Night Owl Cards

This is my favorite card recognizing a Dodger no-hitter. Donruss also put one out of Kevin Gross in its 1993 set, but it scans like crap, and the Score one lays it all out for you. Who, what, when, where. It's there. With the first no-hitter of the season pitched last night (yes, I was working and thank goodness for earlier Saturday start times on the west coast), I looked back on which cards I have that recognize Dodgers no-hitters. There aren't a lot of them. If you pitched a no-hitter before the 1990s, good luck, unless you're Sandy Koufax. Really, the boom in no-hitter cards, recognizing personal achievement on the field, was in the '90s. Score, again, brought it to the forefront with its marvelous no-hitter subset , acknowledging the surge in no-hitters during the 1990 season. The Kevin Gross card followed two years later. The next Dodgers no-hitter happened in July of 1995 when Ramon Martinez pitched one against the Marlins. This is what I have t...

It's been one of those weeks where I can't achieve anything that I want. Everywhere there's a road block. False family crises. Car issues. Allergies. Computer meltdowns. Busy work. And, oh yeah, let's throw the baseball playoffs in the middle of it all. If I were to redesign the calendar, the first two months that I would crumple up into a ball, throw in the waste basket, and redo would be March and October. They are undoubtedly defective. So with the little time that I have today, I thought I'd show off the remnants of my belated birthday spree. I pretty much showed all the good stuff already. But I had a handful of dollars leftover and went to ebay to see what I could scrounge up cheaply. Yes, this was cheap and better damn well be. You can see some of the foil has worn off. But I don't really care about such things. This is plenty of shiny for me. And with this card I am down to needing a single sparkly for the whole diamond parallel Dodger set. ...

(First day of summer. It's in the 80s. Sunny. And I'm still working. Explain. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 146th in a series): By the time this card arrived in '84, I was a certified fan. You aren't really a fan until you know misery. Disappointment. Heartbreak. Deflated expectations. Disgust. All of it. I was fortunate in that I selected a favorite team at the same time that team was going pretty good (by coincidence, I swear). By the time I had fully invested myself into this thing called "baseball," instead of simply collecting cards, my favorite team was making regular trips to the World Series. Back-to-back trips, in fact, in 1977 and 1978. But then I began to find out exactly what being a fan was all about. It wasn't merely rooting for your team, and seeing it do exactly what you wanted it to do -- win. It was about this: Crushing World Series losses (1977 and 1978) . Disappointing seasons full of unrealized expect...

Today, I'm planning to head into work for a full day for the first time since Wednesday. We'll see how that goes. I'm still coughing like a nine-pack-a-day puffer and unless my co-workers consider that comforting background music, things could be bumpy. Also, I haven't exactly been in touch with the normal rhythms and customs of life for the last week and have done a variety of things to almost get myself and others killed, including: driving at night through a snowstorm for a mile without headlights, leaving the stove burners on while making chicken soup, sailing through a stop sign, and other things I'm sure my wife will tell me about when she's sure I'm my old self again and can be sufficiently embarrassed. Staying home and lying on the couch when you're sick isn't only to get you healthy and keep others from catching your illness. You're also there because sick people lose the direction manual to life's little rituals. Fortunatel...

Long before there was "Manny being Manny," there was "Rickey is Rickey." Except Rickey Henderson actually uttered "Rickey is Rickey" before it became a catch phrase. Or so the legend goes. Not only was Rickey Henderson one of the most talented players ever, he was one of the most entertaining, just from a quotebook standpoint. There are web sites devoted to Henderson's quotes, and there have been some wonderful articles written about him. If you haven't read Tom Verducci's Sports Illustrated article "What Is Rickey Henderson Doing in Newark?" from about five years back, and you want to be entertained, head to SI's archives and give it a read. The reason I bring all of this up is Man of Steal from Rickey Henderson Collectibles and I arranged a team trade. And since Man of Steal is Man of Steal and Night Owl is Night Owl, that means a trade of A's for Dodgers. I'm glad Brad wasn't looking for Henderson cards from me bec...

Ah, the perils of gold foil. There's no use in making the letters all fancy and shiny if nobody can READ them! Isn't that right, 2008 Upper Deck? Actually, this is 1993 Donruss, but you can see by UD's base set offering this past year that someone hasn't learned much in 15 years. In defense of the '93 card, gold-foil technology (which is a smidge behind micro-laser brain surgery technology on the world-wide criticalness factor scale) was in its infancy. That gold pixie dust, or whatever they used back then, was bound to fade. But I guess no one thought of that. In case you've never seen this card, it's a Spirit of the Game subset card from the Donruss base set. "Spirit of the Game" is written in script at the top (if you look at Kevin Gross' glove you can see it). And "Donruss" is in the bottom right corner. This card commemorates the no-hitter that Kevin Gross threw against the Giants while with the Dodgers on Aug. 18, 1992. Gross w...