Night Owl Cards

  As the resident "ink-stained wretch" of the card blog world, it's my duty to note history as it pertains to newspapers from time to time. Today, I find myself walking through the newspaper morgue, which is not where they stash the dead bodies of old newspaper men, it is the name for any reference room at a newspaper, where clip files are stored, digital reference computers, reference books, etc. One thing you might find there, if a newspaper has proper respect for the sports section of its paper (so few do), is a copy of the final edition of The National. The National died on this exact day 30 years ago. I have the final copy, sent to me by a generous reader a few years ago. This paper was momentous at the time of its release, for sports fans but especially for sports journalists like myself. I was just starting out in the business at the time of its debut in January 1990 and to see something like this -- a daily publication dedicated to nothing but sports -- was exciti...

  Happy Veterans Day to all who have served our country, including my departed dad, who was a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. I haven't written a Veterans Day post every November 11th, but there are a few, here and here and here .   For this Veterans Day, I thought I'd do something a little different, and take another cue from a reader. It's the second time this week I've acted on a reader's suggestion. I must be running out of my own ideas!   Anyway, after I posted the layout I created for the Dodgers' World Series victory, someone suggested that I should show off some of the layouts that I've saved over the years.   I didn't think anyone would be interested in that -- we're all about cards here you know -- and I still wonder if I'm boring people who consider newspapers a relic of their grandfather's era or whatever. But newspapers are very alive on a daily basis in my world, so let's take a look at a few of my favorites. (You're g...

Today is Phil Niekro's 81st birthday. Are you sick of hearing about this? If so, blame, Matt . He is the No. 1 person I think of when "folks born on April Fool's Day" is mentioned. Although he's not the only person as Rusty Staub, Willie Montanez and Ron Perranoski were all born on April 1st. So was April Sargent, who you probably don't know, but I really need to do a Brush With Greatness post on her someday. But back to Niekro. This 1988 card was quite the ... heh ... score during Score's trading card debut. This is the only card in 1988 showing Niekro in his final MLB uniform. Niekro's last season was 1987 and he played in one game -- ONE GAME -- for the Braves at the end of the season. Here's how it went: Niekro was pitching for the Indians for much of 1987 when in early August, he was dealt to the Blue Jays, who were trying to win a pennant. He was then released by the Blue Jays at the end of August and his career was practically o...

When I first started this blog, I was searching for content. I didn't want the blog to be "look what I got" all the time, and besides, I didn't have all that many cards to boast about twice a day (I still can't believe I was posting twice a day). I decided one interesting series might be to relay the various encounters I had with major league baseball players. As a newspaper journalist, I had run into one or two, although I had never been an MLB beat writer or anything. I started the "Brush With Greatness" series and started posting those rapid fire, at least one a month for a couple of years. Then I ran out of those MLB subjects and started writing about interviews with athletes from other sports. Then I ran out of those and the series basically died. Or so I thought. Life is weird. You probably know that. Two days after my John Wockenfuss story appeared in the paper, I received a call at the office from a former high school and college bas...

There is a clipping pinned to a bulletin board at work just as you walk into the sports department. It is a copy of a high school sports game write-up from another newspaper. It's your typical roundup item, two paragraphs long. But those two paragraphs are so error-filled -- nine lines of text and about eight things wrong with them -- that the correction that the paper ran the next day is twice the size of the original roundup item. This amused me so much that I had to pin both items side-by-side onto the bulletin board. In the newspaper world, this is one of our greatest fears, that you will attempt to correct an error and just make things worse. So in typical black-humor fashion, I posted one of our greatest fears for all to see. I have never witnessed so many errors committed in one tiny space. Until I came across this Larry Milbourne card that I recently posted on my 1985 Topps blog. The back of that card is a treasure trove of mistakes. First, let's addre...