Night Owl Cards

  I'm making good on a promise I wrote back in July with this post, with just one day to spare.   During the last One-Card Wonders post I finished all the 1970s one-card wonders and said I wanted to do the same with the 1980s in the next post, which I said would happen before the end of the year.   Well, the end of the year is here and I can't let all those people who have been waiting for the last five-plus months down! So don't worry, be happy! The last OCW post of the year is here!   In this episode I'm covering 1988 and 1989, the only years I haven't touched from the 1980s. I'm also tackling not only the Topps sets from those two years but Donruss, Fleer, Score and Upper Deck, too (This means I'm technically not done with the '80s after this post because I still haven't uncovered OCWs for some of the other 1980s Donruss and Fleer sets).   As a reminder, I define One-Card Wonders as cards of players who appeared on one major release only. I discou...

   I hardly ever play Immaculate Grid anymore. During its early days -- about a couple of years ago now -- I played fairly frequently. I enjoyed coming up with team combos for long-forgotten or hardly known players. Team combos were my thing.   At the time, the categories were mostly team combos and awards, which I could tackle fairly well. Then, about 100 days into IG, numbers categories started popping up. My brain doesn't retain numbers nearly as well as which player played on which team. Also, numbers remind me of homework, and, yes, the game started to feel like that.   So I mostly only play now when I see that one of the rows or columns is the Dodgers. I can find really obscure players in that category. Trying to get a low rarity score was always an objective for me when I played -- I can be the competitive sort -- so I like the obscure guys.    My ears perked up when a couple of Immaculate Grid users recently mentioned Jim Hutto. Hutto is a 1970...

  I was surprised to discover that the last time I updated this series was more than a year ago .   I like writing this series, and it's not super work-intensive. But I also try to balance it out, so I'm not running these all the time. Apparently I balanced things out a little too much.   As a refresher, this is where I pick a card year or two and find players in that set who had just one card for their whole career. They didn't appear on a multi-player rookie card or in any other major set (I discount minor league issues and sets of that nature). They are true One-Card Wonders.   The last time I did this I said I wanted to wrap up the 1970s, so that's what I'm doing now. The last years to finish are 1972, 1973 and 1976.   The most surprising year here is 1972.   There are just four One-Card Wonders in the 1972 Topps set, which is 787 cards large. Interestingly, two are bunters.   #77 - Ron Theobald, Brewers #331 - Stan Swanson, Expos #366 - Jimmy Rosa...

  I noticed on baseball-reference the other day that Buzz Stephen had died recently.   The name vaguely rang a bell but I wasn't sure why. It turns out I had just come across his name while working on the latest One-Card Wonders post for this blog. That's life in my addled state, a name that sounds vaguely familiar isn't from 40 years ago, it's from the last couple of weeks.   I was going through the 1970 and 1971 sets to find players who appeared in those sets for their one-and-only card. I wanted to include 1972 as well, because each of these sets are large and I wanted to see if there were more one-card wonders in these sets (I've done 1969 already, another large set, but it produced a rather small total of five). But I ran out of time for '72.   Stephen is one of five one-card wonders in the 1970 set -- so same total as '69. Somewhat unexpectedly, he's the only Pilot OCW, although on further thought a team with such a limited history would have playe...