Night Owl Cards

It seems strange to say in our phone culture, but there used to be a time when you didn't necessarily take pictures when you went to a baseball game. You certainly didn't take pictures of yourself, I know that. I own zero photographic proof of the first Major League Baseball game I ever attended, the Royals and Yankees at Yankee Stadium in July of 1978. My father may have taken some photos with his camera, he was the picture-taker until my mom took over. But I've never seen any. Any images of that game have resided solely in my mind's eye for 42 years. Such was the case for a number of major and minor league games that I attended through the 1980s and '90s. Camera? Why would I want one of those? There's a game to watch out there! And food to eat! There's no time for snappy, snapping! Well, that thought process certainly changed. Look at the stands of any baseball game. The phone, with that camera, seems much more interesting to many people in the ...

You probably heard about, or even saw, a team called Maine-Endwell win the Little League World Series Championship on Sunday. The ESPN announcers did a decent job of explaining that the players on the team come from a community of around 10,000 people just north of the Pennsylvania border. The community is actually a school district. The Maine-Endwell Spartans have been a state power in football for awhile and are now well-known as raising really good 12-year-old baseball players. But I knew most of that already. From the time I was 13 until I left home, I lived a block from Endwell, N.Y. I used to watch the Little League World Series championship game every year on ABC. It was fun to see kids my age competing on national television. Even though they always seemed to be from Washington or California. But as the years went on, I stopped paying attention, and began to get annoyed with the amount of time ESPN devoted to it. That all changed this year. I watched three or four of...

I am at the stage in collecting -- or more accurately I'm at that stage in life -- where a retail pack of 2013 whatever can't possibly compete with a simple repack of old cards. They're both the same price, as you know. A single rack pack of Topps Update and one of those Fairfield rack pack "guess what's inside" repacks run about $4.99 with the repack yielding a lot more cards. I guess you're paying for "new" with the other pack. But when I bought one of each last week I received so much more "card collectibility" out of the repack. Not a surprise. Not something I haven't said before. Not something others haven't said before. It was just so apparent , that's all. The most notable feature of the Update pack was that it was a Mariners' hot pack. Besides the emerald Aaron Harang card, there were these Seattlites: What to do with these cards? I suppose I'll send them off to Larry at Emerald City Diamon...