Night Owl Cards

I've run this card blog longer than most, and the longer it goes, the more difficult it is coming up with original topics. I am all too well aware of when I'm repeating myself, and also too well aware that sometimes I don't know when I'm repeating myself. There are just some topics that I should never discuss again. And I'm going to do something about it by occasionally writing a series of posts called "I will never write about this again". One of those topics is my four-year foray into fantasy baseball in the mid-1990s. I don't need to write about this again. I was terrible. It was a long time ago and the rules have changed vastly. It's time to let it go. The reason I haven't let it go until now is that I'm forever trying to remember what players were on my fantasy team during those years (1993-96). I finally did a little research and figured out most of them. I am going to list them here now so I will have this for posterity an...

I like the 1995 set a lot. But I think the reason I have never committed to collecting it is it because it holds too many bad memories. Yeah, there was the strike the year before, but it's more than that. There was my fantasy league team. I have mentioned several times how lousy I was at fantasy league baseball. Every year at this time, I get solicited by folks online and off to join a fantasy league. And every year I ignore or decline. It's all because of how terrible I was participating in a fantasy league during the mid-1990s. I played in a league between 1993-95 (yes, we had the great misfortune of playing a fantasy league the 1994 strike). If I remember correctly, I was pretty good at drafting pitchers, but awful at drafting position players. Then my pitchers would go on the DL and my team would be stupid in everything. I'd lose interest about two months into the season and my fellow players would pick the remnants off my dead team's carcass for a hand...

Well, my dreams of competing against the 2010 Heritage blaster fantasy league members by using a cello pack of 1989 Topps cards was dealt an immediate and crushing blow when I realized I am just too darn lazy. My intent was to pick my fantasy team of 1989 players, find a comparable 2010 player, and then use those comparable players on my team. Well, finding comparable players is a long and excruciating task. I got through all of one-and-a-half players and gave up, beating myself up for the 45 minutes that I had wasted. So, Dan Plesac, you will never find out how you would do as Matt Capps. And Alejandro Pena, you will never know whether your most comparable 2010 pitcher is Rafael Soriano, because I quit in disgust while going through the Minnesota Twins roster. That means all you're going to see is what kind of a fantasy team I could form out of the 39 cards from the cello pack that madding sent me. And that's good enough, really. Say it is. You'll make me feel bett...

Whenever more than one person sends me the same night card, that can mean only one thing: it's automatically an awesome night card. I received this Upper Deck card of Dante Bichette recently, several months after it was sent to me by someone else. The reason that it is such a naturally awesome night card is because it is both a night card on the front ... ... and on the back. I'm sure there are a few other cards like that (probably almost all of them made by Upper Deck). But it'll be hard to beat this one, since the bank lights behind Bichette really make the photo on the back. I have but two memories about Dante Bichette. The first is of pulling his 1989 Topps rookie card about 37 times during my card-buying spree of that year. He is in the top five of the player I pulled the most that year. Right there with Scott Bailes and Bob Brower and famed former Angels manager Moose Stubing. The other memory of Bichette is he was the stalwart of my fantasy league team...