 |
 |
A checklist card gives me an opportunity to veer away from the 1965 Topps set a little bit and give some context to these recent posts. In February 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic, we added 23 cards to our 1965 Topps set and I began composing posts going through each of these new cards. I write these posts in advance and then schedule them on a weekly basis each Monday, Wednesday and Saturday mornings for 7am publishing. I’m usually extremely busy during this time of year at my chosen profession, but this year has been much different. When I started writing about these 23 cards, we were hearing about the virus, but we had no idea how much life would change in the matter of a few short weeks.
With baseball and all other normal life suspended for the foreseeable future, and with New Jersey and the rest of the country practicing social distancing and self-quarantining, I’m spending more time than usual with each of these cards. It’s relaxing and it gives me a little bit of time each day to think about baseball cards and the players on them rather than thinking about everything else going on. I’m trying to compose a post a day, and when the 23 cards run out I’ll most likely head to eBay to add some more just to keep me going. I hope when these posts are published in June that our world is back to some semblance of normal. I hope baseball is back and I hope my kids can go back to school. I hope we flatten the curve and less people get sick.
A checklist card is objectively one of the most boring cards in any entire baseball card set, but right now boring sounds pretty good to me. It’s March 17, 2020 as I write this, St. Patrick’s Day, and my wife and I and our two sons haven’t left the house for a few days except to take daily walks around the block, to shoot hoops in our backyard or to just sit on our front step. We’re washing our hands, eating all the snacks my wife stocked up on and I’m trying to refrain from constantly refreshing my news feeds for the latest breaking information. I’m listening to a lot of Beatles music, trying to focus on work (as fortunately enough with my job I’m able to work from home), and writing posts about checklist cards from the 1965 Topps set. I’m generally optimistic but I miss normalcy. This post is scheduled to publish exactly three months from today - June 17, 2020.
We’ll all have stories to tell once we’re on the other side of this. I hope when we’re telling those stories the world is back to being as relatively boring as a checklist card.
February 29, 2020 from King of Prussia, PA - Card #77
Doug and I attended the Philadelphia Sportscard & Memorabilia Show held on the bottom floor of the Valley Forge Casino on the final day of February. I did a post over at The Phillies Room with a few pictures of Doug taken with some of the show's autograph guests.
We purchased this checklist card from an initial batch of 17 commons and semi-stars purchased from John's Sports Cards within the first hour of our arrival. I didn't track each individual price of the cards purchased, but this card was originally marked at $10 and the entire 17-card lot cost me $50 total.
The Card
This is one of seven checklists to appear in the set, each marking their respective series. The fifth series in the set covers cards #353 through #429, or 78 cards. On the back, Stan Williams (#404) and John Roseboro (#405) only had their first initials displayed to make room for the number of the card.
In my experience building sets from the 1970s, it's tough to find these cards completely unmarked so I was happy to find this one when flipping through a stack of "semi-stars" at the table hosted by John's Sports Cards. At the time this card was purchased, we had six cards (including this checklist) that could have been marked off - #389 Don Larsen, #407 Lee Maye, #414 Al Lopez, #417 Ed Brinkman and #419 Ruben Amaro.
For series five in our set, that's six down, 72 to go!
Checklists
Prior Card: #360 Orlando Cepeda - San Francisco Giants
Next Card: #362 Don Schwall - Pittsburgh Pirates
No comments:
Post a Comment