Night Owl Cards

    I don't think I need to tell you that I love lists. Half of my blog, probably, is some sort of list. I love making lists. I like compiling those lists into a series (a list of a list). I like organizing my cards according to lists.   I've been doing that since I was a relative tyke, sitting on the bedroom floor, laying out 10 cards (five on each row) in order of career batting order on the back, selecting the next card off the stack to my left, and then shifting the lined-up cards over one according to the new arrival's stats.   Lists are an easy way to make information digestible and entertaining. Creating lists enjoyed a big boost in popularity in the early 1980s, as there seemed to be new books every week about this list or that. Lists fell into overkill, especially since the advent of the internet and a whole bunch of fly-by-night websites that want clicks. But a well-maintained, thoughtful list is always interesting to me. I gravitate toward lists: Top sitco...

  One of the most frustrating things to me is that no matter how much you prepare, research, take advice, it feels like there's no moving forward for very long. It's one step ahead and two steps back.   Maybe this is the point I'm at, actually moving out of middle age, or maybe it's just a period of time that will go away, but I'm dealing with more than a couple firsts in my life that aren't very pleasant.  This is why the hobby means so much to me. There are fun firsts popping off all the time. Every new arrival is a first. I just added the 1969 Topps Gil Hodges and Joe Pepitone to my collection. Welcome newbies! (Actually, this isn't the first time Hodges has been in my collection, I foolishly got rid of my original copy -- don't remember how).   So that's a fun first and I'm eager to recall other fun -- or semi-fun -- firsts to take the edge off of these present-time dumb ol' firsts. So here's the sixth edition of Firsts, where I rand...

(Greetings from one of only a handful of places on earth that received more than three feet of snow this weekend. No, I'm still not used to this after 30-plus years. I need some Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 345th in a series): Sometimes I can't believe my luck when I decide to write a post. This card has been sitting on my desk as a possible topic for months and I only decided to post it because I needed something quick during a holiday filled with visitors and snow. As I uploaded the card and searched for an online version of this newspaper front, the date on the top hit me: "December 1, 1993". Hey, today is December 1! Thirty-one years ago today, this Florida Times-Union edition was published, a day after the Jacksonville Jaguars were named an NFL expansion team. Obviously a momentous day in the city. I found a couple of photos containing the cover image on the Jaguars' web site. YES.   I have no attachment to the Jacksonville Jaguars. Like many NFL fans ...

  Earlier this year, I wrote a post about some clippings I found in our newspaper morgue that pertained to baseball cards.   I featured only one of the clips because it came with half-tones of two old baseball cards, the 1975 Topps Bert Blyleven and the 1976 Topps Pete Rose.   But the envelope was filled with other clippings related to baseball cards. So I pulled a few of them that I thought were interesting to show here.   The most interesting one to me is from 1970 (that's why there's a 1970 card here).   You can see this is from the New York Times and I was greatly amused by this because it reads like the new-fangled thing that kids like to do is -- gasp -- collect full sets!!! "A Willie Mays is no more valuable than say, an Ed Spiezio to these kids." I guess this article is talking about me! I'm the "new sophistication"! But it's certainly not talking about most of the collectors I come across today or probably for the past 35 years or more. I a...

  I went to a reunion of a local baseball team yesterday.  This was as local as a local team can get. It wasn't minor league ball, nor even semipro ball -- nobody was getting paid, I don't think -- it was just guys in college or just out of school playing on a team because they wanted to keep playing. They did that for three years, in the early 1970s, and then stopped. And they didn't reunite until yesterday, more than 50 years later. One of the players on those teams was Dave Trembley, who you may remember as the Baltimore Orioles' manager from 2007-10. He's a local guy. I've written about him in my Brush With Greatness series and a couple other times -- but that was awhile ago. He's retired now from major league ball, I believe. The organizers of the reunion started out wanting to recognize only Trembley for all he's done -- stuff like that doesn't happen regularly around here -- but he didn't want to be the center of attention. Only until it b...

  U.L. Washington passed away Sunday. It was a little distressing when I found that out, not because I had a firm connection to Washington, who was the shortstop for the 1980s Kansas City Royals teams that repeatedly made the postseason, but because it took a long time to find credible information on the news. One big reason for that is the demise of traditional news sources, which ain't good, but also the immediacy of social media, which often doesn't place a lot of importance on how they discovered that information . But another reason is a lot of folks on earth now just don't remember the 1970s and 1980s. It's not important to them. Now that is more than a little distressing to me.   So Washington falls into that category of "incidental" baseball players of the past for many people. He wasn't George Brett or Tony Gwynn, someone who enters into fans' consciousness automatically whether they were around for that player's games or not. Washington...