Night Owl Cards

   Among the posts I teased to a couple of months ago was one in which I determine who were the worst-performing "Rated Rookies" in the history of the Donruss brand. Well, as much as a few Twitter folks wanted to know that, it's already been done. Almost two years ago , in fact. (I need to get myself a Sporting News gig where I write about baseball cards). That's cool. Because that's just Donruss and I've been only half-interested in Donruss since it debuted. What I really wanted to examine are the worst-performing Topps All-Rookie players. You know, the folks who received a rookie trophy or rookie cup in the following year's baseball card set. Sure, I could determine who was the worst AND who was the best, rating them like that Rated Rookies article did. But you know all the best-performing rookie cup players already. They get all the pub. Guys like Johnny Bench, Carlton Fisk, Rod Carew, Mark McGwire, Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger.   Yeah, it's time...

I've had a couple of people request that I do this post. I hesitated, most likely because I don't like being told what to do, but also because I just haven't been paying attention. This concerns 2017 Topps flagship and the set's jaw-dropping inability to adhere to one of its basic features for the majority of time flagship has been around. But because I wasn't paying attention, and hadn't bought very much flagship this year, I hadn't noticed. I also don't know if this has been addressed by any other blogs (oop, here is one mention now ). But onward I go, because I am at my core a base-set collector. Last fall, Topps announced its all-star rookie team . It's been an annual tradition for decades as far as I know. The players selected for that team show up in the following year's set with a little rookie cup on the front of their card (or if they started in the '60s, a big, honking trophy). This was the team for 2016: C - Gary Sanch...