Showing posts with label Christy Mathewson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christy Mathewson. Show all posts

Saturday, April 29, 2017

#30DBCC Recap of Days 21-30 plus a bonus


Wrapping up with the final ten cards I posted on Twitter as part of the 30 Day Baseball Card Challenge. Thanks to Tony L who adapted a music challenge to something collectors could have fun with. Cards 1 thru 10 were posted here and the next group, 11 to 20, are here.


Day 21: The third segment kicked off with a "card of a rookie I thought I was 'investing' in". I really did very little of this. I didn't go out and buy cards of anyone hoping to cash in. What I did do was put away cards of promising rookies that came in the numerous wax packs I was ripping back in the Junk Wax Era. Mike Marshall (the outfielder, not the doctor/pitcher) came to mind.

Day 22: Card of a common player that eluded me. I had already posted the best example, my Mark Belanger '67 rookie, back on Day 7 as a card I bought in person w/ a story behind it. So I drove off the tracks on this one and went with a 'story' that eluded me. This '59 Colavito card led me down a long and winding path to find the shot it was based on. I finally did.


Day 23: A fave oddball from the 50s. 1954 Red Man Billy Pierce. BP had a card in each of the three red Man issues.



Day 24: A fave oddball from the 60s. I had lots of choices with Orioles team issued things, fool food related cards, etc. But I picked this Boog Powell from 1969's Atlantic Oil game series.


Day 25: A fave oddball from the 70s. (I mislabeled this as Day 24 on Twitter) It's one of many many MLBPA discs and similar items from that decade. From 1977 we have a Pepsi Jim Palmer.



Day 26: A fave oddball from the 80s. One of my favorite Eddie Murray cards is this Drakes Cakes from 1983. I even got a retweet by @Drakes__Cakes. LOL



Day 27: A fave oddball from the 90s or later  Gary Cieradkowski does some great work. His art graces this 2008 Wally Yonamine promo card for a Rob Fitts book. And he has a blog and his own books. Highly recommended.

Day 28: A favorite relic or manufactured relic card. Another category of cards I don't deal with much. I have a couple pages of relics in a binder but I haven't thought about them much. This Babe Ruth bat relic is the best of them although a Mel Ott jersey swatch card I have is cooler looking.


Day 29: A fave pre-1950 card. This was tough. I have some tobacco cards that I love and a few nice cards from the 30s and 40s but in the end my only career contemporary card of Babe Ruth won out. This is a German issued Sanella margarine card from 1932. It's worth posting the back, too.



Day 30: The last day of the challenge asked for your favorite card in your collection. This was the hardest one for me. I cycled through about a dozen cards. I eliminated those that I had been on an earlier day like the '78 Murray, 1961 Wes Covington and the 1960 Mantle All Star. It came down to my '57 Brooks Robinson rookie, my T206 Chief Bender, another card I'll discuss in a bit and this card....


....which in the end is the one card I'd keep if I had to offload my collection. Christy Mathewson is from Factoryville, Pa. I spent some summer vacations there staying with my Aunt Mary and Uncle Al. There isn't much in or around Factoryville. Mostly we sat on their front porch up on that hill and enjoyed the views of valleys and trees. At night my uncles and my Dad would go to the one bar in the area. They would take me and some of my cousins when we were teens and many intense bar shuffleboard games ensued. That's where I learned to appreciate pickled eggs from a jar and Hires root beer from a bottle.

My Uncle Al was probably the only other collector in my extended family. He had a few cards but mostly he collected baseball publications He loved books, guides and magazines. When he passed on some years ago my aunt sent me a box of his stuff. Nothing extraordinary but all of it priceless...to me.

I remember those summer days in the northeast Pennsylvania hills when I look at this card.

