Night Owl Cards

 (Today begins the first day of "easy season" in my job. "Easy season" isn't as "easy" as it once was, but I need to focus on the fact that I won't be typing in 48 school-game roundups per day for the next three months. Let's get to Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 340th in a series):   One of the things I miss the most about trading cards from the 1950s through the 1990s is the personality of the players coming off of the cards.   Card backs were for finding out who was behind that face on the front. In the early going, from the 1950s through the 1970s, you could get some inside information about the player from a cartoon or a short write-up. The cartoons from specific sets like 1956, 1970, 1973 and 1974 Topps baseball and great oddball sets like Kellogg's, which dared to ask what players' hobbies were, made ball players human, guys you could relate to -- they were just like you in a lot of ways. They liked to draw, they liked to wa...

One thing that I fail to do when trading in this hobby is make the best use of my PWEs and my extra pages. When sending out a PWE, I usually pack maybe 3 or 4 cards into penny sleeves and fold some paper around it so the cards don't move around and then ship it off. Meanwhile, people are stuffing up to 12 cards into one-third of a nine-pocket page and shipping it in that same PWE. What's wrong with me? I don't know, I guess I don't have a lot of extra pages around right now. But that's not the main reason. The main reason is I don't think of it. And when someone sends me one of those cut-up pages, I don't keep them so I can be just as efficient when I send out PWEs. Yup, those cut-up pages just get chucked. I'm the place where pages go to die. I've got to stop that. I have a card room and a card desk and a card drawers full of supplies. I love my card drawer full of supplies. All I need to do is add those cut-up pages to the drawers an...

Somewhere during the 1980 baseball season, I became aware of a player named "Mookie." Mookie! What a terrific name. You just didn't come across unusual first names like you do these days (every day at my workplace, it's like: "OK, so that's how we're spelling 'Jasmine' now?"). Mookie was called up to the Mets in September of 1980 and, wow, was it different viewing someone named "Mookie" on my television. This card is practically iconic, thanks to the arrival of Mookie Wilson on cardboard. But it still wasn't as fantastic as this card: I pulled this card of this Mookie character in one of the first packs of 1981 Donruss I ever bought. I was entranced. I mean, what decade was this?   Cards by something called "Donruss"? Players named "Mookie"? Man, the '80s are gonna be weird! For years I hoped that somehow the Mets would trade Mookie Wilson to the Dodgers. I liked speedsters anyw...

(There is nothing that will make me happier to see an NFL season end than the Giants winning the Super Bowl. I've suffered through this fate four times now, and it doesn't get any easier. Bring on the pitchers and catchers! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 133rd in a series): Upper Deck is known for making some vaguely snarky cards on the sly during their early days. The book "Card Sharks" documents some of it. I haven't read the book so I don't know if this Bill Buckner card is mentioned. But Upper Deck seems to be making a rather obvious comment on this card that came out four years after Buckner famously let a ground ball go through his legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. Was Upper Deck yucking it up because they found a photo featuring a giant black hole between Buckner's legs? If so, UD had a lot of company. Buckner jokes filled the airwaves back then. He was the subject of late-night jokes and the target of hecklers in the...