Night Owl Cards

  I received my first COMC order of the year Monday. I requested shipment on July 12 and it was originally slated to arrive in late August. Instead it showed up in 17 days. That's record time. During a period when ebay service is all over the map (yet I am hounded by PROVIDE FEEDBACK emails the second I receive an order), it's nice to see someone picking up the slack, especially with all the past complaints about COMC delays.   This COMC order is a reflection of my tour through various web sites, card blogs, social media, whatever. Whenever I saw a card that I liked, into the COMC cart it went. That means sometimes when I pulled a card out of the shipment I was like "what'd I order this for?" The only explanation is "human see, human do." I wanted the card at that time.   So here's a look at me jumping off a bridge just because everyone else did it.   Much of these knee-jerk orders involved Dodger cards. I couldn't tell you where or when I saw ...

  I went to a reunion of a local baseball team yesterday.  This was as local as a local team can get. It wasn't minor league ball, nor even semipro ball -- nobody was getting paid, I don't think -- it was just guys in college or just out of school playing on a team because they wanted to keep playing. They did that for three years, in the early 1970s, and then stopped. And they didn't reunite until yesterday, more than 50 years later. One of the players on those teams was Dave Trembley, who you may remember as the Baltimore Orioles' manager from 2007-10. He's a local guy. I've written about him in my Brush With Greatness series and a couple other times -- but that was awhile ago. He's retired now from major league ball, I believe. The organizers of the reunion started out wanting to recognize only Trembley for all he's done -- stuff like that doesn't happen regularly around here -- but he didn't want to be the center of attention. Only until it b...

As of Friday, Dave Trembley is an ex-major league manager. This is thanks to the Orioles' totally token move of firing the man, which falls squarely under the heading of "See???? We're doing SOMETHING." The move is made all the more useless by the fact that I don't think anyone in Baltimore is paying attention anymore. People are suddenly allergic to that beautiful stadium there, unless they're wearing Yankee caps. I don't believe for an instant that Trembley had anything to do with the Orioles' horrible start this season. You can say I'm biased because I've talked to Trembley several times, I've talked to his very nice mother, I know at least one of his childhood friends, and he grew up in a town that's 10 minutes away from me. And you're probably right. I am biased. But I'm also realistic. There is no way anyone could enter that disaster of an organization, virtually bereft of talent on the major league level, and with a...

I received two packages in the mail the other day. Both were similar in one special, super-fantastic way. But at the start, I regarded each with suspicion. I've never been a suspicious person. I always give people the benefit of the doubt, and I've been known to give someone a second or third chance. But all of that has changed ever since the evil genius from Wisconsin road into town. Now, I'm living in a world of  human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria . I need an exorcism on my mailbox. The first package arrived from Brian of 30-Year-Old Cardboard . I opened it with the precision of an explosives expert. What came out was an envelope with a handwritten message. I have really come to loathe hand-written messages. This is what it said: Well, if that isn't a prelude to a bipping, I don't know what is. I opened the envelope and was greeted by another envelope. It said this: Great. Creative packaging designed to produce an a...

Have you ever bought a blaster just for the sake of finding two cards? Of course you have. Let me rephrase that. Have you ever bought a blaster just for the sake of finding two cards that weren't the last two cards you needed to complete a set? You have? OK, let me rephrase that again. Have you ever bought a blaster just for the sake of finding a card of Juan Pierre and a card of Dave Trembley? HA! You're lying! You have not! Only I do ridiculous stuff like that! And that is exactly what I did a couple of days ago when I picked up a blaster of Topps Series 2. There is no earthly reason for me to buy something like that. I'm as done as done can be with '08 Topps. The more time passes the more convinced I am that the product was crap. However ... I needed a Juan Pierre card to complete my 2008 Dodgers set (I realized a couple of weeks ago, long after I had thought I had already wrapped up the Dodger set, that I still needed the Pierre card). And I needed a Dav...