Day "31": I couldn't do a baseball card challenge without somehow including the 1959 Topps Bob Gibson I posted at the top. So I added a extra day to the challenge. Here's what I said about this card on my '59 Topps blog years ago:
This is by far the worst conditioned card in my 1959 set. But it's also the one that means the most and the reason I'm filling up a binder with this great group of cards. This Bob Gibson is the only '59 Topps that has survived from my childhood. Besides that, even given the condition it's in ("Poor" would be a generous grade) I love this one. Gibby looks happy to be posing for his rookie card and he's smiling out at us from an outrageously inappropriate pink setting. This is a 'high number' card, note the red and black on white reverse. One day I'll upgrade this card but I'm not in any hurry. This old warhorse of a card will anchor my set for the time being.
I don't remember how the tape got on the back but it doesn't detract from the card in my eyes. Neither do the creases or rounded corners. It had hidden in a copy of the first Beckett Price Guide as a bookmark and sat forgotten in a storage box in my closet. Sorting through the box a couple of summers ago brought Gibby's card back into my hands and the answer to the question I'd been asking myself for some time ("Which vintage set do I want to collect") was answered.
So there are the final cards in the 30 Day BB Card Challenge. I enjoyed posting the on Twitter (and here) and I enjoyed reading other fols' postings. Many are still going on. Tony, great job in putting this together! It forced me and others to dig into boxes and binders we hadn't gone through in awhile. And to think about and appreciate the cards we have in a different way.  It was great fun.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Best Binder Page


Last week Junior Junkie posted his "Best Binder Page" which consisted of the nine 'best' cards in his collection. He selected cards he's take with him to a desert island. His cards, not surprisingly, were all Ken Griffey Jr cards...and some beauties are on that page for sure. He issued a challenge to fellow bloggers to do the same and several have done so. I liked the idea and figured 'why not?' Seemed easy. Take my nine favorite cards and scan them as they sat in a nine pocket sheet.

Well, not so fast. As I started pulling out binders I found that choosing nine cards was next to impossible. I had a stack of about 25 I thought would belong on my list of 'favorite' cards and I hadn't even gotten to my box of slabbed cards. At first I thought I'd follow JJ's lead and select nine Brooks Robinson cards, or Billy Pierce cards, maybe nine John Unitas cards. But in the end I decided that I had to have my best binder page reflect my wider interests. And I realized that I had to make my own guidelines. So I did.

My Best Binder page would contain:
1) Non-slabbed cards. I decided to take the 'binder page' term literally. I know JJ didn't stick to that but I just wanted to scan a page in one piece. That left out a couple of worthy cards which I'll mention later.
2) Only 'Big 4' sports cards. I collect all kinds of off-the-wall stuff but most folks are not interested in my actresses, Japanese menko or George Jones/Merle Haggard cards so I left them out. I decided that the page would reflect a cross-section of my mainstream interests.

As it turned out I scanned my 'Best Binder Page' about a dozen times. I kept looking at it and thinking that there was a card that I had excluded that needed to be in it. I finally said 'enough!'. And the result is the page at the top.

I'll add a few words about each card below.


Brooks Robinson's rookie card from 1957 was the first 'big ticket' card I ever bought. And it's my favorite player's rookie card. It's the first card that went into the page.


The 1978 Murray rookie may be my favorite card of all time. It's certainly my favorite card of the 'modern' card era.

T206 Christy Mathewson speaks for itself. It's the coolest card I own. If I was only allowed to keep one card I think this would be it.


I was a huge fan of John Mackey. I've written previously: "[He] redefined his position and was a pioneer in the rights of the oft forgotten former players in his job as NFLPA president. Sadly his work kept him from induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame due to politics. On top of that he was a wonderful guy, great to fans. I got to see him interact with the public at a memorabilia show many years ago and he was personable and gracious." And this card comes from the terrific 1964 Philly Gum set. Special player, special card.


I couldn't leave out Billy Pierce. It was hard figuring out which card to include but this one comes from the very first card set I held in my hands, the '58 Topps. Truth be told my favorite Pierce items are not regular cards but rather some of the oddballs and specials I have, his Dormand postcard for example.

But I like the '58 Topps set more than most do. Nostalgia plays a part I'm sure. It's colorful...and this Pierce has the great 'flying sox' logo going for it. I'd have put the yellow letter variation here for added spice but I couldn't lay my hands on it immediately.


