Night Owl Cards

  I mentioned when I completed the 1988 Donruss set that it marked the first time I had completed four major sets from a given year.   I don't see that happening for me ever again. After the '80s, it's difficult for me to find multiple sets I was interested in enough to try to complete them. For example, I've completed 1993 Upper Deck, I wouldn't bother throwing money at any other '93 set outside of a token Topps complete-set buy. (I'd take a gift of a complete '93 Stadium Club or Pinnacle set but I'm not buying them).   So '88 is a milestone, a one-of-a-kind collecting feat. I like that it's '88. That's the year the Dodgers won the World Series; it's the year I graduated from college; it's the first full year of my wife and I going out. It's basically the last great year before adulthood stomped everything to hell.   To mark the feat, I thought I'd take 10 notable players from this time and compare their cards from th...

I intentionally used that post title because I hate the phrase. There are many phrases that activate the skin-crawling mechanism for me, and not all of them are uttered by Chris Berman. Here's another one: "the next level." This is used by hack local sports broadcasters to refer to area high school athletes who sign NCAA Division I scholarships. I recently saw a broadcast about some girls signing to play DI lacrosse, and the on-air idiot didn't say "Division I" a single time. He just uttered "the next level" over and over. Apparently, the girls are signing to play lacrosse on the second floor of their high school. Anyway, this is a housekeeping post in which I regurgitate some random thoughts such as the one above. Follow along, won't you? You may have heard that the Dodgers re-signed Hiroki Kuroda yesterday. You also may not care, but I do. This means the Dodgers have four reliable starters in the rotation and can work on what is really...