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.
Hey, did this guy ever amount to anything?
Some of the alternates were just an airbrushed logo, but this one was a completely different card front with the same back.
In the same sleeve with 5-6 of the cards (all stars) were these small postage-stamp sized ones.
The recently departed Hall of Famer
Gotta be one of the rare cards that listed him as “John”
Just a guy from The Hill
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.
A couple of guys with St. Louis in their future.
Another guy that would eventually wear the birds on the bat.
Pretty sure Uecker would say the card value declined once his mug got on it.
Besides this, there was a whole subset of cards about Babe Ruth.
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.
Might have been nice to have these two in a rotation.
A guy that was on the wrong side of his Cardinal career.
Going to win some games with these two.
2020 might really be Ernie’s kinda year if the plan for all those doubleheaders gets implemented.
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!)
I don’t know playing it but this guy knew how to run a game.
One of the facts I loved about Torre was, before the Yankees, he had played for three teams and then managed the same three.
This guy looked much better in red.
The trailblazer
In 1962, it was probably tougher to get this card than the Brock one.
Two Cardinal Hall of Famers, including the most recent addition.
You’ll find these two guys out on the wall in left field.
