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I recently found the remains of my baseball card collection.
When I was a kid I was a huge baseball fan. Like any other kid I had thousands of baseball cards. But back in the good old days, we didn't buy cards to put in little plastic sleeves in hopes of financing our collge educations. We bought cards to play with. We flipped 'em, read 'em, traded 'em, and studied the statistics on the back. The good ones ended up in a shoe box and the Carmen Fanzones and Pedro Bourbons ended up on the floor of my closet. Every winter my mom would eventually clean up my room and most of my cards ended up in the garbage can.
A few cards did survive! and here they are! |
Tom Seaver - Mr Met
Tom Seaver, for many years, was the only great player on the Mets. His cards were sacred and got special care and treatment. I always attached Tom's card to the cover of the shoebox. I used both tape and glue so his cards would never get lost.
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Here's a couple of really old cards. Note the yellowing tape (I tried removing some tape with mixed results so I ended up leaving most of it on. There's also some glue bleeding through the cardboard. |
 
Uh Oh! fingerprints. Do you think these are mint or near mint? |
 
Sometimes when you peel the tape off it leaves a mark like the card on the left. Those cards from 1971 with the black borders always looked like shit before the gum lost its flavor. |
An action shot! A nice change from those poses with the warm up jacket |
Saved the best for last. The official Tom Seaver rookie card. This card recently sold at Christies for $500,000,000,000,000,000 in very good condition. I made sure my friends would know that it was a Tom Seaver card not just a Bill Denehy card. Interestingly, crayon ages better than the inks they used back then. |
The Cooperstown Collection - Hall of Famers
In the old days, kids didn't know that players were going to the Hall of Fame after only one year of playing. Players used to have to play a long time and then wait 5 years for someone to vote.
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I didn't know who Johnny Bench was? Catcher cards were the best for drawing little piles of doodie |
I knew Hank Aaron was good. But my younger brother didn't give a rat's ass. |
 
"The Mick" was THE Yankee. Here he is after an imaginary fight with Lindsey Nelson. |
I punished Nolan Ryan for letting the Mets trade him for Jim Fregosi. Angel my ass, he was Satan himself. |
 
I didn't know that Reggie would become Mr. October for the hated Yankees but I couldn't resist that pose. Just 11 years old and I already knew that drawing a penis was funny. It would be a few more years before I realized that drawing an erect penis was REALLY funny. |
The Pete Rose Collection - Hall of Shamer
During the 1973 National League playoff, Pete Rose beat-up a Met, Buddy Harrelson. I immediately laid waste to my entire inventory of Charlie Hustle cards.
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