Thursday, August 8, 2019

Three vintage Phils for my second blogiversary

I just caught my blogiversary in time to make a post for it.  Today is two years blogging, although the blog posts come infrequently these days.  In a sense I write for a living; I'm a math professor, and I mainly write research papers.  There's a lot of other writing, too, though, which in various forms involves either advocating for my own research (like in grant proposals) or evaluating other people's research (like in reports on other people's papers, theses, grant proposals, and tenure cases).  Much of this involves responsibility to other people -- if I don't work on writing a paper, I might be letting a coauthor down.  Which is all to say that writing on a blog sometimes has to take a back seat.  But I try to get back into it after I've been away for a while, and I see that it's been more than a month since my last blog post.  So as usual when I've been away, I'll say now that I want to get back to it, and I'll start now with three vintage Phillies.
1961 Topps Dallas Green
Dallas Green was a hero to us kids in the greater Philly area in the early 80s, although perhaps not in the same ways as Schmidt and Carlton, or even Bowa, Trillo, Bowa, Boone, Maddox, or McGraw.  But Dallas Green was the manager who delivered the first World Series for the Phillies.  He didn't hang around much after that, and was soon off to the front office of the Cubs.  But he was in Philadelphia long enough to deliver.  His 1980 Topps Burger King card has always had a place in my binder.  I decided to get a card of him as a player; he didn't only play with the Phillies, but it looks like all his cards have him with the Phils.  He was only briefly with the Senators and the Mets.  Green also is another special collection of mine, which is of Delawareans who made it to MLB.
1961 Topps Clay Dalrymple
Another 1961 Phillie is catcher Clay Dalrymple.  He played with the Phillies from 1960-1968 and with the Orioles from 1969-1971.  Wikipedia claims Dalrymple is second only to Campanella at percentage of throwing out baserunners attempting to steal; Baseball Reference puts Dalrymple at 30th place all-time.  In any case, he was a good defensive catcher for a number of years.  I wanted to pick up a card of Dalrymple for a specific reason, which is that I have his autograph.  The autograph is on a Phillies hat, and Dad and I got it at one of the many games we went to back in the late 80s/early 90s.  I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I think we gave some money to charity, and got the hat as a prize?  I don't know if it was a raffle situation or a grab bag or something.  But however it worked, I now have a card to go with the autographed cap.
1967 Topps Rick Wise
Dalrymple wasn't the only autographed cap we got, either.  I also have a Rick Wise.  Wise was a solid pitcher but is most famous for being traded for Steve Carlton, of course.  I had some Rick Wise cards in the 1972 set that I'm building, but wanted another outside of that set for my main binder.  So this 1967 will do nicely.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

4 comments:

  1. Great cards, and congratulations on the milestone! I think we can all understand the occasional lapse between blog posts with your other writing responsibilities.

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  2. Happy belated anniversary! A math professor?!?! I'm always amazed at how many really intelligent people seem to write card blogs (myself not included), it probably makes for a nice break from the smart people jobs.

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