More Blogiversary: Favorite Cards Bought in the Last Year

Picking up on the theme of yesterday's post, I'm showing some of my favorite cards I've bought since resuming collecting about a year ago.  I'll make a few more posts like this, reflecting on my first year back in the hobby.

These will be in no particular order.

1954 Jackie Robinson, 1973 Mike Schmidt.

Here's where it started: it dawned on me that after all these years, I could accomplish my childhood dream of owning a Mike Schmidt rookie card.  I also wanted to get a Jackie Robinson card for my son, who had just turned two.  I told my wife and she supported both ideas.  And I was off.  When cards were viewed as an investment in the 80s and I was a kid with an allowance, there was no way I could have gotten anywhere near these cards.  But all of a sudden I realized that as an adult with a job, and long after the card bubble popped, dreams can come true.

Dick Allen.

Dave Parker.

I always collected a lot of 70s cards back in the late 80s and early 90s, but of course I couldn't get everything.  I was limited to what I could afford and to what I came across in the shops and at the shows.  With online commerce now, though, cards are less rare.  And these two card scream 1970s, with the red White Sox uniform and the black Pirates uniform, not to mention Dick Allen's glasses and mustache.  In my opinion these two greats belong in the Hall of Fame, and I'm delighted to have these very 1970s cards of them in my binders.

1940 Jimmie Foxx.

The 500-home run club was a big deal to me as a kid, since I got into baseball seriously around the time the local hero Mike Schmidt joined it.  And I remember hearing the story that when Jimmie Foxx hit his 500th home run it wasn't considered a big deal, since he was only the second one to do it after Babe Ruth, and Ruth had 700+ home runs.  So, if that's true, people hadn't really calibrated yet how special it was to reach 500.  And apart from all that, even though he's pictured with the Red Sox, Foxx in a way represents old Philadelphia in my collection since he was known for his time with the Philadelphia Athletics.

1970 Kellogg's Willie Stargell.

This 1970 Kellogg's Willie Stargell is great for its minimal design.  The later Kellogg's cards are great, too, but something about this, with its plain white border and simple baseball text field in the corner, not to mention the young Willie Stargell depicted, stops me every time I flip past it in the binder.

1960 Topps Frank Robinson.

I only ever had a handful of Topps cards from the 60s.  I collected the 70s pretty well, much more than most kids in the 80s going to card shows.  But the 60s were more distant and more expensive, too.  I don't recall knowing what the 1960 design looked like.  But when, in the past year, I saw this 1960 Topps Frank Robinson card online, I knew I had to have one.  It's a beautiful design, and capturing one of the game's greatest sluggers and all-around players when he was a young man (chances are he was 24 when this picture was taken) makes it all the better.  I've now added a few more 1960 Topps cards to my main binder, and will show the others in due course.

There are plenty more cards I could include.  I've been buying pairs of Robin Roberts and Richie Ashburn cards in honor of Dad's memory, since he was a fan of those Whiz Kids when he was little.  But none of the cards stand out to me individually; they mean more to me as a group.  And I'll write a followup post to talk about some of my favorite newly acquired sets that I've bought in the past year, so I'm not including cards from those sets here.

Having said all that, here are a couple more cards, which we might call honorable mentions:

Tony Gwynn.

Wade Boggs.

To a lesser extent than the Mike Schmidt rookie card, there were a bunch of cards that would have been nice to have but were serious investments.  I did manage to get a Rickey Henderson rookie card, but that was off a friend, and I got a Dave Winfield because it was badly off-center.  But the rookie cards of the then-future Hall-of-Famers were hit or miss, a kid couldn't get them all back then.  So two big ones were from the 1983 Topps set, Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs.  I didn't have them back in the day, but can get them now for just a couple of bucks each.  They make good additions to the main binder.

Thanks for reading!