Blaster Schmaster: The Early 60’s and Late 50’s
March 19th, 2011 by slangon

This journey is becoming quite the Odyssey. To recap, I spent about what I would’ve on a blaster at Sportlots. I’ve been showcasing what I got. We’re on the home stretch.

First, a card from the set that is being ripped off paid homage to in this year’s Heritage set.

I guess this years Heritage version will be having the disembodied floating heads of Jered Weaver, Felix Hernandez, Jon Lester and Justin Verlander. I wonder if they’ll all be wearing hats. This card was actually the one splurge of this order. I paid a whole buck for it.

Next was a few more old football cards.

First up is 3 time Pro-Bowler “Big Jim” Schrader.

I also got this Jim Mutscheller card, which I picked purely because of his name. It’s fun to say. It was only later that I learned that Jim was part of the inaugural class of the Beaver County Sports Hall of Fame.

I scored a couple of base cards from the ’59 baseball set.

There’s something really interesting about seeing the facsimile autograph on this card that was made 50 years ago and comparing it to the TTM autograph I got back from Eddie Yost about a year ago. I guess there’s a reason signatures are used for all sort of legal matters. They’re virtually the same.

I’m not sure exactly how the artists at Topps determined which colors would go with what cards. It obviously had nothing to do with the team colors. I feel like whoever ended up with black won the design lottery, because those cards always look bad-ass.

I was also able to knock another card off of the old team cards checklist.

I always feel like the 1959 “bullseye” design works better on team cards than it does on the player cards, but maybe that’s just me. I’m a little bleh about the inclusion of pink, though. Maybe because it reminds me of Pepto Bismol. Maybe because it reminds of a 4 year old girl. Either way, I’m not a fan. I do like the mix of fonts they used on the team name, though, particularly the scripty looking for they used for “White Sox”. There’s also something kind of cool about getting a team card from the year that the team won a pennant, like the Sox did in ’59.

That’s it for today. Hopefully by the time you read this, my wife’ll have finished pushing that kid out and I’ll finish this thing up with the next post.

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