I thought I had told this story here before, but checking back it was on Facebook a couple of years ago. Which means I can use this as one of my daily posts and not feel terribly guilty about it.
I’ve mentioned before that my father-in-law was a big baseball fan. As I wrote in the post marking his passing (that wound up being read at his funeral), the first time I met him back in 1998, we spent hours talking baseball. I’m pretty sure it was that first trip where he showed me something he was quite proud of. He had started collecting the 1962 Topps set when they were new and had worked on getting it complete most of his life. I don’t think it had been done but for a couple of years when I came into the picture.
It was a full set, painstakingly put together from packs purchased long ago to trips to card shows to round it out. He even got some (maybe all, I don’t know) of the variant cards that were in the set as well. When he died five years ago, the collection came into my possession. So I went through it yesterday afternoon and took some pictures of a few cards in the set. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the tour.

Some of the alternates were just an airbrushed logo, but this one was a completely different card front with the same back.

Save for Casey’s airbrushed one, none of the Mets had a cap on in their pictures, as they were going into their first season. Same thing with the Houston Colt .45s.






I actually thought Clemente might have gone by Bob early in his career, but it was more of the writers and teams not wanting to recognize his heritage.


Now let’s look at the ones that you probably most want to see. The ones wearing the birds on the bat in ’62 or making an impact on the team later on. (No slight to the guys above like Maris and Cepeda!)

One of the facts I loved about Torre was, before the Yankees, he had played for three teams and then managed the same three.



