Night Owl Cards

Every year at this time I buy some Opening Day and I apologize for doing so. I was going to do the same thing again this year (because I already said somewhere else that I wasn't going to buy any), and then I decided I'm not going to do that. I was out shopping for another birthday yesterday and I ended up in the card aisle and grabbed a fat pack of Opening Day. Everyone else would do the same. It's new. It was the first pack out of a brand new box. You're not a collector if you see an untouched box in front of you and don't grab a pack. (Oh, god, I just uttered the "you're not a collector" line. I'm sorry, so, so sorry). Opening Day has been pretty good to me the last couple of years despite the limited attention I've given it. Two years ago, it produced the Stadium Lights insert set and I drooled all over the thing . Last year, I bought a single blaster and pulled an autograph . So there's your incentive for buying a pack. Plus...

You can expect to see this card again in December. Look at all those Jingle Bells colors. It's Christmas in July! Makes me think it's going to snow even though it's 91 right now and hasn't rained for weeks. I present this card to you while not exactly in a "Look! Manny Ramirez never played for the A's!" frame of mind. It's kind of fun, much like the old '70s days in which Bill Grief appeared as an Expo even though he never played for them, or Bud Harrelson as an Astro, or innumerable Blue Jays and Mariners in the 1977 set. But it's kind of frustrating in that it's a bit of fiction in your team binder while middle relievers remain total non-entities to Topps. But Topps has toyed with Manny's cards for so long now -- removing umps entirely, leaving umps' disconnected legs -- that I'm getting bored with it. I can't even get fired up trying to determine when this photo actually took place. My theory is Ramirez is actu...

We're all familiar with Topps' methods of dealing with cards of players who were traded during the offseason. Back in the '50s, the pictures were paintings and they would simply repaint the cap on the picture. During the '60s, they would get a shot of the player without his cap and crop the photo tight so you couldn't see the player's old uniform. During the '70s, Topps constantly featured players staring up into the sky, as if they had just spotted a spaceship (is that what I think it is?), so their cap logo wouldn't show. And of course, there was airbrushing. Topps airbrushed the caps on seemingly half of the 1969 set after baseball expanded by four teams. During the '70s and '80s, Topps attempted to draw the new team logo onto the players' caps with some spectacularly horrid results . I often wondered if Topps employees hung those card photos on their refrigerator doors at home because the logos looked like children drew them. (Che...