Chew on this

When you decide to invite a puppy into your home, there are a few things that become apparent immediately.

First, a puppy is like a newborn baby in many ways. You have to teach him how to sleep, how to speak, how to go to the bathroom. Fun!

Secondly, you now have competition for your food. Remember those old days of putting food on the table, then going back to the kitchen to get a drink or something you forgot? Gone. The dog will catch on to any careless action when it comes to food.

Finally, and this is most important: YOU MUST KEEP EVERYTHING YOU VALUE IN LIFE UP HIGH.

After countless early lessons, I thought I had gotten that third point down cold five months into owning Dodger (yes, he's named after my favorite baseball team). But I got careless last week. According to Dodger, baseball cards ARE food, and he somehow snagged a pack each of Upper Deck Masterpieces and Baseball Heroes and made them into his personal doggie 1 of 1s.

Let's take a look at a dog's artistry. To him, at least, these are works of art. To others, they are a travesty. I know a few card bloggers out there who might want to look at the rest of this post with their hands over their eyes.

First we have the Masterpieces cards and Hanley Ramirez. This card, compared with the others, came away relatively untouched. But it's a shame this is a two-dimensional image, because there are teeth marks all up and down the top and bottom of the card. If you stack these nine dog-chewed cards next to a pile of nine cards untouched by canine saliva, the chewed cards are more than twice as high as the others.

Avert your eyes David of Tribe Cards! Dodger went right for Hafner's spikes on this card. Dogs love their shoes. He punched a hole just to the right of the "R" in "Hafner."

Dodger's quite the fan of one of Patricia's favorite pitchers, Barry Zito. You can even see at the bottom right where my dog signed the card -- with his teeth. I had trouble lining these cards up on the scanner, because they had suddenly taken on the look and feel of a relief map.

I'm showing the Carew card again because it's the only one, believe it or not, that has a piece missing. I don't know where that missing piece is -- probably long digested by now.

On to the Heroes cards. It looks like Dodger chewed and slobbered on this one for quite awhile. Serves Figgins right for being an Angel.

I said in a comment on another blog that this was a black parallel card of Hughes. I don't know why I said that. It's obviously not. I made the comment the day of "the incident," so I must've still been in shock. The Hughes card is torn in two places up at the top.

Frenchy doesn't look too worse for wear. But there's actually creases all over the card. And none of these cards will lie flat.

A couple of big rips through Brandon Webb's card. By the way, I am SO glad there were no Dodgers in any of these packs. And that's the first time I've ever said that sentence.

Finally, Steve, I'm sorry. A tattered black parallel of Paul Konerko. But at least Dodger appeared to like the card -- a lot!

I suppose the good news is none of these cards were short-prints, at least not that I know of, and none, aside from the Konerko, were parallels.

All of my cards are in safe keeping away from Dodger. But as you can see, I have to be vigilant at all times. Because while you may see cardboard, my dog sees FOOD!