Night Owl Cards

  (The 1989 Score offers are arriving fast-and-furious after my most recent post. I should be down to just a few wants in a week or two! The blog's still got it. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 361st in a series):   I plucked this Cluck from my COMC order, which arrived early last week. You'll soon see the rest of what's probably my final order from that place, but I wanted to feature this card separate since it's kind of the black sheep of my order, not fitting neatly with any of the other cards.   I didn't pick it up only for the wonderful Toros uniforms of the era (and there are even gaudier examples ) or just because of the marvelous name on the front. Nor did I add it because coach cards are a relative rarity.   I grabbed this card for all of those reasons and one other -- I interviewed Bob Cluck once. He is a "Brush With Greatness" subject who I have never mentioned.   I wonder how many other coaches who I have interviewed have cards tha...

  I became aware of this card probably several months ago, filed it away as a future conquest, promptly forgot about it, then came across it again a couple of weeks ago.   It's now in my possession and it couldn't be more fantastic. I grew up with Luis Tiant as a key member of the Red Sox and then wrapping up his career with the Yankees and Angels (I was not old enough for the Indians and Twins version of Tiant). He is firmly entrenched with the AL East in my mind, one of my childhood favorites, and that's why it's so bizarre and so wonderful to see him in a Dodgers uniform.   Sure, El Tiante is part of a low-level team in the Dodgers' chain, but it doesn't make the card any less intriguing.   It's part of a litany of cards of players and other baseball figures in unfamiliar uniforms.   We've all seen the short-term stops cards for players, there's been plenty of blog posts about those. But what about coaches and managers? There's some weirdness ...

I'm still going through the cards that I received months ago from ARPSmith's Sports Obsession. I'm in the middle of filing a batch of 1982 Donruss and I've enjoyed recalling one of the unique aspects of the set. Coach cards. There are eight individual cards of coaches in the '82 Donruss set. This seems completely bizarre from the viewpoint of the modern card set, but take it from me, it wasn't exactly normal finding these old dudes in our packs of 1982 Donruss when the stuff was on store shelves. I didn't have much of an issue with the cards. They seemed kind of cool actually. The coaches I pulled were Vada Pinson, Johnny Podres and Tommy Davis. I knew those guys. Two of them were former Dodgers. And since they had retired several years prior, this was my first chance to own picture cards of those guys. The 1982 Donruss card of Johnny Podres dressed as a Minnesota Twin was my first Johnny Podres card. Donruss chose the coaches wisely. The m...