Night Owl Cards

  It's taken me a little time to get to this package arrival, mostly because it's a lot to go over. That happens sometimes with the sends from Johnny's Trading Spot -- there's so much stuff and a lot of it is not the usual stuff, so some time has to go into the corresponding blog post. For example, this: This is way cool. It's a season highlights record of the 1959 Dodgers' season, their second year in Los Angeles and a World Series championship team.   The record is a collection of highlights with each of the moments narrated as they happen by Vin Scully. Ira Cook does the narrating between highlights. Listening to Scully is always a treat but it's even more interesting here because he's so young and his voice is so different. Yet all of the great descriptions that he was known for are still there and it's amazing he had that kind of command of the language way back then. The record is in terrific shape, not a single skip or pop. But I knew I'd...

I don't know if you heard but Vin Scully made his social media debut yesterday. Yup, the 92-year-old decided the time was right to enter the online swamp and start up a Twitter account . I hope it goes well for him. He said he misses the fan interaction and people probably will be mostly civil to such a legend. Scully is one of the few phenomenons in life that everyone on Twitter can agree is a treasure, and hopefully the trolls will leave him alone. Outside of when Scully started becoming the main voice for NBC baseball during the 1980s, I didn't grow up listening to him like many Dodgers fans. And I've had to learn many of his well-known phrases second-hand from fans who repeat them quite often. One of the most-common is "old friend" or "old friend alert." Scully turned the conflicting feeling of seeing a former Dodger on an opposing team, often playing against the Dodgers, into a friendly sentiment. It's become such a popular phrase tha...

I've heard or read a few fans saying that they miss Vin Scully already. Even though I'm a Dodger fan, I'm not really in a position to say that. First of all, I live on the east coast. Scully was never the soundtrack to my daily baseball viewing. Whenever he popped up on my screen, usually as a broadcast cutaway or MLB Network airing, it was always a pleasant surprise: "Hey! There's Vin! I get to hear Vin! So this is what everyone is talking about." Secondly, I can't remember a busier time during the first week of the baseball season for me personally. I've watched no more than maybe 3 innings combined so far. I haven't heard enough of any broadcaster to miss them or hate them. But, at some point, I know I eventually will miss Vin. It will be during a Dodger broadcast. And it will suddenly occur to me that, "hey, this is a game that Vin Scully would always broadcast." And I'll sigh and the game I'm viewing will lose some ...

This is one of my favorite custom cards in my collection. It achieves the three things that I look for in a custom card. But I'll get to that in a minute. This card was devised for me by Big D of the long defunct card blog, Hey That's Mine . He hasn't posted since 2012 and that just goes to show you how long custom cards have been around the card blog scene. Remember Goose Joak ? That blog was probably the first that I saw that regular cranked out custom cards. I believe that's all he did in terms of his blog. Not many of those custom cards actually became real cards if I recall correctly (although I do have a fine Alissa Milano custom created by Goose Joak). And that's why I have trouble paying attention to custom cards most of the time. I like my cards to be real, things I can actually hold in my hand. It's why I have so much trouble with digital "cards". They don't exist in reality. Custom cards that you can create online through photosho...

I have read dozens of tributes to Vin Scully in the last month. But the tributes didn't start there. No, I've read tributes to Scully in newspapers, in magazines, in the commemorative program for the 1980 All-Star Game, ever since I was a kid. Even though I didn't grow up in Southern California and listened to few of his Dodger broadcasts before the advent of the MLB Network, I have always known Scully was considered a legend in his field. I remember him receiving the Ford Frick Award for broadcasting and giving a speech at the Hall of Fame way back in 1982 . I waited until after Scully's last game to issue my farewell to the man. Anything before his final broadcast seemed like naming the field after the guy while he was still coaching. So now that the game is done, his career is over, it's time for my reflection and an attempt to say something that hasn't already been said by a thousand testimonials, many of which are from people who know him. I arr...

While all this 2016 Topps opening is going on, I've been getting some pretty sweet packages in the mail. They're so nice that some of them feature cards you've never seen before -- so think of that when you're pulling that card of Rougned Odor for the third time. One of the packages of never-before-seen goodies that arrived recently was actually a tiny little white envelope. It was from Baseball Card Breakdown . And Gavin was so bold to advertise it ahead of time as "the best PWE ever." He even suggested I should title this post that. Well, that certainly draws your attention. And the cards were pretty cool. But dude . We're probably in second-best PWE territory. Without doing any further research, of course. But let's not get hung up on labels. Let's address what was stuffed in that PWE. For starters, there was a Nebulous 9 card that you see up above. That rather pedestrian 2014 Opening Day Adrian Gonzalez card completes the Do...