1956 Topps set at the local second-hand shop.

I've been very busy with a freelance project but on the way back
from downtown I just decided to stop at the second-hand shop
near our favorite breakfast place. You never know when they'll have
something nifty.

At the front counter was a pleasant older woman, and nearby were
two shoeboxes filled with....baseball cards. "Mind if I look at
these?" I asked.

"Oh, certainly, dear, they just came in. I haven't priced them yet."

The boxes were filled with neatly stacked piles of these 1956 Topps
cards. Not reprints. I decided to count them. It took a while, but
gave me a chance to carefully assess every card. There were 340.

"Do you have any idea when these might be available?" I asked.

"I guess when I can find someone to help me get a sense of how
much they cost. What would you be willing to pay?"

Because there were so many smile cards, not to mention quite a
few midair moments, plus the card didn't have many dinged
corners, and since this was a charity outfit and I didn't want to feel
guilty, I said, "Well, what are you asking?" Often, people accuse me
of being extravagant, but mainly I wanted to be fair.

The woman was clearly interested in a transaction. She had many
contributions to process, and perhaps wanted to get rid of these
two boxes of baseball cards that were kind of in her way.

"Baseball cards don't sell very well here. How about 10 cents per
card?

"I'd pay that for them, but I'm not saying that's what they're worth.
I bet some are worth a lot more. But my eight-year-old daughter
would like these. They're like little pieces of art. I'll take them."

She seemed pleased, and even asked if I needed help getting the
boxes out to the car. "Oh no, I'm fine," I said.

This turned out to be a bad decision, because as I opened the back
 the van, the two boxes fell to the ground, and just then, one of
those enormous gusts of New Mexico dust devil wind came along,
and the cards were carried aloft. I considered trying to find some of
them, but really had to get home.

Easy come, easy go, I guess. But even for those few minutes, I
enjoyed owning a complete set of 1956 Topps cards.

What's in the cards? NL Predictions for the season.

How will our cardboard cronies do this year? Here are some
predictions. Maybe we're not the brightest bulbs on the baseball
tree, but at least Dinged Corners will do better than anyone on
CNBC or in the financial sector did in the predictions THEY made.

NL EAST

First, who will win the World Series?

The Mets, of course. Yes, we have to say that, but here are a few
reasons why it might not be outlandish (if they don't go into severe
clutch mode): It's the last 17-20 games that have done them in the
last couple of years. *see Dodgers entry below A big problem in this
regard has been the pitching.

But now we have Francisco Rodriguez and J.J. Pitch the Eighth
Inning. So, we're goin' with the home team on this one.

Second will be Cliff's adorable Phillies. No more rings for you
this year, Philliephans! Cole Hamels and Brett Myers will help get
them that far, along with Chase "Boo?" Utley.

They have a great bullpen, no denying that. Brad Lidge should be a
Met. But uh uh.

Third, well, let's go with the Junkie's Atlanta Braves despite
the team's hideous logo, which we can't believe they still use. As if.
Again, we're talking pitching here...Derek Lowe, Javier Vazquez,
Kenshin Kawakami...all very interesting.

The Marlins have to pin their low-rent hopes on young talent.
Ricky Nolasco, Chris Volstad, and the rest. Eh. Although we will
hope they do well because we want the wise and witty Tatiana to
be happy.

Oh, you Nationals. Mm mm. Sigh. Goodbye Jim Bowden and, er,
Jose Rijo. Of course, there is Adam Dunn. But not a factor this year.

CENTRAL

Milwaukee Brewers: no more CC. How far can Prince Fielder and
Ryan Braun take this team?

Cubbies. Great rotation. But Kerry Wood is with the Indians now.
Milton Bradley is a switch hitter and powerful but....dunno. Just not
feeling it.

St. Louis Cardinals: WE INTERRUPT THIS POSTGRAM FOR THESE
MAILDAY MESSAGES: MARIE FROM CARDBOARD PROBLEM SENT
US A LOVELY DAVID WRIGHT AND AN EXCELLENT CURTIS
GRANDERSON FOR NO GOOD REASON! Therefore we present this
for Marie:

The swagger combined with the friendly smile is pretty terrific. This
Card photo oughta be a card. Why may the Cardinals be a factor
this year? Albert. Chris Carpenter. Brendan Ryan.

Strong lineup. We'll see, but here's another case where we now feel
more positive about a team because of bloggergrrlz.

Reds. Johnny Cueto, Joey Votto, Jay Bruce. No Griffey, no Dunn.
Willy Taveras will steal things. They've got the mighty Micah! He is
going to do great things. Also, they have Nachos Grande.

