Night Owl Cards

  Starting a Blog Bat-Around these days is kind of like announcing in 1989 that you just bought a vinyl record. Nobody cares, everyone's moved on to compact discs/TikTok.   But records came back, and are dumb expensive, so maybe blogging will, too. Anyway, this is a Blog Bat-Around for the seven of you that blog and care about this topic.   Not Another Baseball Card Blog has already kicked it off . This theme came from a Bluesky discussion and was specifically mentioned by Shlabotnik Report , I think. What are cards you like that feature a team you don't like?   This could get very involved for me. There are a lot of cards I like, often showing teams I root against. And my dislike for teams can spread like a disease covering two-thirds of major league franchises. It all depends on the baseball scene at the time, whether playoffs are involved, etc.   But to keep this manageable, I'll cover four or five teams. And most of the cards I'm showing are coming from ch...

  Card bloggers who have been at it for a dozen years or more are aware of Dave from Tribe Cards and his seemingly never-ending giveaways. I've mentioned a few times now that he was my introduction to how wonderful card blogging could be. People sent you cards just because you asked. For free. And good stuff, too. The first stuffed box I received not even two months into my blogging career contained a 1950 Bowman card. I had arrived in the blogging world just to write about cards -- isn't that wonderful that you could do that? -- and now this?!?   So when Dave announced almost four years ago that he was launching another giveaway -- a return to the 12 Days of Cardmas Giveaway, even though it wasn't Christmas -- I signed right up, very enthusiastically.   Years went by and I forgot about the whole thing until Dave reappeared last month to announce he was sending stuff out. The original call for sign-ups provided a sign-up "sheet," requesting our top three choices...

  OK, back by popular demand, here is a look at my collection based on who is in the Division Series (what used to be the lowliest of the playoff series, but now we have a bunch of wild-card hoo hah and fandoodle).   There are four new teams to consider. Of course, there are four holdover teams that I've already considered, so for those four repeats, I'm going to select my second "oldest" and "newest" card for that team. The random is still random.   All right, I have the Dusty Baker card above that represents three teams in this postseason. Let's do this:   ORIOLES VS. RANGERS   Baltimore Orioles (cards in my collection: 2,574. Overall rank: 14th)   Oldest card in my collection: 1956 Topps Chuck Diering (I decided to leave a lot of these uncropped, because I like the effect ... or did at the time).     Newest card in collection: 2023 Topps Heritage New Age Performers Gunnar Henderson.  Random card in my collection: 1988 Topps Jim Dwyer Thou...