Night Owl Cards

  I'm working on a couple of blog posts that involve research and I was hoping one of them would be ready today, but it turns out we're a long way from that. Thanks, work week. So I've got a fairly quick post instead.   I think we can all agree that among the poses that appeared on baseball cards from the '50s through the '80s, one of the best was the first baseman's pose with mitt outstretched waiting for the throw, or even better, with the ball nestled in his glove.   I liked those shots a lot. There's a reason that you haven't seen the few examples of that pose in the 1975 Topps worst to best countdown yet. They're just too good.   I believe the first time I became familiar with that pose was with the 1976 Mike Hegan card. It was so cool. Had no idea who Mike Hegan was (didn't pull his card in '75), but that card couldn't have been a better introduction. It sure left an impact, and it's never left my brain.   So any player making t...

(An update on the 5,000-card, 5,000-post giveaway: I just sent out package No. 14 of the 20. Package 15 is waiting for another post-office trip. No. 16 is waiting for packaging. No. 17 is being selected.)   It's not the same selecting a modern-day player as a Legend Of Cardboard as picking someone whose career has already passed. First, there are so many cards made of players today that the chances of having several run-of-the-mill cards is 100 percent. After all, Heritage and Gypsy Queen and Allen & Ginter exist, and even stuff like Fire and Gallery is likely not going to produce a Legend-quality photo of the subject. This is not a case for oldsters like Bob Didier, where he has just four major-release solo cards and all but one is fantastic. Second, one of the main themes of these posts is that the eligible players aren't necessarily well-known for their on-field skills. They are not the "Shoebox Legends" under those old stereotypes, the Aarons and Mays and Mant...

  This post is a product of spending a lot of time lately in the early '70s, in each of my hobbies, card collecting and music. While adding some of my recent 1970 Topps acquisitions to the binder, I paged over two very familiar cards, which are exactly 20 cards apart when paging by number. I'm going to focus on the fellow who arrives second in the set because he's a well-worn blog topic, someone whose fantastic cards were introduced to me during my early blogging days. Lowell Palmer is one of two new Legends of Cardboard in my continuing series . You might remember that players are only selected as a "Legend of Cardboard" if they are known more for their cards than their baseball career. And while certain moony-eyed women of the early '70s would argue, Palmer's fame rests with his cardboard, specifically his Joe-Cool specs, which appear in both the 1970 and 1971 Topps sets. Uniform and background aside, it's almost as if the 1970 and 1971 photos were t...

I haven't written a "Legends of Cardboard" post in almost three years. That's because it's taken me that long to get this card. Who knew a card of someone who barely registered on a major league roster, from 1993, would be so elusive? Yet, every time I searched for the famed Oscar Azocar "bat-hugging" Stadium Club card on COMC, it would be sold out. A few times (such as now), it's available on that site for almost 6 bucks. No thanks. I ended up finding it on Sportlots for 18 cents. And, how about this for a development? It arrived today from someone who lives in my town. Heck, he could have driven over and dropped it in my mailbox. Finally, it's mine. I wanted to hug it like Azocar is doing to his bat. Azocar is the latest Legend of Cardboard -- keep in mind Legends of Cardboard are those players who didn't necessarily excel on the field but certainly excelled on cardboard. He is a Legend of Cardboard because he not only produ...

I'm happy to say that the two shoeboxes full of cards sold at the yard sale earlier today. The mailman, making his usual stop, spotted the boxes and said he knew a family with a kid who liked baseball. The mailman then called the family and went on his way. Sure enough, a little while later, a van pulled up, someone got out, and bought both boxes of cards. I hope the kid likes 1990 Topps. OK, there was other stuff in there, too, pretty much the whole gamut from 2017 Topps to 10-year-old cards, to even a couple of beat-up items from 1972 and 1973. I think the kid is going to have a ball. One person I know was not in those boxes of cards is Kirt Manwaring. Because you don't just give away a Kirt Manwaring card. Manwaring's birthday is today, so it's an appropriate time to honor his contribution to cardboard. Manwaring may be a little too well-known for the Legend of Cardboard series, but really he had only one solid season at the plate, 1993 when the Giants c...