Blaster Schmaster: The Mid-Late 60’s
March 16th, 2011 by slangon

On we roll with my blasters worth of (mostly) vintage. The more I think about this, I wonder why Topps doesn’t actually do something like this. I mean, considering that they started the Million Card Giveaway last year and kept it up with this years Diamond Giveaway, they apparently have no problem obtaining a stock pile of old cards. They should just package them up and sell them for $20. You can feel free to steal that idea, Topps. Anyway, on we march.

I know it’s not football season, but I got a 1969 footballer.

Admittedly, I’m nowhere near as familiar with Topps football designs as I am with baseball. If you had told me that this card was from 1959, I would’ve believed it. For some reason, I dig that it’s the Baltimore Colts and not the Indianapolis Colts. It’s like getting a Milwaukee Brave or a Kansas City Athletic.

I also snagged a quartet of 1969 Topps baseball cards, all of which turned out to be Cubs. One draw back to Sportlots, as opposed to Check Out My Cards, is that 99% of the time, there’s no photo of the card you’re buying. That’s admittedly a bit risky as far as potentially buying a really, really crappy looking card, but when I’m doing one of these bargain bin searches, I’m usually not paying more than $0.25 or so per card, so I’m willing to take the risk. A side effect to that though, is that 9 times out of 10, I’m not certain what team the player is from. Oddly enough, as we’ll see when I’m finally done with this whole mess, I ended up with a lot of Cubs cards, not that that’s a bad thing. I wonder why this particular seller had so many cheap Cubbies.

Thanks to R.A. Dickey, I’m becoming more and more enamored with the idea of knuckleballers. I’m actually toying with starting yet another sub-collection of just knuckleball pitchers.

I often wonder if the Topps airbrush artists were aware of the fact that the Dodgers were the only team that had those red numbers on the front of their jerseys. If you’re not going to airbrush that out, you might as well not bother airbrushing anything. I snatched up this card as quick as I could (or at least as quick as one can snatch up anything when shopping on-line) because Jim Hickman hold several special places in Mets history. He was the first Met to hit for the cycle, he was the first Met to hit 3 homers in 1 game, he hit the very last home run in the Polo Grounds and he drew the first walk as well as hit by pitch in the history of Shea Stadium. Also, when the Mets traded him to the Dodgers in 1966, he was the last of the original Mets.

I also managed to snag this pristine copy of a ’69 Santo. I love that baby bear on the sleeve of his pajamas.

In the last post I did about this batch of cards, I talked about how I was psyched to get a Jimmy Qualls card. I didn’t realize that I was also getting Jimmy Qualls’ rookie since the seller just listed this card as Cubs Rookies.

We’re sticking with the Cubs, but this time moving to 1968.

I actually already had this card, and at the time I was buying it, I was 95% sure that I did. The guy was selling it for only $0.50 though. I figured for half a buck, if it turned out that I did already own it, I wouldn’t be too upset. Turns out, even with that dinged up lower left corner, it’s in a little better shape than the one I already had.

The last 2 cards for today are from the middle of the decade.

I had wanted a Bill McCool card for a long time now. Gotta love that name. Add to that the Topps All-Star Rookie trophy and the overall niceness of the ’65 design and we have one swell looking baseball card.

In the last Blaster Schmaster post, I had mentioned Duane Josephson and how he had one All-Star appearance in his career where he came in the 8th to replace the catcher for the A.L. What do you think the chances are that I would randomly end up buying a card of the guy he replaced in the same order as his card?

That’s it for today’s episode of What Else Can You Do With the Price of a Blaster. We’re really getting towards the end. I promise. Speaking of getting towards the end, my wife is due to give birth to our second child on Friday, so new posts might be few and far between over the next few weeks. I have been trying to stock pile some random pre-written posts to schedule for that period, so we’ll see.

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