Night Owl Cards

Continuing with the theme of "subconscious collecting," or what someone so crassly described as "hoarding,"  are the players I accumulate who have the most tenuous of connections to me. One of those players is Tim Wakefield. Wakefield rose to fame as a knuckleball pitcher for the Red Sox, and previous to that for the Pirates. Many people also know that Wakefield started out as a hitter. He was a first baseman before realizing he had a better shot at the majors if he took the mound with his baffling new pitch. The embarrassingly suspect connection to me is that Wakefield played his first season of professional baseball -- as a first baseman -- for the New York-Penn League Class A Watertown Pirates, who played their home games a few traffic lights from where I now live. I didn't even live in Watertown when he played in the minors. I was still in school. And, although my newspaper often interviewed former Watertown Pirates and Indians who moved on to bi...

I recently came across something that I thought I had thrown out a long time ago. It was a folder filled with reference type material from my first season of covering a professional baseball team, the now-defunct Niagara Falls Rapids. I've mentioned the team a time or  two . Like me, they were in their first season, too, in 1989. They played in the short-season Class A New York-Penn League. Throughout that year, we figured things out together. A lot has changed since 1989. Not only do the Rapids not exist, but many of the teams that were in the NY-P at the time do not exist. Also, entire careers have come and gone since that season and that's what I want to address. In the folder were rosters from almost all of the NY-P teams in the league at the time. It was interesting to look back at those rosters and see which players had made it to the majors. Apparently, I had done it once before, because there were marks next to the names of the players who were big-leaguers. ...