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.

I think I did pretty well

Please allow me to pat myself on the back (and after the debacle of my last post I need it). What you see above is the photo of the cards contained in the eBay listing that fell into my lap for $21 over the weekend.

Nine 1960 Topps cards that cost me $2 and change apiece with shipping factored in. Even when you take into account that I had the Nellie Fox card already that's quite a deal. Now the Gibson and Mathews cards have creases, and the Colavito isn't great but the others more than make up for it. The Whitey Ford card is in at least excellent condition and the Robin Roberts and Nellie Fox cards are close. The Fox will be an upgrade over the one in my binder now.

I'm saving the actual scans for my 1960 Topps blog but I was so pleased with the cards when they arrived I wanted to show them off.

1958 Topps All Star Subset

One of my collecting goals is to complete the 1958 Topps All Star subset. I'm not too far from it now. I just love this group of cards, much more than the base '58 set. I picked up the Mickey Mantle card a few years back so the last of the higher dollar cards of this group that I lack is the Willie Mays. But it's not outrageous so I'll nab one at my price one of these days.

Meanwhile here are my latest four additions. They came via a fair sized COMC purchase recently. Maybe the reason I like these so much is the stat laden back of each. It gives the players 1957 numbers versus each opposing team. That sort of thing used to keep my occupied for hours as a kid. Look at Eddie Mathews' stats against the Cubs. He crushed them for a .408 average on 31 hits. He killed the Dodgers, Pirates and Giants as well.

The 'big head' portraits like Mathews and Johnny Temple are OK, but the Spahn is the star of this group. Heck any card of Spahn is the star of a group. He's all nose and hat brim and angles.

Spahn only pitched two thirds of an inning versus the Dodgers in 1957. Made me curious enough to check his Gamelog for that year. It doesn't look like he skipped any starts for avoid Brooklyn (Spahn wouldn't do that). Turns out he pitched that brief turn in relief and picked up a save versus the Bums. It was his third and final save of the '57 season. 

The All Star Managers card is surely a picture taken at the '57 World Series.

The back of the managers card is a checklist of the final thirty something base cards and the All Stars.

When I first discovered eBay in the late 90s the first things I went afetr were small lots of 1958 Topps commons. I had aspirations of putting the set together back then. I quickly decided that I had better things to do but out of that came this desire to finish off the All Stars. A year from now I'll be done.

A Nice Package, Part Two ;-)

My family first moved to Houston in the summer of 1967, early July to be exact. I was heading into my sophomore year of high school and I was the one family member that hated the idea of pulling up our New Jersey roots and heading down here. I pretty much figured that being summer I wouldn't know anyone or even get a chance to know anyone my age until school opened. And a new school itself was not something I relished.

But Houston had baseball, and with the Orioles struggling following the great 1966 season, I decided to throw myself into following the Astros, just because. We were in a hotel for a few days before our moving van arrived and I remember cutting out Astros game stories, box scores and pictures from the Houston papers, the now-defunct Post (where I later was employed for many years) and then afternoon published Chronicle.

Those clipping turned into a scrapbook of the second half of the Astros' dreary 1967 season. I wasn't new to this. I had kept New York Ranger scrapbooks for years. Which brings me to the card at the top of the post. It was part of the Nachos Grande group break and it is why I was happy I dealt the Twins for the 'Stros as my 'second' team. I would never seen it otherwise. It's a 2004 Upper Deck Play Ball Home Run Heroics Eddie Mathews.

It's a gimmick card, sure, but it commemorates Eddie Mathews  500th homer which he hit in a Friday night game on July 14 of that season in Candlestick Park. I don't specifically remember listening to that one but I listened to just about every Astros game that year after we arrived. What I do remember (and probably still have stored somewhere) is the newspaper account of Mathews' milestone. Those were the highly competitive days when newspapers held deadlines until the West Coast games were finished before going to press.

So when this card came out of the stack from Chris I really got a kick out of it when I realized what it was. There are a couple of others in the break that are worth mentioning, for differing reasons.

This is Dave Crouthers, a 2001 3rd Round pick of the Orioles. After the 2004 season, with a 30-25 minor league record, the O's tossed him along with Mike Fontenot (who?) and Jerry Hairston, Jr. into the trade for Sammy Sosa. This may be the most obscure autograph card I own but in looking at that trade I did discover that both Crouthers and Hairston played for Southern Illinois. I also now know that Hairston played for the Orioles for seven seasons and then for two teams for two seasons and five teams for one season. So there.

This is Annette Charles. I have no idea who she is or why she has a card and I don't care either. Plus she's rather unattractive in a Pat Nixon sort of way. 

Pinnacle Press Cal Ripken. Any Ripken is a good Ripken. That stance is #845 of the 1252 different ones that Cal used in his career.

And finally a 'laundry' card of Rafael Palmeiro. In August 2005 I was driving my family from NYC to Baltimore on our monumental East Coast vacation when the news broke that he'd been suspended for steroid use. When we attended the games at Camden Yards the sign congratulating him on 3000 hits was still up. But he wasn't playing.

Of the cards that I received as part of Chris' 'trade stack', this is my favorite:

It's a 2005 Upper Deck Classics Lyman Bostock. He was a talented young outfielder for the Twins and Angels who was shot an killed in 1978 in a case that was the result of Bostock being in that too familiar 'wrong place, wrong time'. He'd only played four seasons in the bigs when he died. If you are a fan of the powder blue double knit era, this is a card for you.

Here are a few others with quick observations:

I liked Frank Viola with the Twins. But wearing that terrible Met road uni with the shoulder stripes? Ugh. Still kind of a neat card. Looks like he's charging a bunt.

There is no way this guy hit 50 homers in one season. He's the bat boy. I don't believe he was juiced but I'm totally convinced the ball was. It was part of baseball's attempt to pull fans back into the game.

EDIT: The more I look at this card the more I'm convinced it actually IS the bat boy.

I don't know Kevin Foster but that's a screamin' Cubbie throwback, isn't it? 

Chris Sabo, without his goggles. He just looks weird like that.

 btw....THIS is Chris Sabo.

Cliff Floyd pulling a hammy, again. He does Sirius fantasy baseball radio shows. He's pretty good at it. Funny and insightful. Better than he was at staying healthy.