Night Owl Cards

  I'm making good on a promise I wrote back in July with this post, with just one day to spare.   During the last One-Card Wonders post I finished all the 1970s one-card wonders and said I wanted to do the same with the 1980s in the next post, which I said would happen before the end of the year.   Well, the end of the year is here and I can't let all those people who have been waiting for the last five-plus months down! So don't worry, be happy! The last OCW post of the year is here!   In this episode I'm covering 1988 and 1989, the only years I haven't touched from the 1980s. I'm also tackling not only the Topps sets from those two years but Donruss, Fleer, Score and Upper Deck, too (This means I'm technically not done with the '80s after this post because I still haven't uncovered OCWs for some of the other 1980s Donruss and Fleer sets).   As a reminder, I define One-Card Wonders as cards of players who appeared on one major release only. I discou...

  I mentioned when I completed the 1988 Donruss set that it marked the first time I had completed four major sets from a given year.   I don't see that happening for me ever again. After the '80s, it's difficult for me to find multiple sets I was interested in enough to try to complete them. For example, I've completed 1993 Upper Deck, I wouldn't bother throwing money at any other '93 set outside of a token Topps complete-set buy. (I'd take a gift of a complete '93 Stadium Club or Pinnacle set but I'm not buying them).   So '88 is a milestone, a one-of-a-kind collecting feat. I like that it's '88. That's the year the Dodgers won the World Series; it's the year I graduated from college; it's the first full year of my wife and I going out. It's basically the last great year before adulthood stomped everything to hell.   To mark the feat, I thought I'd take 10 notable players from this time and compare their cards from th...

  A guy I work with is a Tigers fan. Every once in awhile, the Tigers' recent history of ineptness or fairly recent Detroit World Series failures will come up and he will end it with a sigh and add "well, we'll always have 1984." I knew the feeling. For me, and all Dodgers fans, it was "well, we'll always have 1988" for quite awhile. During this past World Series, I read more than a couple of L.A. fans' wishes, that if only everyone could stop bringing up 1988 all the time, that if the Dodgers could win the Series, it would end, or at least lessen, the references to '88. And so, it happened. The Dodgers won the 2020 title, and, now, this is me putting 1988 aside with this post. It's time for a new episode of Joy of a Team Set, featuring those 1988 Dodgers. I'm going to do it a little differently this time. I've always wondered how the various card sets that were around at the time covered the '88 Dodgers. I've known that 1988 ...

Today is Phil Niekro's 81st birthday. Are you sick of hearing about this? If so, blame, Matt . He is the No. 1 person I think of when "folks born on April Fool's Day" is mentioned. Although he's not the only person as Rusty Staub, Willie Montanez and Ron Perranoski were all born on April 1st. So was April Sargent, who you probably don't know, but I really need to do a Brush With Greatness post on her someday. But back to Niekro. This 1988 card was quite the ... heh ... score during Score's trading card debut. This is the only card in 1988 showing Niekro in his final MLB uniform. Niekro's last season was 1987 and he played in one game -- ONE GAME -- for the Braves at the end of the season. Here's how it went: Niekro was pitching for the Indians for much of 1987 when in early August, he was dealt to the Blue Jays, who were trying to win a pennant. He was then released by the Blue Jays at the end of August and his career was practically o...