Night Owl Cards

  Trading Card Database announced its site's end of the year awards yesterday and Night Owl Cards is your favorite card blog once again! Thanks for continuing to read my nonsense after so many years. Sometimes I feel like that rock band that has overstayed its welcome. But stuff like this helps me know I should continue. You'll note a couple of familiar blogs also on that list and the two tied for No. 3 are well-known TCDB users and promoters, at least that I've seen. I am not. I don't have anything against the site at all, in fact I think it's great. I simply am late to the party and haven't had the chance to get involved in everything TCDB has to offer, so it feels weird to be honored without taking part like those other blog operators.   I'm late to the party in everything having to do with the hobby and it seems more so the case the last few years. As I pull away from modern cards, I am starting to lose track of what sets there are. I've long since s...

As a team collector, I've already written off current sets as something I can complete. There's no way I will get all of the Dodgers from sets that are issued today. It's a parallel-insert-SP insanity world, and until it all blows up, I will never be able to cross off the last card and exclaim "DONE!" It's been that way for a number of years now, which is why team collectors make little deals with themselves -- "OK, I'll collect the whole non-parallel set and I'll be finished" -- to keep from going broke and insane. I have no hope of finishing off the Dodger team sets from probably the last 20 years. I'm not going to even try. Oh, sure, I'll act like I'm trying by obtaining all the cards I can from the mid-1990s through the present, but really, I'm not trying. Ignore that happy tune that I'm singing. The lyrics are dark, dark. For real hope of completing team sets, I have to go to the cards of my childhood, some o...

I'm generally not fond of "cleaning out the draft folder" posts. First, I don't have a lot of "draft posts" going. I pick a topic and write it. There are no half-written posts anywhere in storage. Second, if the cards weren't good enough the first time I scanned them, what makes me think they'll be good enough now ? But desperate times call for lazy measures. In case you haven't noticed, there's been no baseball since Tuesday. Baseball's postseason schedule is almost as irksome as the fact that the game's brass feels the need to speed up games, but won't touch advertisers or broadcast stations that do far more to lengthen games than anything players do on the field. Oh, was that a tangent? Sorry. So we baseball fans are forced to settle for hockey as a suitable alternative until Friday. Those starved for baseball need something to tide them over, and since I have little time to provide something of substance, I figured ...

Without really knowing it, I categorize Dodger eras into the three categories of "good," "bad," or "indifferent." And, by association, my attitude toward certain Dodgers players, past or present, is colored by whether they appeared in a good, bad or indifferent Dodger era. For example, take this fine card of George "Shotgun" Shuba, supplied to me by the Junior Junkie (all of the card you will see here are from the Junior Junkie, by the way). Shuba was hardly an exceptional player. He was a utility man. But because he played at a time when the Dodgers were perennial contenders, when they were breaking racial barriers, and because he had such a cool nickname, he is a favorite. Shuba is known for the symbolic gesture of shaking Jackie Robinson's hand in the minor leagues. He's also well-documented in the book "Boys Of Summer." And he hit a pinch-hit homer in the 1955 World Series. Through circumstance, he shined. He came ...