Night Owl Cards

  Apologies for the morbid post, but I'm discovering that this is going to be a difficult time of year for me from now on. My mom passed away two years ago on Mother's Day and my dad a month later. It's the second anniversary of that time period and the fragility of life is naturally on my mind. It doesn't help that the players on my baseball cards keep leaving. Nothing underlines one's mortality quite like the news that another player whose card you collected as a kid has died. I periodically recognize those recently departed players from my youth with individual posts but those passings of players from the very first set I ever collected -- 1975 Topps -- have been coming so frequently this year that I can't keep up. Often I'm just too shocked to write anything (For frequent commenter, steelehere, who often randomly mentions a former Dodger player's death on my posts, I do pay tribute to them on Twitter, even if I don't mention it on the blog. Here ...

Baseball and bubblegum. To me, they seem to be one and the same. They go together. That old commercial jingle got it wrong. Apple pie? Who eats apple pie at a ballpark? "Baseball, hot dogs, bubblegum and Chevrolet" is how it should read. For at least as long as Topps and Bowman have been around, there's been gum at the ballpark. Card companies that also pedaled in gum made sure it was available to players. A player blowing a bubble was considered free advertising. But try to catch a bubblegum bubble on the front of a baseball card prior to the 1970s. I'm almost certain it doesn't exist. A wad of tobacco chaw in a cheek is much easier to spot on cards between 1951-71. I know, I've looked. There are more tobacco chewers in the first 30 cards of the 1960 Topps set than there are gum chewers in the entire 572 cards that year (2-0 is that score). That is completely ridiculous. Don't we call these little pieces of cardboard "bubblegum cards?...

Haven't done one of these for awhile. 1975 Topps mini Ken Reitz: Obviously, I have held on to the rabidly creased Reitz for a long, long, long time. The card came into my possession the first year I started collecting, the very year the card was issued, in 1975. I don't know how it came to be folded 10 times. I'm pretty certain that I didn't do the folding. I'm guessing I acquired the card from a friend in a desperate bid to accumulate every '75 mini that I could find. Condition wasn't a deal-breaker then. If you had the card, you had the card. Appearance was incidental, for the most part. But as the years went on, wrinkly Reitz began to stand out for all the wrong reasons. My other '75 minis from '75 were respectably worn. Rounded corners. Scuffed surfaces. Some minor writing on the back. But they weren't viciously worn like Kenneth. Today, I received a Reitz more in keeping with my collection. It came with a bunch of other ...