Night Owl Cards

(I've begun packaging some of the prizes for the giveaway. I believe I now have everyone's address except for Jeff S. Just send me an email!) For the first 35-40 years of my life, the word "goat" as it applied to baseball either meant the Billy Goat curse that followed the Cubs around for 100 years or a player who screwed up in a significant game. "Baseball's Greatest Goats," that was the kind of title used for books or articles and everyone knew that when they opened the pages, they'd read about the biggest gaffes, goofs and blunders in baseball history. Try searching that phrase now. "Goat" no longer means the opposite of "hero" in sports lingo. It actually means hero. G-O-A-T. Greatest Of All Time. Just about every internet sports reference to "goat" involves Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali or some other athletic great. Somehow "goat" has come to mean completely the opposite of what it used to ...

Like a lot of collectors in the 1980s, I subscribed to Baseball Cards magazine. I was on board from practically the first issue in the early 1980s. But I had stopped getting it by 1985. During the late '80s, I'd pick it up here and there, but I never kept them. However, I did keep the ones that came to my home between 1982-85. For years, they were stored in a box in the attic. But since this blog started, I've pulled them out and read them occasionally. They're fascinating. They're not fascinating strictly in a nostalgic sense. They're interesting both because of the informative articles therein and in how much the magazine differed from its unholy successor, Beckett magazine. The only time I ever look at Beckett is when I'm in one of those chain bookstores and I'm desperate for something to pass the time. I'll open it up, read a few pages and practically drop it in horror over what the hobby has become -- or what is worth emphasizing in that maga...