Night Owl Cards

  I received an email yesterday from Bob of the best bubble , informing me that my other Beckett magazine article is out. This one is about my Dodgers fanhood and is in the latest Beckett baseball magazine. I don't have a subscription to that, so I'll have to wait until I have time to find a Barnes & Noble or grocery store that's carrying it. I need the extra time anyway because I haven't even devoted a post yet to my article that is in Beckett Vintage Collector this month. So with two magazine articles out now, and writing almost every day on this blog, and an actual job that involves -- guess what? -- writing, it's obvious that writing is what I do. What I like to do. What I need to do. Who I am, basically. But how did I get here? You'd have to go back to when I was a kid with a flourishing and overwhelming need to read. I read as a child a lot. From Sesame Street books to the Hardy Boys to The Bronx Zoo. By the time I was about 10, just about the only thi...

(Today is National Pizza Day. One thing I miss about living in a larger city is the quality of pizza. People where I live act like certain pizza places in town are better than others, but frankly, it doesn't matter. Nobody here can do it like Bocce's in Buffalo or those places I ate at in Chicago or that one time in Philly. It's tough to screw up pizza. But something about those city pizzas put everyone else's pizza in their place. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 289th in a series): Perhaps you heard the other day that Roger Kahn passed away at the age of 92. Roger Kahn is one of the most acclaimed baseball writers who ever put pen to paper. He wrote "The Boys Of Summer," about the 1952 and 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers, a book that has been praised as the greatest baseball book in history. I don't know whether that is the best baseball book or not. But I do know that because of that book, I am a sportswriter. Still. It's not easy to b...

This was meant to be a simple trade post featuring some fantastic cards sent to me by Wicked Ortega . But as Tina Turner once said, "we nevah, evah do nothing nice and easy." So get ready for a "nice and rough" post through my scatter-brained, rolling on the river mind. I opened the package from Wicked about a week or so ago. As usual it contained plenty of fantastic cards from that bottomless well in southern Florida. There were want list needs, Upper Deck disasters from 2010, relics, and this card: That is a 1954 Bowman of Billy Cox, the third baseman of "The Boys of Summer," Brooklyn Dodgers. It's terrific. I've owned only one '54 Bowman in my entire life, although I once had a chance to buy a handful and stupidly turned down the guy flat. So the awesomeness of finally holding a Dodger '54 Bowman in my hand did go through my head. But the first thing I thought of was the first thing I always think of when I think of ...

You thought I was going to post about blue refractors didn't you? Sorry, we're going in an entirely different direction. The Dodgers clinching a postseason berth tonight got me thinking about why I like the team. And while a lot of that can be explained by card collecting and the fact that the Dodgers were one of the top teams around when I was a child, there's more to it than that. My appreciation for the Dodgers comes down to history -- Brooklyn Dodgers history, and more specifically, the Boys of Summer. Roger Kahn's book, "The Boys of Summer," based on the 1952 Brooklyn team, stayed with me more than any other book I read during college. And I read a lot of books in college. Kahn's book was like "Ball Four" and "The Bronx Zoo," in that it finally depicted players as people and not mythic legends. And while that idea may seem to contradict the practice of collecting pictures of players on little squares of cardboard, I don't thin...