Night Owl Cards

This is one of those "good news for me, bad news for Topps" posts. I've been on vacation this week. It's not great timing, given that I can barely go anywhere or do anything, but it was planned out long ago and a vacation is a vacation, I'm certainly not giving it back. It's given me time to do lots of card stuff, more than I would normally do on a vacation. And it's given me time to observe what kind of card stuff I'm doing, specifically what kind of card stuff I'm buying. And this is me observing: I ain't buying modern card stuff. This is a by-product of not going down to Target or Walmart or Walgreen's and buying what's in the card aisle. Since it's far too much hassle to do that, I have a little extra card money to burn, and instead of blowing it on Opening Day or Gypsy Queen, it's going toward cards purchased online. And what cards would those be? Well, it's not 2020 Topps. It's certainly not 2020 Panin...

It took me awhile to pick up on the signals that I need to pull back on trying to accumulate every Dodgers card in existence. The signals were there. They were in every complaint about variations. Every squawk about short-printed base cards. Every lament about the growing number of parallels. Every screed about online-only sets. Each one of these modern-card features made team-collecting infinitely more difficult than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. But something else told me to let go, too. When I get packages now, often the cards that interest me most are not the Dodgers cards. They are usually either set needs or maybe a non-sports card or -- and this is especially true -- a card of The Chicken. This exquisitely scuffed-up sample of The Chicken's card in 1983 Donruss arrived in a PWE from Matt of Sports Card Collectors . Every other card in the PWE was a Dodgers card. I threw those Dodgers card down on the floor in disgust, spat on them and looked lovingly at my chicken ...

How old do you have to be to experience nostalgia? My daughter and her friends get nostalgic, but it's that weird kind of nostalgic that only college-age kids experience, that nostalgia that isn't really nostalgia because it wasn't even 10 years ago. You know that song "We Are Young" by Fun? If that pops on the radio -- well, it means I have no control over the radio station, for one -- it will throw my daughter and her friend into fits of "remember when" as if this 2011 song came out when The Brady Bunch was in prime time. It's bizarre, and as a parent you can't help but announce in response "that was yesterday! " But as the years go on and my daughter and her friends have moved on, I can't help but get nostalgic over stuff that was brand-new not even a decade ago, too. For instance, 2009. You remember 2009, right? The movie "Up"? That horrible "Boom Boom Pow" song? But some things were kind of good...

I'm currently in the process of trying to fill a vacancy at work. Trying to find a sportswriter is a bit of an unusual task. Since there are a limited number of newspapers, you attract résumés from everywhere, and I mean everywhere: places like India and South Africa. But we're looking for a specific kind of person: someone who can write well, tolerate our remote location, and live on a salary that would outrage a teacher. It's not easy. Yesterday I thought I had a good candidate lined up: his cover letter mentioned collecting baseball cards as a kid!! His writing seemed crisp, he didn't let off any weird vibes in his email communications and he knew the area. But when I called him, he seemed bored out of his skull. I don't know if eight media companies are knocking down his door, but it was quite off-putting. And, I hate to get personal in situations like this, but it was especially off-putting knowing that he collects -- or at least collected -- baseball ...

What time of day do you write your blog posts? For the last six or seven years, I've written the posts for Night Owl Cards in the afternoon, somewhere between 2-5 p.m., usually. I've done this for so long it's become ritual and the perfect time for me to write. That's all going to change starting tomorrow. My work shift is changing. The shift change will impact my life in a variety of ways, from when I see my family to when I eat. But the important part for the blog is: when will I write? Beginning on Tuesday, the time of day when I would usually write, I will be working. So now I have to find another time to write. Man, that will be weird. There are a few possibilities and I've already picked one, but let's go through them just for fun. Post in the morning as I will be getting up a couple hours earlier now There is not a chance in hell I will be doing this. If you want anything coherent coming out of this blog you don't want me to post in t...

In 2007, the last year Sports Illustrated came to my house every week, the magazine featured a story on Triple A Dodgers pitcher Matt White. It was a follow-up story from MLB.com on the journeyman reliever who had already seen his last major league appearance by that time. White had bought some land in western Massachusetts and had discovered that the rock on that land was valued at over $2 billion dollars. This captured my imagination as it obviously did with all of baseball at the time. The media went wild with the story even though White was still toiling for a minor league salary, knowing that the cost of excavating all of that rock would cost thousands upon thousands. They called him the "Baseball Billionaire" and teammates like Luis Gonzalez sang him the theme to "The Beverly Hillbillies". I thought the story was so cool that I filed away in my brain to someday get a baseball card of Matt White, hopefully in a Dodger uniform. I had just gotten ba...

I am a big believer in the saying, "if you want something done right, do it yourself." To some, that is the mark of a control freak, someone who can't delegate, not a team player. I am probably guilty of some of that although I don't think I make it too obvious. I don't like that I'm such a big believer in that saying. It's just that it keeps proving itself true over and over. The last couple of days I've been consumed by a work project. It's a lot of effort, requires quite a bit of input from a variety of people, and there are many elements to it, with lots of scheduling involved. The people under my direction have it down like clockwork. They write quality stories, meet deadlines, provide the right photos. It's the people who are not under my control who repeatedly dropped the ball the last two days. I can't help but notice that. That probably means I'm not noticing when people out of my control do their jobs, but serious...