Night Owl Cards

(Today marks exactly one month of working from home. I have no idea why I couldn't have started doing this 10 years earlier. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 292nd in a series): Meet my first association with Ron Santo. This is how I came to know him. Mini-sized. The most diamond-cut of all diamond-cuts. And a member of the Chicago White Sox. That's what I knew of this Santo fellow. He played for the Chicago White Sox. And he appeared on strange-looking cards. I pulled this card out of a pack in 1975, having no idea that he spent the vast majority of his major league career with the White Sox's city rival, the Cubs. Eventually, probably many years later, I re-associated Santo with the Cubs. However, when his name pops in my head -- and that happens very rarely -- he is a member of the White Sox. On a crooked card. You just can't destroy the power of first associations. You can force it down, way in the subconscious. But you can never kill it. ...

My card collecting friend R.C. sent me a few cards recently. He said he didn't have a need for them and hoped I might find them useful. These weren't your average cards so I can find a variety of uses for them. In fact, I can break the uses down into: 1. Keepers (Cards I can use in my collection) 2. Traders (Cards I'd be willing to use in a trade for the right deal) 3. Giveaways (Cards that I can use in a giveaway next month) Let's see the breakdown with pretty pictures. 1. KEEPERS This was not the only legends short-print in the package but it is the only one I will definitely keep. The 2009 set was the first one to add short-printed legends cards, I believe, and I remember the carefree days when this was a new-and-interesting concept. Plus, the 2009 Topps set is the first one I completed after coming to blogging. And you can't beat seeing Ryne Sandberg in a Phillies uniform. These are each upgrades. As a proud 1970s card collector, I...

I've been out of commission for the last 36 hours. Just way too insanely busy to pontificate about cards. So, I'm just getting around to Ron Santo's death and what it means to me. But, outside of being sad that someone so beloved by a certain fan base is gone, it doesn't mean much. I am not a Cubs fan. I live far from Chicago. Santo's career ended an instant before I started paying attention to baseball, and those players who retired in 1973/74/75 existed in a vacuum for me for years until I started to get a handle on that period of baseball history. Also, WGN was not available on the cable systems where I resided until the last decade. I never heard Santo broadcast a game. Santo isn't even an excuse for me to rail at people who vote for Hall of Famers (besides, I'm more a critic of the system than the voters). Santo does deserve to be in the Hall. I just can't get outraged by that stuff like others do. So, why write about him? Well, for one, I wan...

This card always puzzled me. I don't know if my depth perception is off or if it's the way the card's cropped, but it looks like they cut around Santo's likeness and then pasted him in the forefront of a Cubs spring training scene. I realize this photo was likely taken in 1973 and photoshop wasn't around, but the photo just looks weird. But that's not the reason why this card is here. It's here because the Hall of Fame Veterans Comittee on Tuesday announced their list of 10 candidates for the Hall from major leaguers whose careers began in 1943 or later. Santo's on that list. So is Gil Hodges, Joe Torre, Luis Tiant, Maury Wills, Tony Oliva, Jim Kaat, Dick Allen, Al Oliver and Vada Pinson. On December 8th, the committee will announce whether they've selected anyone from this list, or from the previous list of players whose careers started before 1943, for the Hall of Fame. And that got me thinking: why go through all the hand-wringing? This debate...