Night Owl Cards

A member of The Infield is gone. The Dodgers announced today that Davey Lopes passed away at age 80. He was a central part of my earliest years as a baseball fan. That 1976 Topps Record-Breaker card is in the top 10 of cards that meant the most to me as a boy.   RIP. 

   I've written a few times over the last couple years about a collector I know. He was a co-worker. He didn't work in the same department but he used to come up to the office and we'd babble about cards.   Through the years he went from a collector who bought boxes and boxes of cards at the local Target/Walmart (I once encountered him and his girlfriend with a shopping cart full of blasters) to someone I saw at the monthly show with a table selling cards -- something that earlier on he couldn't see himself doing.   He died a week ago today. Heart attack. He was 53.   That is crazy young, younger than me. And all I could think of was a whole bunch of people that I see at card shows who are in bad shape -- much worse than the guy I worked with and often even younger. Since I heard about his death, it's been on my mind. Last weekend I went to an outdoor flea market and my mind fixated on the out-of-shape people, thinking "take care of yourself, dude!"   Core...

    I had another post planned for today, had the cards pulled and ready to scan, but death had other plans. You know the old superstition that notable deaths come in threes? Well how about finding out three well-known baseball figures of my younger days died within a 24-hour period? That's an unsettling ramp-up. It started yesterday afternoon and it's still going. Ken Holtzman. Gone. Whitey Herzog. Gone. Carl Erskine. Gone. All three have meaning in my young rooting life, Erskine the most obvious, though I never saw him play. I'll start with him because that's where I have the most to say.    Carl Erskine was on one of the first five 1956 Topps cards I ever owned. I've mentioned before that when we received a bunch of '56s from my dad's co-worker, my brothers and I split them up and decided that all the cards of each person's favorite team would go to that person (my one Orioles-loving brother got screwed). Erskine arrived with Newcombe, Randy Jackson, ...

    It's been a long time since I've written a post like this and thank goodness. These are the most crushing kind but also the most necessary. I woke up this morning to the news that Ben had passed away over the weekend . He was 43. Longtime blog readers probably remember him, he was the one who wrote Cardboard Icons , one of the OG blogs, it began two months before mine. I remember being excited to see his blog because he was a newspaper writer, his blog handle at the time was "Newspaperman". I found someone who understood my line of work. He got out of the business maybe a year or two later and, like me, wrote for Beckett magazine for a time. He moved on to work as a community service officer in California where he lived. Ben was very active in the hobby and on Twitter/X. He was up on the latest hobby trends and card sets. His collections were BIG to my eyes. He had a crazy collection of baseballs that had one thing in common -- they each had hit a major league ba...

   This is the first Brooks Robinson card I ever saw. I was into my third year of collecting before I pulled his card. Never saw his tremendous '75 Topps card nor his '76 card. Instead, I pulled his final solo card (excluding the Record Breaker card in '78). I thought he looked old. Too old to be playing. And what was with the card number he received in 1977 -- No. 285? A number ending FIVE? Wasn't he really good or something? I just didn't know very much about Brooks Robinson then. Had I known, and been older, maybe I wouldn't have liked him, him and Frank Robinson and Palmer and all those guys who did a number on the Dodgers in 1966. And, still, I didn't care much a few years later, when my brothers and I went to a card show where Robinson was signing. I was there for the cards, let my brother, the Orioles fan, get in line for Brooks. So he did. I've told this story on the blog before, but it was like 12 years ago and I have other readers now. My broth...

  Apologies for the morbid post, but I'm discovering that this is going to be a difficult time of year for me from now on. My mom passed away two years ago on Mother's Day and my dad a month later. It's the second anniversary of that time period and the fragility of life is naturally on my mind. It doesn't help that the players on my baseball cards keep leaving. Nothing underlines one's mortality quite like the news that another player whose card you collected as a kid has died. I periodically recognize those recently departed players from my youth with individual posts but those passings of players from the very first set I ever collected -- 1975 Topps -- have been coming so frequently this year that I can't keep up. Often I'm just too shocked to write anything (For frequent commenter, steelehere, who often randomly mentions a former Dodger player's death on my posts, I do pay tribute to them on Twitter, even if I don't mention it on the blog. Here ...