Night Owl Cards

Continuing with the theme of "subconscious collecting," or what someone so crassly described as "hoarding,"  are the players I accumulate who have the most tenuous of connections to me. One of those players is Tim Wakefield. Wakefield rose to fame as a knuckleball pitcher for the Red Sox, and previous to that for the Pirates. Many people also know that Wakefield started out as a hitter. He was a first baseman before realizing he had a better shot at the majors if he took the mound with his baffling new pitch. The embarrassingly suspect connection to me is that Wakefield played his first season of professional baseball -- as a first baseman -- for the New York-Penn League Class A Watertown Pirates, who played their home games a few traffic lights from where I now live. I didn't even live in Watertown when he played in the minors. I was still in school. And, although my newspaper often interviewed former Watertown Pirates and Indians who moved on to bi...

(Today is a day I have eyed with trepidation for six months. I could exit the day exhilarated and victorious or terribly demoralized. I better have lots of cardboard around me in either case. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 169th in a series): I've mentioned several times that the only thing I really collect is baseball cards. I don't collect jerseys or periodicals or caps. I have collected other things in the past, and I've mentioned that, too. Matchbox cars, stamps, stuffed animals, coins, etc., etc. After puberty hit, I cut down on my peripheral collecting habits to zero in on cards. But still the collecting addiction extended its reach into other things . And when I wrote that post that was when I realized that even when I "wasn't collecting" I was always collecting. I just didn't think of it as collecting. I call that "subconscious collecting" or "subliminal collecting." There was a period, between 1995-2...