Night Owl Cards

  When you get to be my age time travels faster than ever. I think I've finally figured out that the reason older people talk about this so often is not to make idle chit-chat but because it's so staggering that you can't help but talk about it. It's shocking. I know almost a day doesn't pass without me thinking about how fast the days, months, years move.   I suppose this topic is especially appropriate today as we just moved the clocks ahead an hour last night. It's annually one of my least favorite days of the year and I'm writing this in a half-stupor thanks to that time change.   It's about the last thing I want to do at 60 years old -- speed things up. And here we are charging ever faster toward the start of the Major League Baseball season, which according to my research is starting earlier than at any point since I became a baseball fan.   This is discounting the recent super-early, one-off games or series in a foreign country that MLB likes to d...

  Two things I've noticed since posting the first half of my hobby box of 2024 Heritage the other day. The first is that out of all the regular player and manager cards I've pulled so far, not one features a posed shot. Those were staple shots for Heritage all the way through last year. Just about all of the base Dodgers cards from last year's Heritage are posed shots. To go from that to absolutely none seems like a decision was made. We were still in posed territory in 1975 Topps, plenty of it, in fact. How I long for a hands-on-knees photo in 2024 Heritage like Robin Yount or Roger Metzger or Tommy Helms. But there's been none to be found. Every photo is either an action shot or a candid photo (both, obviously, were in '75 Topps). I don't know why posed shots have been scrapped. Perhaps Fanatics said "no more fake backgrounds"? If that's the case, applause, applause. But I think the non-posed pix is one of the reasons I can't find anything in...

  I found my blog on the Bedford Falls Bridge last night, looking over the railing, ready to jump.   He was a wreck, crying and sweating and carrying on. I tried to tell him all that moisture isn't good for the computer, but he was inconsolable.   "Blogging isn't what it used to be," he exclaimed, moving even closer to the edge. "The new blogger changes are ruining my life, constant format fiddling between 'normal' and 'paragraph' mode, struggling with the size of photos, battling to get text left-justified! I actually now need to upload the pictures after the post is written if I have any hope of a thumbnail photo showing up on the blog roll! It's all backwards!" I tried to calm him down by reminding him that I'm the one who is doing the writing and uploading. But he wouldn't listen, muttering something about how one of the images took four tries to upload in the right spot for this very blog post. He eyed the crashing waves belo...