Night Owl Cards

I am sure that there are more than 100 reasons why I collect baseball cards, and I've probably documented at least three-quarters of them on this blog. Yet, many people, those who I know personally and those I just come across in social media, still have no idea what it is that makes me collect. They ignore my enthusiasm or question my interests. Why would I want to waste money on picture cards? Many of these people aren't sports fans. They don't understand and they don't want to understand. "It's just sports," they say. "He'll always be that way." It's kind of like being patted on the head. But I think I have a reason to collect cards that might open the eyes of some of those people. I received a cool card package in the mail yesterday. It was filled with lots of my collecting interests. Dodgers, set needs, vintage greatness, oddballs, even some non-baseball goodies. You'll see them all some other time. In that box of exci...

Thirty-five years ago today, I read about the White Sox's disastrous Disco Demolition Night in the evening newspaper. That's how leisurely life was as an adolescent in 1979. Entire news cycles -- what was a news cycle? -- could go by before I absorbed anything that was taking place outside of my own neighborhood. But there on the shag carpeting (I would often read the paper on the floor back then), I learned that the previous night the White Sox were forced to call off and eventually forfeit the second game of a doubleheader against the Tigers after fans stormed the field prior to the second game, incited by the announced mission (and probably a few drinks) to blow up disco records. I don't remember my thoughts after reading the story. It was a period of upheaval in my life, too. My grandfather was ill. He wasn't my flesh-and-blood grandfather. My grandmother had remarried five years earlier and this new man took to his new grandkids like they were his own. He wa...