At least the cards are getting older, too.

I celebrated a birthday some months ago, and I'm just now getting around to writing about what I unwrapped that day, mostly cards I picked out at a card show in late February. A lot has gone on since then, including my recent overnight trip up to Nebraska to see a particular celestial event.

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

One of those Nebraskans shares some space in Cooperstown with Ernie Banks, depicted on this beautiful 1965 Topps card. Mr. Cub's career was winding down a bit by this point, but he still had a few All-Star selections left. A cute cartoon of a bear on the back is holding a sign with Banks' then-total of 376 career home runs, on his way to 512.

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)

All the cards in this post came from the same vintage dealer as these cards, a nice older gentleman named Roy (Ray?), whose table has become one of my favorite stops at the monthly card show. He has a terrific selection of vintage at all price points, and if any of you are in the Denver area on the last Saturday of a month, I urge you to take a look. You won't be disappointed, especially when you can pull Babe Ruth retrospectives from the famous woodgrain set of 1962 Topps for just a couple bucks. Over a half-century after this card was printed, and darn near a hundred years later, Babe Ruth is still revered as one of the best home-run hitters of all time. The 60 home runs he famously hit in 1927 (while earning a whopping $70,000 salary), remains, in the eyes of many, the asterisk-free home run record.

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.

1955 Topps #85 Don Mossi (RC)

It wasn't just Hall of Famers in the vintage bin, each one safely tucked in a toploader. I managed to find one of Don Mossi, one of the Cardsphere's favorite mid-century players. This one is my first-ever from the 1955 Topps set, and it's really surprising how sharp and vibrant this card still looks after all these years, especially the back. That card back mentions that Mossi moved to the bullpen for his 1954 rookie season, after pitching as a starter during his previous seasons in the Minors. Mossi and his Cleveland Indians even won the AL pennant in 1954, which is where he made his only postseason appearance. The New York Giants won that Series, a team that Monte Irvin played on, whose card I also purchased from the same dealer.

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

Same goes for 1956 Topps, again setting me back just $2.00. '56, of course, marks the first appearance of action artwork on a Topps card, and it really makes it come to life. That famous blue "B" of the Brooklyn Dodgers appears in a couple spots, and let's not forget that this card was printed the year after the Dodgers finally won a World Series, the only time they'd do so in Brooklyn, thanks in part to Don Zimmer's "timely hitting". They won it all again in 1959, giving Zimmer his second ring as a player, but that was after the team moved to Los Angeles and found lots more success on the West Coast. The way things are looking for them this year, there's a strong possibility they'll bring home another title.

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

Going back another year to the three-border 1954 set, we have a card of Harvey Haddix, right in the middle of his three consecutive All-Star appearances. This one was a bit pricier at $5, but I couldn't pass up the player who famously pitched 12 perfect innings yet lost the game in the 13th. Anyone who saw Rich Hill's last outing must surely understand how frustrating a lack of run support is.

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

I added to my 1955 Bowman collection by acquiring a card of Bill "Moose" Skowron, the longtime first baseman of the New York Yankees. Like most players in this post, Skowron's career was just getting started when this card was printed. He had yet to win his five World Series rings (four as a Yankee), but already turned in an impressive .340 batting average in his rookie year of 1954, continuing the sharp Minor League hitting this card tells us about. 

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)

Continuing the Yankee show, Roy offered me Skowron's rookie card for $40, which I accepted. 1954 is my favorite set from the 1950s, and the general design gave me my first quasi-exposure to vintage, thanks to the 1994 Topps Archives 54 set. My local Wal-Mart carried packs of that set, out of which came my greatest pull ever, and my dad had an interest in the same set, often leafing through cards on display when he took me to the baseball card store. But I still have a hard time spending that much on a single card. Only the 1962 Al Kaline and the famous 1962 Mantle in my collection cost more. But it's still in great shape, and who knows, my dad may have had a card just like this.

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.