Night Owl Cards

Buying cards is generally considered a pleasant experience. But because this is the real world, there are always some hassles that go along with even the happiest of purchases. If you're buying cards online, you may choose from multiple outlets, but sometimes you can't see the cards you buy, sometimes you have to constantly comparison shop so you don't get ripped off, sometimes someone snags the card out from under you, sometimes cards arrive damaged or not at all. If you're buying cards in a store, you must deal with crowds and lines. Sometimes you're dodging shopping carts parked in the card aisle for the specific purpose of deterring you. Sometimes there's this weird 20-something guy there in an army jacket, who -- what is he doing, is he sniffing the cards? -- and you have to pretend to be interested in something else in the store until he goes away. The worst experiences of the best shopping experience that exists are without a doubt in Walmart. I...

I'm in the middle of the kind of hassle-filled day that only March can bring. So why not lend a little levity to the proceedings? I like mascots. That's a change from the past years when I didn't. Back when I first followed baseball, there were no mascots. Baseball was a joyless, regimented pursuit. Then the San Diego Chicken (first known as the KGB Chicken) was born. He was creative, funny and seemed to have a regular time slot on This Week in Baseball. The Phillie Phanatic phollowed. Then came Montreal's Youppi, which I always pegged as the mascot most likely to be beaten up. I'm not entirely clear on the order of appearance of the mascots. But somewhere in there, the Cardinals' Fred Bird snuck in, too, which I didn't think should have been allowed to happen. But allowed it was and the door swung wide open, and soon almost every team had a giant, oversized mascot. When the Red Sox trotted out Wally the Green Monster in the late '90s, I ...