Houston Astros: Ivan Rodriguez and his gold glove = good. But
All-Cute Team Member Brad Ausmus is with the Dodgers now, thus
decreasing our interest in Astroland by approximately 100 percent.
Still, the Astros have Mike Hampton, which could be helpful, and
Lance Berkman is always good news, but oh that Roy Oswalt. Final
assessment: no.

Pittsburgh Pirates: Our fondness for this team has to do with
Richie Hebner and Ralph Kiner, so as usual we live in the past. The
Pirates' ship likely will sink this year (sorry Billy) . However, by all
reports they do continue to have an excellent ballpark.

WEST

LA Dodgers, baby. Manny, Randy Wolf (what a GREAT name),
Chad, Clayton, and Hiroki all = powerhouse. We're sorry that
Takashi Saito is gone. *They are going to do well up until the end
of the season and will fall apart at the end, taking this minus mojo
from the Mets, who will emerge like the phoenix from the End of
The Season Ashes.

Dbacks. No more Micah, so we don't care. Dan Hairy. Brandon
Webb, the baseball equivalent of Sominex, although he pitches
well. Uninspiring. But let us be clear about one thing: we love Tim Rooks and will
continue to seek out cards for him.

San Francisco Giants. It's still hard to type "San Francisco" and
"Giants" in the same sentence, since we were raised in a NY Giants
family. But they do have Jeremy Affeldt and Tim Lincecum. They
also have All-Cute Star of All Time, Barry Zito, the Zeetster, the
cool Zee, who may surprise anyone at any given second and get his
mojo (aka zito) back. Word is he worked very hard over the winter.

Interestingly, the team signed Randy Johnson, as if attempting to
cancel out the cuteness factor of Barry Zito with MulletRJness. But
you know what? It won't work. ZITO EMERGES VICTORIOUS. Plus,
the Giants have Bailey.

Rockies. Much less interesting because adorable sweet All-Cute
All-Canadian Jeff

Francis is out of commission this season. And one of Lucy's top
three player-name players, Matt Holliday, moved to the A's. Brian
Fuentes is gone, replaced by Huston Street. If Tulowitzski manages
not to hurt himself, and if Todd Helton isn't weighed down by his
ego, they could do better this year.

Padres. Transitional. No. We are sorry.

Next up: AL assessment, which will include a shocking confession!
And the confession will not be about Ichiro. This is only a red
herring:

Yes, we did sort of steal the All-Cute idea from one of the best baseball fan blogs in
the galaxy, Marinerds, Etc. We apologize even as we continue to commit theft. Albert Pujols and Brendan Ryan
photos from CardinalsCandids.

There is flying in baseball.

Maybe it's because Wright rhymes with flight; whatever the
reason, we were sorting through cards this morning and
remembered how much we like this Topps card of Lance
Berkman:

It reminds us of this behind-the-scenes photo of Superman At
Work:



And then we got to thinking, well, David, Lance, and George are
on to something:

New Year's baseball card questions.

It's 9 degrees here tonight! After escaping the Arctic Tundra long enough
to run errands earlier today, our family did several relaxing things like
help Lucy watch a few dozen times okay it was only three or four times the
video on YouTube of Miley Cyrus singing the theme song from 'Bolt.'
Other family activities included each of us having to answer the
following questions. It was revealing, so now we want you to do the
same--we'd be interested to know your responses. Please use comments
to answer.

ROUND ONE:

1-If I didn't collect baseball cards, I'd collect _________.

2-My baseball heroes include one you probably wouldn't know from my
blog or comments, and that person is __________.

3-Every New Years I resolve to __________ my collection.

4-If I could spend a day with one person from baseball history, it would
 be ________.

Our family's answers: each of us has been assigned a letter :)

A-pictures of dogs/Pat Neshek because he smiles nice and has a nice signature/increase/David Wright

B-Navajo spoons/Chase Utley/organize [preferably using a Wall-E type
Axiom technology where your cards would float untouched from
envelope or box, be scanned into your system including include from
whom it was received and for what in a trade and whatever
information might be relevant in ways you can't predict now]/Shoeless
Joe Jackson

C-Hamtaro cards/

Jonathan Papelbon/look over/Dottie from League of Their Own

D-Matchbox Lesney cars in original boxes/Billy Beane/

enter into Excel/Gil Hodges

Ok, we just ran those to get you thinking. Now we need to know your
responses!

ROUND TWO: Here are Lucy's questions for you:

1-What is your favorite kind of dog?

2-Who is your favorite baseball player?

3-What is your favorite team?

4-What is your favorite baseball movie?

