Night Owl Cards

Christmas Eve greetings, all. When someone decides to blog about sports, they first must promise that they will write a post about their all-time team. It can be the "all-time best" at each position, even if that's rather pedestrian. Or it can be something less obvious. I prefer the latter. And I've already composed the All-Greg team , the All-Fish team and the All-Beer team . But it's Christmastime and any team on this festive day should be Christmas-related. So, how do you combine baseball with Christmas? They don't go together very well. Opposite seasons, you know. What to do. What to do. I thought about finding players' last names that evoke Christmas images. You know, Rob Deer and J.T. Snow and Jon Garland and Tim Mistletoe (he's a prospect you've never heard of). But that's probably been done before, possibly multiple times over the years. As I thought about it some more, I started to hear bells in the distance. Sleigh b...

There are certain topics that circulate through the blogs over and over again. Sometimes the same topic comes in bunches, only to disappear for awhile, and then re-emerge a year or two later when new blogs start up. One of these topics is finding cards of players on teams for which you never knew they played. It pops up repeatedly. Jose Canseco as an Expo is often cited. Al Oliver as a Dodger is another one. There are probably many more that I forget. I decided to finally do a post on this, just to keep my blogger license. You have to write about this topic -- and players with goofy hair -- or "they" will come and find you and tell you can't waste your time rambling about cards anymore. I didn't have a lot of time to dig up cards, so I went directly to my Topps Traded sets, since that's where a lot of these examples occur. I don't have all the Traded sets, or even half of them -- including some pretty common issues, like from the late '80s. So I k...