Night Owl Cards

  U.L. Washington passed away Sunday. It was a little distressing when I found that out, not because I had a firm connection to Washington, who was the shortstop for the 1980s Kansas City Royals teams that repeatedly made the postseason, but because it took a long time to find credible information on the news. One big reason for that is the demise of traditional news sources, which ain't good, but also the immediacy of social media, which often doesn't place a lot of importance on how they discovered that information . But another reason is a lot of folks on earth now just don't remember the 1970s and 1980s. It's not important to them. Now that is more than a little distressing to me.   So Washington falls into that category of "incidental" baseball players of the past for many people. He wasn't George Brett or Tony Gwynn, someone who enters into fans' consciousness automatically whether they were around for that player's games or not. Washington...

(Today is National Waiters and Waitresses Day. One of my favorite things to do is eat at a restaurant and I have great respect for table-servers, and from the time I was a bus boy have tried to tip them more than what is standard. They know the value of work. Time for Cardboad Appreciation. This is the 282nd in a series): This is one more card from my COMC Spring Cleaning shopping spree and it is probably my favorite out of all of them. I didn't know it existed until it popped up in an unrelated search. I am familiar with the '89 Bill Pucko Cards and the design from that year. But all of my knowledge came from the Niagara Falls Rapids team set from that same year and those cards feature red borders. This was the most notable card from that set, according to me: This is the card where I make my trading card debut . I'm the guy in the press box, fourth window from the left, talking to the scorekeeper in the fifth window. I kept all of the cards in that Rapids ...

I'm writing this late because I fell into the trigonometry trap left by my daughter. Never again. So, as I write, the Royals are leading the A's 3-2, but that could all change and everything that I write from here on out may be obsolete in an hour or two. Oh, well. How often do I get to write about the Royals? The best thing about Kansas City playing a playoff game is it evokes memories of what I call my first collecting era. That era runs basically from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Or, in other words, the same period of time that the Royals were winning playoff games and playing in the World Series. My glory card years were their glory years period. So I wanted to show some Royals card favorites from that period -- I kept it to 1976-85 since that is when K.C. began and ended its postseason run -- in recognition of this feat from what has always been one of my favorite teams. The trouble is, I've actually shown a lot of Royals cards from this time period a...

(Today is "Pardon Day," a day of seeking forgiveness. In the spirit of that day, I would like to say to the Padres "I'm sorry I thought your team was crap at the beginning of the year and that your manager would be fired." However, I am not sorry for hoping whoever plays the San Diego Padres in the playoffs beats the s---t out of them. I can only appreciate so much of "Pardon Day." Now, it's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 80th in a series): Most people know this card as the rookie card of both Paul Molitor and Alan Trammell. For them, that's rarity enough -- two standouts at their position featured on the same rookie card. But for me, it's rare for another reason. When I first started collecting, the four-player rookie card was the standard. Four-player rookie cards appeared in the first set I ever saw ('74 Topps) and the first set I ever collected ('75 Topps). It was the first cards I ever cut up ('76 Top...

  I admit that I address only the best parts of my job in these "Brush With Greatness" segments.   Interacting with Major League Baseball players is pretty cool. You deal with plenty of garbage in this business (whenever my fellow co-workers hear someone from another profession squawking about the woes of their job, we often sniff, "wouldn't last a day in our job." And for the most part, we believe what we say). So the occasional baseball assignment balances things out a little.   As a young sportswriter, I couldn't believe my luck when my editor told me I would be covering the New York-Penn League Class A baseball team in Niagara Falls. It was a new team, called the Niagara Falls Rapids and affiliated with the Detroit Tigers. My boss was giving me full reign, even though I'd been on the job for less than a year.    For the Rapids' season-opener, I was on the field with a fellow sportswriter, a veteran of these kinds of things, for all the pregame ...