Night Owl Cards

You probably heard about, or even saw, a team called Maine-Endwell win the Little League World Series Championship on Sunday. The ESPN announcers did a decent job of explaining that the players on the team come from a community of around 10,000 people just north of the Pennsylvania border. The community is actually a school district. The Maine-Endwell Spartans have been a state power in football for awhile and are now well-known as raising really good 12-year-old baseball players. But I knew most of that already. From the time I was 13 until I left home, I lived a block from Endwell, N.Y. I used to watch the Little League World Series championship game every year on ABC. It was fun to see kids my age competing on national television. Even though they always seemed to be from Washington or California. But as the years went on, I stopped paying attention, and began to get annoyed with the amount of time ESPN devoted to it. That all changed this year. I watched three or four of...

I sure do write about this guy a lot, don't I? Hopefully, this is the last time. While everyone is talking about Strasburg on the Million Card site or in a complete 2010 Topps set or in Topps U&H or whatever, I went the simple route and bought the Syracuse Chiefs team set for a rather inflated 10 bucks. That's 33 cents per card. Or maybe it's 5 dollars for the Strasburg card ... ... another $2.50 for the Drew Storen card, and 9 cents each for 28 scrubs. This Strasburg card is staying with me. Not that it's rare or anything. There were more than a few being sold at the Syracuse Chiefs' game last night. And here was the vendor's chant as he walked up and down the aisles: "Get your scorecards and baseball cards. Strasburg right on top." And Strasburg is. They've got all the other cards in alphabetical order, except for Strasburg, who is conveniently out front. That was the highlight of my pregame purchasing. Once the pla...

(Today is "National Milk Chocolate Day." The order of those two words in the middle is important. I detest "chocolate milk." Always have since the time I was little. But "milk chocolate" is the most wonderful invention ever and much appreciated. This is the 74th in a series): If it doesn't rain, I will be attending a minor league baseball game tonight. It's already rained twice here today, but the game is an hour away, so who knows what it will be doing down there. The Syracuse Chiefs are facing the Indianapolis Indians, which doesn't mean much in major league terms, since those are the Triple A affiliates of the Nationals and the Pirates (I bet they pack the house for that series). But, as usual, we will be going merely for the spectacle of a relatively well-played game in my favorite kind of environment, one surrounded by baseball. Jason Marquis is scheduled to make the start for Syracuse. He's on a rehab assignment with the Natio...