Hello, World

I am not really sure what I want to accomplish here, other than to amuse myself some. I have recently gotten back into collecting baseball cards and thought I would try my hand at setting up a blog. A few housekeeping details:

1. How did I get here? Well, for reasons I cannot recall, I started reading baseball card blogs and it reawakened my interest in collecting. The two blogs that started me down this path were 83F Project and The Greatest 21 Days.
2. Collecting History? I don't recall how I got started, but I collected sports cards during the mid to late 1970s. Mainly baseball, but also football. I also collected, for a while, hockey stickers that were distributed by the Loblaw's grocery chain. I stopped collecting when I hit high school and took on the teenage angst pose. I ended up selling my cards off to help me buy a better bike when I joined the bicycle racing team during my freshman year in college.
3. What am I collecting? Back as youth, my first baseball glove was a Wilson Paul Blair model. So, I decided to start off collecting his baseball cards. I figured that there would be about 17 cards, one for each year in his career. Having gotten out of the hobby before the proliferation of manufacturers, I had no idea that there would be reissues and various "legends of the game" series. At this time, I have identified 54 70 total Paul Blair cards, of which I have 24. I am also collecting 1974 and 1978 Topps baseball sets. At this point, I have 691 out of 726 from the 1978 series and 125 out of 660 from the 1974 series.
4. Team Interests? I grew up in Rochester, New York as a Yankees fan during the glory days of the late 1970s. I can remember sneaking a transistor radio into bed so I could surreptitiously listen to late games from the West Coast. I can also vaguely remember listening to Ron Guidry's 18 strikeout performance on June 17, 1978. I stopped following baseball in college during the mid-1980s and only started following it again recently. Still a Yankees fan. I also follow the local minor league team, the AAA Oklahoma Redhawks.
5. What am I going to do? Over the last month, I have occasionally, on a lark, picked up one of the those cheap repackages of cards at our local Target. I have found all manner of odd cards mixed in. Some are amusing. Some are just confusing. So, I thought I'd blog about those cards that catch my attention for all the wrong reasons. I also engage in a little amateur photography, so I may post about cards that interest me from that perspective.
6. What is that picture in the header? It was taken at the September 4, 2010 game between the Oklahoma Redhawks and Omaha Royals. That is Omaha second baseman Marc Maddox batting against the Redhawks Zachary Phillips. The crows is pretty sparse since the game started at about 11:00 AM on a Saturday. It isn't usually SRO, but normally there are larger crowds.The original is actually a fairly good shot. Taken at 1/2000 of a second, F/3.5, ISO200, Focal length of 18mm. Unfortunately, the original image is almost 3000 pixels wide and a lot of resolution is lost scrunching it down to fit the banner.

So, there it is. We'll see where this takes me.