Night Owl Cards

  The most recent Beckett Vintage Collector arrived in my mailbox Monday and with it my latest article for the magazine.   It's the 20th article I've written for the magazine as I'm coming up on six years since first joining the writing roster there. But it's also been a year since I've had a story published, mostly due to 1) Far less time to devote to magazine writing, thanks to my "real job" and 2) Plain running low on ideas.   But I'm glad I had enough to get me to 20. I'm fairly happy with the subject of this article. It's certainly something I can relate to considering my profession. It's about the many examples of name errors on sports cards.   I know the struggle well -- we publish sports names almost every day at my job. But it still was surprising how many name errors I came across while researching for this story (and how many more emerged once I announced my story had published).   I quickly realized I would not be able to includ...

The percentage of times that the wrong player has appeared on a baseball card is remarkably small. It's actually admirable -- when you look into it -- that baseball card manufacturers have avoided the gaffe of featuring a card of a player with a photo of someone else as easily as they have. Speaking as someone who is forever coming across (or being notified of) misidentified players in photo captions in his line of work, I don't know how the card companies, particularly Topps, do it. It can't be easy. It happens so seldom that when the goof is made, it becomes so famous that most collectors are very familiar with it. The card above is a rarity: I had no idea it was an error until I started researching this post. I have had this 1982 Donruss card of "Shane Rawley" in my collection since 1982. I didn't suspect a thing. Who can tell 1980s Mariners apart anyway? But I probably should have had my doubts. Rawley's uniform is dirty, like he had been sl...