Remember this classic argument?       Well, replace those two phrases with golf season and softball season, and you'll get an idea of what's going through my mind now that it's springtime. To explain:   Last year I got back into golf, and had a really great time re-discovering the game and shaking a lot of rust off my own. I kept track of some informative stats across the year, and I'm motivated to improve this season.   But at the same time, I've enjoyed playing softball over the past five years or so. I've been keeping stats there as well, and despite the dr ..read more

It's October 1982, and you're a pro baseball player. This season you've really come into your own as a dependable, everyday infielder with the Toronto Blue Jays. And although your team is starting to take shape with talented young players like Jesse Barfield, Lloyd Moseby, Damaso Garcia, and Dave Stieb, the club hasn't quite put it together enough to make the playoffs. So your season is finished. However, your older brother Dane's team, the St. Louis Cardinals, just swept straight past the Atlanta Braves in the National League Championships. He didn't play in the series, but things were about ..read more

I've created a custom card that features quite an interesting assortment of characters. There's a Brain.    An Athlete.    A Basket Case.    A Princess.    And a Criminal.     If you're a fan of '80s movies, you might have already solved this one. It's The Breakfast Club!   On Saturday, March 24, 1984, those five students—each from different cliques and with different attitudes—reported for detention at the Shermer High School library. And if you've seen the film, you know that it turned out to be quite a memorable day for all of t ..read more

A couple of months ago, I was inspired by Nick (of the Dime Boxes) and Night Owl to post a list of what I considered the best and worst sets of the junk wax era for baseball. I was a young collector back in the junk wax days, and certainly opened my share of baseball packs during that time. But there was also another sport I collected:    Hockey.    So I thought I'd create a similar best and worst list for the coolest sport on ice. Interestingly, the junk wax era for hockey cards didn't follow quite the same timeline. In the second half of the 1980s, when baseball junk wax ..read more

  Feast your eyes on this:     You're looking at Shigeru Takada of the Yomiuri Giants.   And that card he's on is a piece of eye candy.   It's from a 1976 set of Japanese cards that I came across a few years ago on Sean's blog, Getting Back into Baseball Cards . . . in Japan. I sure was thankful for it, and figured with 2024 Opening Day around the corner, it would be a good time to finally circulate it around the blogs again.   Look at the angle of those lines and how the Takada family name follows along. Add a strong hitter's follow-through, and the whole de ..read more

  Let's go back and visit the 6th-grade version of Gregory Ninepockets. During that school year, a new friend introduced me to the sport of hockey. I loved it enough to start playing on foot. And then on roller skates. And then I started buying packs of hockey cards. All within a matter of months. So you can imagine my elation when the local police department visited our school that same year to teach us about the dangers of drugs, and how to combat those dangers by strengthening our physical and mental health—all with the help of hockey cards!     That's right. Hockey ..read more

Okay, it's really not that dramatic.  But a couple of weeks ago, I received a text message from my softball captain. He said that the team's regular third baseman, who'd been injured all of last season (hence the reason I was picked up in March), was healthy and ready to reclaim his role on the team. So, unless I wanted to just ride the pine or play a fill-in role, the captain suggested I look for another team to join. Fair enough, especially considering this team has, by and large, been together for 20 years. I'm not going to mess with that dynamic. Besides, he was very complimentary a ..read more

Watch this introduction:         All around, I think it was a fantastic effort from the creative team—animators, musicians, lyricists, writers, producers, you name it. I mean, tell me you don’t want to watch at least one episode of the show, just to see those ThunderCats battle the bad guys.   There's just one thing: The mid-1980s marked a golden age of animated shows, and the ThunderCats were up against some stiff competition. I only speak for myself, but the time I did spend watching cartoons back then was split more between The Transformers and G.I. Joe than anyt ..read more

    Pro Set.    If you were a youngster who collected hockey cards in the early 1990s, seeing that brand name has likely brought back a tangled web of emotions.    There was excitement back then, that's for sure. As a young hockey card collector, I clearly remember the brand's tagline: The Hottest Cards on Ice! But were they? Yeesh. I don't know. That was kind of a bold claim for a company that was creating hockey cards for the first time—especially with Score, OPC Premier, Bowman, and Upper Deck all jumping into the mix that very same hockey season of 1990-91 ..read more

A series where I post some thoughts about favorite cards. Previous cards in the series are available here.     Have a look at Kurt Bevacqua here, posing on a sunny spring afternoon.         I've always enjoyed posed shots like this, because they show the player with the tools of his trade. Like a carpenter posing with his tool belt. Or a blacksmith with an anvil, hammer, and leather apron. And Kurt Bevacqua sure had some tools. He was a utility guy. A hard-working guy.    In other words, you don't see Bevacqua in the standard batting pose, gripping th ..read more