Night Owl Cards

  Today is the 50th anniversary of the surgical procedure that gave Tommy John his career back and, by extension, hundreds upon hundreds of major league pitchers, as well as amateur pitchers, too. So much has happened since that initial surgery that merely the mention of it can spawn all kinds of discussions, and "Tommy John Surgery" has been the "nickname" for decades for the ulnar ligament replacement procedure in the reconstruction of a pitcher's elbow. I've talked to Tommy John a couple of times for stories and each time his surgery came up. I can imagine he's talked about it hundreds, if not thousands of times. I had the opportunity to talk to him again recently, but, frankly, I couldn't think of anything new to discuss and didn't want me or him to repeat ourselves, so I passed. But I have something new when it comes to his cards ... well, it's old, but it's new to me.   I've mentioned many times that Tommy John's 1974 Topps ...

    Two weeks ago yesterday, I had the great luck to do something that not many get to do.   I interviewed the man whose baseball card was the first one I ever pulled out of a pack.   Kind of unusual, right? First, how many people remember their first card way back when they were a kid? Then, how many get to talk to that person decades later for a story?   That's what happened to me and Tommy John.   I've mentioned John many times on this blog. Not only was his card the first I pulled back when my mom gave me that cello pack in 1974, but he is responsible for my Dodgers fandom. He became a key figure during my formative years of following baseball and also was my first encounter with a baseball player turning to "the dark side" as John left the Dodgers to become a Yankee before the 1980 season.   All of that was a long time ago, of course. I am now more than 30 years into my journalism career and John is 78 years old. But he has continued to be a figur...

Today got busy with a couple of writing assignments. I'm finishing off the latest Beckett magazine article (another one should be showing up in mailboxes next month), and I'm starting a story for my job that involved interviewing this afternoon the man on the first baseball card I ever pulled, Tommy John. Brush With Greatness post in the future. Right now I just have time for my 2021 Allen & Ginter team set, which also arrived today.     I ordered the team set again this year because I just don't have the energy to do what it takes to chase team sets pack-by-pack, blaster-by-blaster anymore. Out of all of the sets issued today, the Allen & Ginter set used to be the most fun, the most interesting to pursue by the blaster. You never knew what you were going to get and, of course, minis. Buying blasters and posting about them was about the journey and the discovery. But I'm not the same and neither is A&G. We're both rather boring now. Just buy that team se...

We card bloggers are a tight-knit bunch. We like that we've found people who both collect cards and can write about them at length. That's a talent. Not just anybody can do both. A quick glance at Twitter will show you that. We don't like it when one of our tight-knit bunch decides to leave us. That's one less person to continue the tradition, to put our love for cards in concrete, virtual writing, to confirm to all of those who don't understand that we're really not insane. When one card blogger exits, it's as if they disappear from our world and we wonder what became of them. The days become weeks, become months, and suddenly we're explaining to new bloggers "there used to be this really great card blog and everybody knew about it and everyone read it" and getting annoyed because they've never heard of this blog. I hope that's not what happens to Dime Boxes. Sure, I understand life and how it pulls you away from blogging, an...