Night Owl Cards

  Today is Father's Day, which as I've mentioned before means doing what I want to do, and only that, all day.   For some that may mean boating, fishing, golfing, going to a ballgame, some of the typical stuff. For me, and most Father's Days now, it means nerding out over baseball cards. As pathetic as that may seem to some people -- probably most people -- I'm perfectly happy doing this. What? You want me to go to Dave & Busters? Come on. So I've got something here that will interest a very limited amount of people. Heck probably most readers and bloggers don't care. But that doesn't matter today on the day of doing what I want. I've long been interested in the phenomenon of players disappearing from card sets. They're in a card set year after year and suddenly they vanish, and then they appear again!   This happens a lot, but you need to pay attention year after year. A very specific example of this is when a player does not come to an agreeme...

  It's Father's Day. As a father, here are the typical father things, according to greeting cards and TV commercials, that I don't do: Fish, golf, hunt, drive a truck, carve wooden ducks, wear a tie, haul stuff, work on engines, tool around in my shed out back. Here's a father thing that I do do: Eat. Fortunately, a couple of people in my family do know what I do -- unlike this year's commerical annoyance from the Duluth Trading Company . In fact, my quite intelligent offspring presented me with an appropriate gift. The gift of cheese. I cannot think of a more perfect Father's Day gift. (Well, yeah, there are cards, but you'll have to talk that over with my stomach). My daughter seems to have this ability to live around great cheese places and I've been the beneficiary the last couple of Father's Days. So in honor of the cheese I am about to consume, let's combine my two loves with a few blog-appropriate images. You may have gifted your father wi...

This is my new blog logo. It was designed by my daughter as a Father's Day gift. It was totally her idea. She is a graphic design major in college and with the way the world is, businesses not hiring college-age talent for internships and such, she had some time to work on her skills for my benefit. I love it. One of its cool components is the background is transparent so I can use it with any background color I want. The last one shows you how nice it looks against the blog color background. I will probably go with the white or light gray option as the logo stands out best with that color. Now for the tricky part. This will necessitate a blog redesign, unfortunately. My current blog design, which I like for its minimalist nature, is not friendly when it comes to using photos or graphic elements in the header or wherever. Blogger in general makes installing things like this a pain, so it's going to take some experimenting before I sett...

(It's 10 days before Christmas and not a single gift from me is wrapped. I need at least 11 days to wrap presents given my limited skills. Think I can stuff everything in a mailer and wrap it in blue tape? Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 278th in a series): In the last week, I have read at least a half-dozen stories on Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. The Chiefs' heartbreaking loss to the Chargers on Thursday will do little to quiet the hype around Mahomes, especially when it comes to the sports card and memorabilia market. "Browse Mahomes cards now! " has been COMC's front-page exclamation for weeks. If I were one of the many who collected hot rookies, I would have looked at my meager football card collection to see whether I owned any Mahomes cards. But I know without even a glimpse that I don't. Besides, when Mahomes' exploits blew up and owning his card became a thing to do, my first reaction wasn...

My dad's favorite player is Ted Williams. It seems odd to write that sentence in the present tense. Williams stopped playing 57 years ago and, um, except for his head, is no longer with us. My dad is in his 80s and rarely talks about baseball in terms of being a fan. But I know he still has memories of Williams in action and remembers them fondly even if he never speaks of them. One of his favorite baseball books is David Halberstam's "The Teammates," which came out about 15 years ago and chronicles the relationship between Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky during Williams' final days. My dad reads a lot, but not many baseball books, so that's how much he still likes Williams. (I have the book, but I have yet to read it). Williams was known as "The Splendid Splinter," mostly, but also "The Kid," and "Teddy Ballgame". My dad, however, is fond of calling him by one of his lesser-mentioned nicknames, "T...

There was a time when I thought baseball players suddenly appeared one day on a baseball field on TV or on a baseball card. There was no sense of "where they came from," their family history, or even the path that they took through youth baseball, the school years and the minor leagues. For awhile, I was aware of only the player, and if that player had a dad who played in the major leagues, I had no idea. Baseball players didn't come from other people. They were just THERE. That changed a little bit when Topps issued the Father & Son subset in the 1976 set. That's where I found out that Buddy Bell and Bob Boone had fathers who also played in the majors. When Cal Ripken Jr. arrived in the majors in 1981 and became a sensation in 1982, I'd hear about how his father -- Cal Ripken Sr. -- was a coach on the team. But since I didn't live in Baltimore and didn't care about coaches, that knowledge faded quickly. Somehow, while collecting cards in t...