Baseball Cards Are Keeping Me Busy

Apparently I've reach the point where I've got too many things on my plate. Writing for The Cardboard Connection, posting on my favorite forum, Sports Card Radio Fan Forum, and following the Cardinals with Pujols on the DL and all the bull-pen drama going on, has pushed posting on my blog almost completely off my plate. But today I'm enjoying a rare day off from work and trying to make the most of it.

I'm going to try and catch everyone up on what's been going on in my little corner of the world of baseball card collecting. Since my last post, I've contributed a couple more stories on The Cardboard Connection. You already know about the piece on the Frank Corridon card (1910 T205 Frank Corridon Leads History Lesson). But since then I've also written Baseball’s Changed But the Stats on the Back Haven’t, which is a story about how I believe Topps or any other company that may get a license to produce baseball cards, should get a little innovative and add some new stats to the backs of baseball cards. 

I've also written a piece about my feelings on base cards. Getting Back to Base-ics With Your Collection was a fun article for me to write because I think some of the newer cards with their fancy graphics and shiny surfaces are approaching ridiculous. I'm not opposed to any types of sports cards. But in a world where refractors, memorabilia cards, and sticker autos are kings, I just wanted to highlight that base cards are still relevant. 


I've also got a new article that I have just submitted for editing prior to the writing of this blog post. It's a piece on a book I just finished reading entitled Mint Condition - How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession by Dave Jamieson. I'll be sure to post a link to it as soon as it hits the website.


Well, besides writing for the website, I've also added a few more "ubber-vintage" cards to my collection. (In my world "uber-vintage" is any card that's over 100 years old.) If you scroll down to my previous post, you'll see my 1911 T205 Frank Corridon card. That card got me wondering about the rest of the Cardinals in the T205 set. So I did a little research and found that there were a total of 10 different Cardinals in the set, two of them are Hall of Famers (Roger Bresnahan and Miller Huggins), and there are two Cardinals who have variation cards. Roger Bresnahan has one card with his mouth closed and one with it open, while Robert Harmon has one card with both of his ears visible and one where you can only see one of his ears. You really have to be a collector to appreciate the variation cards. I think most people would just shrug their shoulders at the slight differences in the cards, but to a collector those are little nuggets of gold! Anyway, I was able to get my hands on a few of these historical pieces. Here's the scans of the cards I recently scored...

1911 T205 Arnold Hauser

1911 T205 Edward Konetchy

1911 T205 Edward Phelps

1911 T205 Louis Evans

1911 T205 Rehel Oakes

No Hall of Famers or variation cards. Those are still a little out of my price range at the moment, but maybe Santa might find it in his heart to put a little special something in my Cardinals Christmas stocking next year. (My wife reads this blog, so just humor me.) 

Just a little trivia note that I would like to add...and this 100% baseball related, but more of a personal nature. I recently have been doing a little research into my family history, and I found out that my grandfather was born in 1911. (In fact, if he were alive today, he would be celebrating his 100th birthday tomorrow.) Since I I'm collecting the 1969 Topps set because it was produced the same year I was born, I wanted to at least get all the Cardinals from the year my grandfather was born. 

I'm going to have to do a little more research into the sets produced in 1945 to find a baseball card set that was made the same ear that my father was born. But that's a topic for another blog post.


Thanks for reading. See you next time!