5-What is your favorite baseball book?

6-What is your favorite card?

Yes, we're asking a lot of you--we need answers to a total of TEN
questions! But sometimes these things need doing. The only prize for
now is our sincere appreciation.

ARCHIVED COMMENTS

Opposite skies.

The conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, and the waxing crescent moon
over L.A.:

And Chile:

Micah and...the Braves?

This Micah Owings card is a new addition to the collection. When
there's a bargain to be had, it's amazing how we go against our
own displeasure with sticker autos, eh? Let's see if we can
distract you from this startling propensity.

News comes from our friend Ann C., source of Most of Our Micah News, 
about Micah's participation in the Rally Foundation, which has
the mission of raising money for childhood cancer research
through grassroots initiatives. He recently attended a benefit
bash (along with Chipper Jones,

Kelly Johnson

and Brian McCann)

that helped raise $183,000 for research.

Tom Glavine (remember him? the former Met?) and John Smoltz

have also played a significant role in fundraising for this group.

We thought it might be nice if once in the blue moon we take a
teeny tiny peek beyond the cardboard. Or, for that matter, the
stickers.

Kelly Johnson card photo from onbaseautos; John Smoltz: the Rally Foundation; Chipper Jones
aand BB Abbott photo by Elizabeth Westby.

Mets Looking Left PLUS miscellany.

JV of Treasure Never Buried, the blog vortex of deep thought,
sent us some really sweet cards. In particular one autographed card that
Lucy totally flipped over, which will appear at the end of this post. One theme
quickly emerged as we sorted through the cards: Mets Looking To Their Left.

There's quite a bit going on, including left-looking, in this Jose
Reyes card. That is a busy bottom third of a card.

Same with this Johan card. A certain person in our family who up
until now has ONLY liked Allen & Ginter cards reluctantly admits
a certain admiration for SP Authentic. This is similar to someone
who only drives Bentleys suddenly taking a happy tear around
the block in a Ford Edge.

David Wright's facial expression always seems worried after he
gets a hit.

By the way, the two X cards above came from different sources:
JV on the left and White Sox Cards on the right. This is called
"the meeting of the twain."

David seems concerned when fielding:

The following David Wright card from JV is what we call
transitional. We will use it to transition to some Barry Zito
cards:

For some reason, throwing arm notwithstanding, the above shot
of David reminds us of Barry. Which raises the question, how can
anyone not love Barry Zito cards? How how how how? Tell us. We
need to know. He combines "flake" with "deep" and "spacey" and
"odd" and "hunky"

and "occasionally quite good" with "sometimes seems overpaid"
in a hypnotizing way:

Actually, even though we carefully transitioned to Barry Zito, we
want to go back for one moment not to Mets Looking Left but to
Random Players Looking To Their Left:

Okay, thank you for allowing that digression.

And in an unrelated development, we must share a mantra we 

now utter when standing outside to pick up the girls at school. 

Every other mom who is there--including many nice ones who 

are talking to us while our mind wanders--discuss weather, the 

PTA, home repairs, politics, you name it. They are wonderful, 

smart, engaged parents. Nevertheless, there's a good chance 

that in our BB-in-a-boxcar brain, Dinged Corners is thinking 

something like, "You can never have enough Micah cards."

JV outdid himself here by sending us a Micah we hadn't seen 

before. Here's the back:

And the front:

Oh by the way, here's Curtis Granderson Looking Left, too:

All righty then.

REGARDING THE MASTHEAD: We became grumpy upon finding 

out about places that are using that particular crate label...you 

can go to tildology for more about this matter and also scroll 

down this blog to find use of the Safe Hit crate label on that 

Fairfield repack box. Tild was spectacularly nice enough to come 

with an alternate, which is now the Dinged Corners masthead. 

Thank you very much, Tild.

ALSO: We have recently received, for whatever undeserving reason, some fantastic 

cards from gca, gcrl, tastelikedirt, whitesoxcards, and saints of the cheap seats, 

among others. We are planning posts to feature more of these cards in the next 

week or so. Just so you know that there are cool visuals coming.

And here's the autographed card from JV that made Lucy so 

happy:

The six facial expressions of baseball players.

This card reminds us that baseball players seem always to wear
one of six possible expressions:

1-the non-expression-that-borders-on-grim look, often when
signing autographs
2-the smile
3-the look of effort (mid-swing, mid-catch, midair, or mid-pitch)
4-the self-satisfied look (watching as homerun leaves park)
5-the worried look (many David Wright cards)
6-Tim Teufel

Are we missing any?

Thank you for the great scan, Night Owl.