Night Owl Cards

  I stopped at the monthly card show Saturday. It was the second straight weekend card show I had attended. This would have been crazy talk in the first 10 years of my blog, but it's something that could easily happen two or three times a year now -- and if I wanted to do a little more traveling around the state, I might be able to go to a show nearly every week over the next six months.   I'm not quite that obsessed. Two in two weeks is quite amazing enough for me.   So you may remember in the show write-up last week that I said I actually finished the show with cash left over. That means I carried that cash into Saturday's show. I padded it just a little, but I budgeted about half the amount for this show that I did for last week's.   It turned out to be plenty because I left this show with money left over, too!  I'd like to blame the expanding number of tables selling Pokemon and such -- it's getting so pervasive that I'm starting to see a world where the...

  I know the postseason is here and everyone learned of Pete Rose's death yesterday evening/afternoon, but this wouldn't be a blog if I wasn't behind. Rose was one of the titans of my youth as far as baseball players. Somewhere along the way I graduated from Ernie & Bert and come on and zoom, zoom, zoom-a, zoom to watching live baseball on TV. Big Bird and The Count became Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose. Those were the two biggest ballplayers on my TV. They were the biggest sports guys period on my TV (well, Howard Cosell became very present). I've mentioned all this before and I did a post on Pete Rose fairly recently in which I mentioned this, too.   I was never a Rose fan. Didn't like the team he played for, didn't like his playing style. Media folks and critics used to brand him as the world's highest-paid singles hitter and I bought into that. Plus he just seemed so damn cocky out there.    My suspicions about the man were somewhat right -- not abou...

  I'm working on a story for my paper on an old baseball team in the area. Posts might be less frequent than usual this week because of that.   While doing some research for the article, I visited our newspaper library, which is right in the building on the same floor as my office. It's a great, old reminder of what newspapers were and are and every time I'm in there, I nearly have to stop what I'm doing just to absorb how much history sits in that space.   Those who are familiar with newspaper terminology know libraries like this are called "morgues". A newspaper morgue is where a newspaper stores clippings of past stories and categorizes them by subject in alphabetized file cabinets. My paper has been around for more than 150 years so there are a lot of file cabinets!   As you can guess, I don't use the morgue that often anymore. We started storing articles in digital format in 1988 and the old microfilm machines gradually disappeared as they became too ...

  I'm not sure where I got this post idea, it's possible it came from Nick's blog , but the spark from wherever made me wonder about switch-hitters and cards. How easy was it to find separate cards of a switch-hitter hitting from both sides of the plate, or at least posing as both a left-handed batter and right-handed batter? My guess was it's probably pretty easy. And in researching, I found that it's very easy. Just to have a frame of reference, I found this article from three years ago, presenting a lineup of the best switch-hitters in MLB history. Then I went to work going through my collection. Even in this era of being able to find almost any card image on TCDB, etc., I still would rather pull cards from my collection when I can. Yeah, it takes longer and, oh, the putting back , but I'm a slave to tradition.   Here is a look at the team (remember, I didn't pick this team) and a card of each player as a lefty and righty swinger:     Left field: Tim Ra...

  Today is Pete Rose's 81st birthday. Rose has made many questionable decisions in his life, but he's an undeniable key figure in my formative years of watching baseball. As I've said before, outside of Reggie Jackson, he was the most-talked-about, most-viewed player, from the time I realized what baseball was, through the mid-1980s when I decided I didn't need to collect cards anymore because they were for babies. Rose was conversation in my house among everyone, which is exclusive company because 1) my mom didn't care about baseball at all, and 2) my dad didn't discuss anyone who wasn't on the Red Sox unless he didn't like the player. Yet the whole household had an opinion on Rose. So you had me and my brothers disliking the guy, and my dad, too, and my mom shrinking in her chair when his Aqua Velva commercials came on. That's how you know you've made it. To this day, Rose is in the top 10 of the number of cards I have a player who never played...

  (How much you wanna bet Pete is checking on the ponies?)   I have been trying to update my want lists on the blog for three years now.   It's slow going because it's super tedious and not in the "fun tedious" way like updating a binder.   Mostly what I need to update are Dodgers team set wants. I've been working my way backwards and I'm at the tail end of finishing the 2002 wants with Upper Deck and a few randoms to go. Working on these sets makes me realize how many evil sets were created while I wasn't collecting in the first part of this century. There are so many sets where half the team set is short-printed, rookies you never heard of are short-printed, just really annoying stuff. Do I even have the energy to track down an SP'd card of someone named Rick Roberts? Those are the things that go through my head when I'm updating these lists, and then I get deflated, lie on the ground and groan and stop.   I still have 2000 and 2001 to go and the...

When I first started my quest to complete the 1976 Kellogg's 3D set, I also kicked off an attempt to complete the 1976 Hostess set. Both food-issue sets, issued during the Bicentennial, are among the most patriotic-looking collections ever made. Each card is like a mini flag. The Kellogg's set is particularly ingenious because it features both stripes -- the border traveling around the card -- and stars. The word "stars" is at the top of every card and each of the player's shown is a star! God bless America. I've chased after each set with enthusiasm, because I was 10 years old during the Bicentennial and stuff issued that year couldn't possibly be cooler. However, I've done much better with the Kellogg's set than the Hostess set. The Hostess set is larger and more prone to stains (one of my least favorite condition issues). Hostess also contains well-known short-prints. I thought Kellogg's had no short-prints. But I only recently di...