Night Owl Cards

All right, it's fairly obvious at this point that I'm not going to be able to tackle It's Like Having My Own Card Shop's anniversary contest in proper fashion. For weeks I've been staring at the possible writing exercises and coming up with nothing. Most of the prompts, to be honest, I don't feel like writing. I don't care how nice the prizes are, I will not write something I do not feel. One exercise seemed promising -- your most embarrassing moment involving baseball cards -- just because I have no issues airing my embarrassing moments while I know others do. But I already wrote about an embarrassing moment quite awhile ago and I can't think of anything that tops that. Finally, I did settle on something. It has to do with the prompt to post a video of myself sharing my collection with someone who didn't know I collected. Except, there's not a chance in hell I would video myself sharing my collection with someone else. But what I did...

It's contest time. Brian from Collecting Cutch wants to know about a year my favorite team didn't win the World Series. Needless to say, this is an overwhelming concept. A year my team didn't win the World Series? Like, say, in the last 31 years? I know my team isn't the Padres or Mariners or even the Pirates. The Dodgers are a little more fortunate in some ways. But they also have been around much longer than most of the unfortunate, so they've had many, many years to compile ineptitude. The Dodgers were the perennial loser Brooklyn Bums for more than 20 years during the early part of the 20th century, and then during the '50s almost all they did was lose World Series. They have Mickey Owen and Ralph Branca and Tom Niedenfuer in their history. There's all those Series losses to the Yankees and all those playoff losses to the Cardinals and, uh, losses in the last two World Series. So I had to do some thinking. And I settled on a team that played lo...

Against my better judgment I am entering Baseball Every Night's "Ugly Sweater/Ugly Baseball Card" contest . It's not that I'm afraid of branding a baseball card ugly. I've done that many times on this blog. I even dedicated an entire post to what I thought were the ugliest baseball card sets at the time (Peter will happy to know that 1995 Fleer wound up first). It's just that "ugly" comes in many forms. How do I decide which ugly? I figured I'd let the dictionary help me arrive at a conclusion. As you know, a dictionary is incapable of settling on one definition of a word. It has to give you several options. By this means, I can address several different kinds of ugly before making a decision and delivering the final, devastating Ugliest blow. For my dictionary of choice, I chose my red-covered, hard-bound Webster's ninth collegiate edition dictionary, published in 1983. This is your average, hefty, all-you-could-ever-need dictio...

This exercise is getting more and more difficult each year. But P-town Tom has issued another year-end contest challenge and I can't resist a quick post idea. What is my favorite card issued in 2017? Hmmm. I haven't bought much 2017 product, just a sampling of each brand, basically. And while I won't bag on everything issued this year -- except for you, Topps flagship -- there is almost nothing made available this past year that stood out for me. I'm a Dodger fan, so it would make sense that in the year of the Dodgers reaching the World Series, my favorite would be related to that. But nothing is jumping out. I probably should have bought a ToppsNow card of the Dodgers celebrating their NLCS win, that would have been smart right about now. But I didn't. Cody Bellinger was rookie of the year in 2017 but my favorite Bellinger card isn't any of the ones with a rookie logo on it. It's his minor league issue card from his time at Triple A Oklahoma Cit...

I'll be writing my usual year-end spectacular in a couple of weeks, and that always includes a reference to the best cards of the year. But I don't feel like I'm undermining that post by participating in a contest by the newly named (damn, I've got to look this up, my Latin sucks) Eamus Catuli! blog. It's a cool contest idea: write about your favorite 2016 card acquisition. This is a little difficult for me since 2016 has not jumped out as a particularly interesting year for cardboard. My team didn't win the World Series this year, so I have no warm fuzzies about that. There was nothing issued that made me lunge at the keyboard so I could order it (I'm not much of a "I need that card for my PC" collector anyway). Just about every enjoyable card that I've acquired in the past year was NOT issued in 2016. So, what's my favorite 2016 card? You just saw it. Yeah, that's it. The Craig Biggio card right there. That's my favo...