Pass The Milk, Please

A few more from my 1962 Post Cereal pickup...

Figured I'd toss up some National Leaguers since my last post (no pun intended) focused on AL guys. NL players got the red trim although a few errors occurred where they had blue grid lines around their stats. I'm very likely to blow those variations off. No need to build a master set when I'm gonna collect these in 'over-excited-nine-year-old-cut-these-out' condition.

The always underappreciated John Roseboro kicks this thing off. The Dodgers are the first team in the checklist for the Senior Circuit. The AL got the first hundred cards, the NL the next hundred in this 200 card set. Which reminds me...I was curious how Post decided the order of the teams in the checklist. They are aligned close to their 1961 finish, but not exactly. Obviously, the Dodgers didn't win the NL pennant in '61. The Reds did that and they are second in the checklist.

I did a bit of digging and played a hunch. Sure enough, the teams were numbered in the order of the major league standing in early- to mid-August, 1961. Between August 7th and 13th, the teams' spots in the standings and checklists matched with the only exception being following the games on the 11th. So that's the week the set must have been planned. Worth noting is that there were 10 AL clubs and 8 NL clubs in 1961. Fans of the newly formed Mets and Colt .45s didn't have player cards to look for on their boxes of Grape-Nuts in 1962. On a positive note, the NL teams got more players per team.

Player success and popularity have a bearing on the cost of these things but scarcity is an even bigger factor. Some players were included on the backs of less popular cereal and so fewer of their cards were snipped from boxes and put into kids' collections. There seem to be plenty of Ed Mathews cards out there.

My Santo is pretty brutal. He appears to be bothered by that fact.

The 'V' or checkmark that appears on my Mossi was on every card I received in my original lot purchase. No issue for me. 

Killer got the V for Victory treatment as well.

Back to NL guys. I think I like the red elements more than the blue of the AL cards.  I've given some thought to 'trimming' some of the cards where there is room to do so. I could 'fix' the Elroy Face card's top with an X-Acto blade, for example. No need to though, I'll never get these things graded.

Ruben Amaro was portraited by his son, Ruben Jr, a player/coach/executive, on a couple of episodes of The Goldbergs. Amaro Jr. went to the same school that's featured in the show and was attended by Adam Goldberg who based it on his life. That's a weird fact.