The most recent Beckett Vintage Collector arrived in my mailbox Monday and with it my latest article for the magazine. It's the 20th article I've written for the magazine as I'm coming up on six years since first joining the writing roster there. But it's also been a year since I've had a story published, mostly due to 1) Far less time to devote to magazine writing, thanks to my "real job" and 2) Plain running low on ideas. But I'm glad I had enough to get me to 20. I'm fairly happy with the subject of this article. It's certainly something I can relate to considering my profession. It's about the many examples of name errors on sports cards. I know the struggle well -- we publish sports names almost every day at my job. But it still was surprising how many name errors I came across while researching for this story (and how many more emerged once I announced my story had published). I quickly realized I would not be able to includ...
I'm sure you can feel it coming, it's never actually left. Football is here. And it's trying to push baseball out of the way. This is how it's been for decades -- once training camps start for the NFL I begin to feel that seasonal dread of summer winding down, sports I care less about or don't care about at all ramping up, and, worst of all, my job -- and life -- getting busier. Actual NFL games don't begin until September, so the true baseball-football overlap is September and October, but tell that to the sports wire, in which the football stories have already outnumbered the baseball stories. But instead of fighting it, I'll lean into it for at least this post. Just the other day I received a handful of cards from Bo of Baseball Cards Come to Life! He was giving out cards to celebrate a new job! (Hey, I need to do a big one of those when I finally retire!). I picked four of them. Two baseball and two football. As I mentioned on another social...