This is the only card that survived from my childhood collection, at least the only baseball card. '59 Gibson, as battered as it may be, is the centerpiece of my 1959 Topps set. Hey, it's Bob Gibson....on a pink card!


Love this 1961 Fleer Lenny Moore card. Probably my favorite football card. The Memorial Stadium scoreboard, the crowd, Moore's pose and the Colts' logo add up to something much greater than the sum of it's parts.


This Mantle from the '58 All Star subset was on my want list for years and years. I finally found one I could afford in decent shape and grabbed it. That got me to chasing the rest of that group of '58s and really got me going after more vintage subsets. It's been a lot of fun.


The 1961 Topps Wes Covington may be a common on the checklist but there is nothing 'common' about it. You can find this all over the card selling sites for a buck and change. That shows you how few folks appreciate art at it's finest.

And that's my Best Binder Page. I'll have to do a follow-up post on the cards sitting on my desk at the moment that I considered and left out. Any of them could have very easily nabbed a slot.

This nine pocket might be more significant for what I didn't include than for what I did. No Jim Palmer? I named one of my son's Jim Palmer so how could I leave him out. I dunno. I also left off my Johnny Unitas rookie card. It's in a slab and I have never gotten around to freeing it.

There were a bunch of other cards that could have easily made the page like Cal Ripken's rookie or maybe his minor league Rochester Red Wings card. It was hard to leave out one of my Jim Brown cards and I had a couple of Gordie Howe cards in the stack of 'semi-finalists but my best Howe card is slabbed. Same for my pretty Gale Sayers card. I'm looking at several Eddie Giacomin cards as I type and wondering how I can leave out my beloved Eddie! Again, I dunno.

And so it goes. Like most of the other bloggers who took on this challenge said or implied...."Ask me tomorrow and you might get a different group of nine cards".

Saturday, May 9, 2015

My three faves, a contest post

Frankie, who writes My Life In The Sports Card Hobby, has a little contest going that is right up my alley. He's asking fellow bloggers to post their three (or so) favorite cards. That's something I do in my head all the time. I thought it would be easy to do for a post. But it was much tougher than I figured. I have LOTS of favorites. The lists sit over on the sidebar of this blog and reviewing them I realized that I have cards I love that I don't even have on those pages. 

But in the spirit of the contest I gave it a shot. I decided to consider only baseball and leave it at three cards although Frankie was pretty liberal in his rules. Anyway, here goes:


1978 Topps Eddie Murray..... This one speaks for itself. I think it's a classic, one of the best of the era. It's the rookie card of a Hall of Famer in a pose that is seen on few if any other cards. Eddie Murray was a badass and this card captures that. It's far from my most valuable card but that makes no difference. I love this one.



The best card of my favorite player has to be on the list of my favorites. It was the first 'expensive' card I ever purchased. I recall finding it at a card show when they were still in their infancy. This one was at the old Allen Park Inn in Houston. The show, and buying this Brooks rookie, was an eye-opening experience. I have a nicer copy I picked up years later but this is a milestone card for me.


I don't have a lot of tobacco cards, a few dozen I guess. This one is the best of the lot. I could have put my T-206 Chief Bender here but the Mathewson is just a better looking card. Sure it's off-center but the idea that someone pulled this out of a tobacco package 100+ years ago is kind of awe inspiring. Mathewson was already one of the greats when it was issued. I bet this very card made someone very happy.

Both Mathewson and Bender were pretty much 'must haves' for me. I have a couple of books about Chief Bender and find him a fascinating character. As for Mathewson, he's from Factoryville, Pennsylvania where I spent plenty of time in the summers as a kid. I have an aunt who still lives there in a beautiful old home with an amazing view. Her late husband, my uncle, passed much of his baseball library along to me.

So there they are. My three favorite baseball cards. I was forced to leave off a few cards I truely treasure including my Bob Gibson rookie which is my only surviving 1959, my Koufax cards, and any number of others. If I make this list in a few months it might be different.