I'm not sure how many of you had the good fortune to see the mind-blowing spectacle that is a total solar eclipse, but it is a wondrous sight to behold. I'm glad the stars aligned (pun not intended) on Monday, offering me cloudless skies and an opportunity to stay with some wonderful hosts not far from Chimney Rock, right along the Oregon Trail.
Rather than brave the apocalyptic traffic back to Denver right away, I elected to explore a few more sights in Western Nebraska, still close enough to my home state that most everyone is a Rockies and Broncos fan. Before I headed back, I stopped in a local bar for a bite to eat, and ended up chatting with a regular who used to know Richie Ashburn. He also mentioned the name Zane Smith, who went to North Platte High School, just a bit north of there. Eclipses and baseball are the great unifiers, offering two total strangers plenty of conversation material in a mostly empty agricultural downtown.
1965 Topps #510 Ernie Banks |
This card has a little ding along the left edge, but it's from perhaps the most iconic Topps set of the 1960s, offering us an interesting profile shot of Banks.
1962 Topps #139A2 Babe Ruth Special 5 (No Pole variant) |
Aaron Judge has cooled off significantly, instead striking out in a near-record 37 consecutive games, but Giancarlo Stanton has been going on an absolute tear after the Derby, getting his season total up to 49 with over a month left to play. Maybe, just maybe, Stanton will give us fans the asterisk-free home run record we've all been waiting 90 years to see broken.
I didn't know this until I looked it up on Beckett, but apparently there is a version of this card out there that doesn't show any dirt in the home plate area, and also shows a pole in the left-hand area of the image. Not sure which is more scarce, but even in the early 1960s, Topps had some work to do after the printing process started.
I didn't know this until I looked it up on Beckett, but apparently there is a version of this card out there that doesn't show any dirt in the home plate area, and also shows a pole in the left-hand area of the image. Not sure which is more scarce, but even in the early 1960s, Topps had some work to do after the printing process started.
1955 Topps #85 Don Mossi (RC) |
This one and its 1955 Bowman counterpart are considered Mossi's rookie cards, and I couldn't have paid more than a couple bucks for this one either. It's a great choice to finally give 1955 Topps a home in my collection.
1956 Topps #99 Don Zimmer |
Topps, of course, was founded in Brooklyn, and to have the team ripped away just a few years into the company's unbroken run of baseball card sets must have been traumatic. Yet they helped bring baseball to a new generation of Americans, and I can picture buying a pack of these for a nickel in the drugstore that surely once occupied the dusty main street in Nebraska I recently found myself on.
1954 Topps #9 Harvey Haddix |
As you can see, these are all a little off-center, the corners are all a little fuzzy, and there's a touch of paper loss here and there. But all in all, none of these were used in bicycle spokes, and that's good enough for me.
1955 Bowman #160 Bill Skowron |
That's two woodgrain cards added to the collection, and at an extremely affordable price.
I can't help but chuckle a little bit at the "Color TV" label underneath the painting. This card was prophetic, as Skowron and his Yankees faced off against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1955 World Series, which was the first World Series broadcast in color. Now it seems like a given, of course in color, but also in ultra-sharp high definition. We're all pretty much surrounded by screens now, TVs, phones, tablets, and of course the screens on which we type out these blogs (except for the occasional handwritten post).
My mom generously purchased all the above cards I picked out as a birthday present, but I did drop a little extra cash on one more 1954 card.
1954 Topps #239 Bill Skowron (RC) |
And it's still way cheaper than those Griffey Gold Medallion parallels that occupy space in The Junior Junkie's vault.
Incidentally, having purchased two cards of a single player, I noticed that at least one of these had an error. This 1954 card lists Skowron's birthdate as December 30th, 1928, but the Bowman card says December 18th, 1930. Babe Ruth's 1927 single-season home run record was in place regardless, but Bowman is the one who got it right.
Sadly, of all the players in this post, only Don Mossi is still with us. These cards are pretty old, but as I look back on my 33rd birthday, it's a good reminder that time does pass by quickly, and, unlike when I first started collecting, the feeling that I have my whole life ahead of me is in the rear-view mirror.
All the more reason I had no intention of missing the solar eclipse, that rarest, most fleeting, and most amazing of events.
Very nice Moose cards!
ReplyDeleteSweet '56! So weird seeing Zimmer without the extra weight.
ReplyDeleteHappy belated birthday! I'm glad to hear that you were able to see the eclipse, even if you did have to travel a bit. Here in Tennessee, all I had to do was walk out the front door and look up, I guess I kind of took it for granted, until a few days later when my mom told me about all the people that had come here to see it. It was pretty fantastic though, and it was kind of neat to hear groups of people cheering off in the distance once the moon had completely covered the sun.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the cards go, I'd say you picked out some really great stuff for your birthday present, with the Babe being my favorite.
Awesome that you got to see the eclipse. I watched on TV but I understand that it doesn't compare to seeing it in person. Great group of cards. I'll admit to being a Mossi guy, too. I have a few.
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