1954 Red Heart Billy Pierce

I knew little about the 1954 Red Heart Dog Food set until I started looking for a Billy Pierce card a year or so ago. I found one in decent shape for $32 shipped. I think the dealer listed it wrong or something because I was the only bidder. As you can see it is suffering to breath in a plastic case and I'll be breaking it free soon enough. 

One reason I didn't know much about these is that there are no Orioles in the set and back in the 80s when I was on a mission to collect every known Orioles card I had no reason to pay attention to them.

PSA has a nice write-up on them (the fact that this one is PSA graded is just a coincidence) that you can access right here. It's a 33 card un-numbered set that you could acquire in 11 card chunks for four labels and a dime. And you could get a Stan Musial card which you couldn't do from packs of Topps or Bowman. If fact the checklist has quite a few Hall of Famers included. Exactly 1/3 of the included players are Hall enshrinees. Of course the 'chase' card is the Mantle. There is a listing on eBay as I type for a complete graded set, 8.5 overall with a Grade 9 Mantle. It's price? $26,500. I'll take two.

But I would like to find a couple more affordable ones, no graded versions needed. 

Here is the checklist with Hall of Fame members in bold.

• 1 Richie Ashburn
• 2 Frank Baumholtz
• 3 Gus Bell
• 4 Billy Cox
• 5 Alvin Dark
• 6 Carl Erskine
• 7 Ferris Fain
• 8 Dee Fondy
• 9 Nellie Fox
• 10 Jim Gilliam
• 11 Jim Hegan
• 12 George Kell
• 13 Ralph Kiner
• 14 Ted Kluszewski
• 15 Harvey Kuenn
• 16 Bob Lemon
• 17 Sherman Lollar
• 18 Mickey Mantle
• 19 Billy Martin
• 20 Gil McDougald
• 21 Roy McMillan
• 22 Minnie Minoso
• 23 Stan Musial
• 24 Billy Pierce
• 25 Al Rosen
• 26 Hank Sauer
• 27 Red Schoendienst
• 28 Enos Slaughter
• 29 Duke Snider
• 30 Warren Spahn
• 31 Sammy White
• 32 Eddie Yost
• 33 Gus Zernial