Closeted Stuff

My wife is off performing 'nursing' duties for my father-in-law who is having some health issues. I'm home watching movies and listing to music and doing a consolidation of boxes and a culling of 'stuff'. Here are some random items I've come across in the last few days. Just because.

Signed 3x7 Tadder photo of Elliott Maddox, a Oriole in 1977 between stints with the two New York teams.

Sandy Koufax oversized card from TCMA circa 1982. Oh, those windbreaker-under-the-jersey days!

1979 Topps Larry Hisle comic. I think these came with gum, not inserted into cards.  Why I have this I can't really say. But I'm going to put it in the back of my '79 binder.

I love this next card, even though I shouldn't. First year Donruss Reggie.  I like this set and I don't care who knows it.

Philly Gum King Hill. One of the best football names ever. He's holding 'The Duke'. We would have sold our grandmothers to the cannibals to own one of those back then.

I've been on a St. Louis Browns kick since our trip up there this past July. Here is Satchel Paige from a 1977 TCMA/Renata Gallaso set.

 

I have a bunch of Pokemon cards in a box for no reason. They came from my sons and from kids at my school who defied my rules about keeping 'toys' in their backpacks. Next time I'm out at my school I'm going to drop these off if i find out they are still a thing. I'll check the next time I'm at Target. They have all sorts of crappy stuff next to their sports cards. Maybe Pokemon is part of that.

Hey.. he's called 'Kadabra'...I get it now. If you pair him with 'Abra' you get 12 zillion Power Ups.

Upper Deck Football Legends set is awesome. I have the base set and some extras like this signed card on one of my favorite players, Tommy McDonald.
 

1990s Bagwell from something called Impact. This I'm sure came from the boxes of stuff my boys left behind.

This card of The Dream needs to go into my University of Houston binder. I also need to blog my 'buying fried chicken for Hakeem' story one of these days.

Lastly, and perhaps most randomly... a Gardner's 1984 Robin Yount. The back is the same as the '84 Topps, I think. From a very brief Google look it seems Gardner's sold out to Bimbo some time back and is now gone as a brand name. truth is I can't imagine where this came from.

That's it for now. You simply wouldn't believe the amount of odds and ends i have stashed around here. Time to clean it all up!

It's Now Officially Football Season

It's been many years since I had any baseball interest this deep in October. In fact it's been many years since I hadn't released my very tenuous hold on the game in July or so. But the resilient Orioles ran through a magical 2012 campaign and made baseball fun. But that, sadly, is over. As much as I hate having them lose to the Yankees it was hard for me to be very upset. They showed a lot of heart (and the need for a few more bats) and they looked like they were having fun.

Best news is that next season the Orioles will be coming to Houston every season! Not many Astros fans are happy about the league switch but I'm really grateful for the chance to see them without taking a road trip to Dallas/Fort Worth. But that's next year. Right now my focus turns to football, at least in my day-to-day rooting interests. I'll still be blogging baseball stuff here among other things. Lately, with the O's so much in the forefront this blog has been more 'Oriole-centric' than I intended it to be. Time for some diversity.

Although I was born in Baltimore and lived in Brooklyn and on Long Island I did most of my growing up in Nutley, New Jersey. Great little town not too far from New York City but what seemed like a whole different universe to me while I was growing up.

There were lots of kids up and down the blocks surrounding my home and, living on a dead-end street, we played a lot of sports right out there on my block. Street football took up a lot of our time in the fall. We would play with usually three or four kids on a side, telephone poles marked the first downs and two man hole covers were our goal lines.

I fancied myself a quarterback and tried my best to be Johnny Unitas. I had a buddy who usually played on my team and the two of us had a set play we called the 'Tommy McDonald'. It involved a pump fake long and him then cutting sharply towards the curb. I'd have the ball already on it's way to where he was going to meet it and, with him being tall, it was pretty much unstoppable. The play was named for the 50's/60's receiver and Hall of Famer Tommy McDonald who played mainly for the Eagles and Rams and was famous for being the last NFL player to not wear a face-mask on his helmet.

The '63 Topps McDonald card I posted was one of my very first eBay purchases. McDonald is one of a handful of non-Baltimore Colt players I collect. I had his book way back when and I'm tempted to pick it up again on Amazon for a couple of bucks.