New vintage Bobby Thomson for the collection

Hi Folks.

A few posts back I wrote about a new card I picked up. I was very excited to get the card and wanted to show it off immediately so I used the scan from COMC and give it a little write up. Well yesterday the package arrived and I had the card in hand.

The card on the right is a sweet looking 1949 Bowman Bobby Thomson. I'm very pleased with the overall look of the card and was very surprised to how much better it looked than the scan from COMC.

The back of the card is interesting too.

Notice the lack of stats that you would normally expect to find. It also makes mention of his military service, which is interesting to see. There's also a small bit about his minor league and rookie year. They don't mention much about his 1948 season other than he slumped to .248 average. At the bottom of the card is an offer for a baseball ring. All you needed was three wrappers and 15cents and you would have been able to get an adjustable, durable metal ring with a white plastic emblem. I wonder how many of these rings are around now? Has anyone seen one?

Enough about the ring, back to Thomson. 1949 was a great year for Thomson. He had career highs in RBI's and BA. But no-one knows that stuff! I had to look it up online, thank you wikipedia. The Flying Scot is remembered mostly for one thing and that is the 'Shot Heard 'Round the World'. I'm sure you all know the story so I wont go over it again.

The picture at the top also features two other Thomson cards. On the left is the 1953 Redman that I wrote about a while back and the middle is a 1958 Topps that I picked up a few months ago. The reason I choose this picture is to show off the different sizes of the cards. The Redman is a Giant compered to the other two. The 58 is a standard size card and the 49 is tiny. I'm glad that cards nowadays aren't as big as the Redman because its a pain to store and takes up more that its fair share of the box its in. I'm a big fan of smaller cards so I quite like it but I'm not a fan of the shape, its too square as opposed to the regular mini cards from Ginter and T206 that have a more rectangular shape.

Overall the Bowman is cool! And its also the oldest card I own.

Some new pick ups

Hi Folks.

This post is a little premature since I don't actually have the following cards in hand but I don't care, I just want to show them! I mostly set out get some cards to trade so I hit the forums, Ebay, COMC and other blogs to see if there was anything out there that I would consider a good deal. I wont bore you with the trade bait that I picked up, well not until a later post when I have them in hand. I just want to show two cards that I picked up from COMC. I stole the scans.




1949 Bowman Bobby Thomson. Who doesn't like vintage? Not quite his RC but only a year removed. Sure it looks a little rough around the edges and a little faded but it will be the oldest card in my collection and will look great next to the other Thomsons. I have a few other Thomsons from the 50's but they don't feature him in a Giants uniform and in my opinion don't look as good so I doubt I'll ever post them.

Secondly a JT Snow 1994 Signature Rookies Draft Picks Signatures numbered to ONLY 7750! This card in my opinion was an absolute steal at only $2! JT snow was the Giants first baseman when I first got into baseball and at the time my favourite player. He is also the first player auto that I ever owned. An auto that I picked up from the Giants store in San Francisco. Its on an official NL MLB ball and I loved it! In fact I still have the ball and its actually displayed in my house much to the dismay of my wife. I was thinking of putting this card with the ball but my cat goes for the cards so it will have to stay in a box.
Thats it for now although I still have credit on COMC so I might pick something else up.

Sad times

October 25th 1923 -

16th August 2010

Amazing generosity from a fellow blogger!

I got an email from John at pursuit of 80'sness the other day saying he had a Bobby Thomson on card auto that he was going to send my way. It arrived this morning!

This is my first auto of Thomson and also my first Goudey card. I nicked this picture off of Johns blog, hope you don't mind! I tried to take a picture with my own camera but it never came out right.

What I like about this card is on the back there's actually some information about the player and not just the usual 'congratulations you have received an autograph of ...'. Also the auto being on card is awesome!

This card can go with my Thomson GU card, my 1953 Red man tobacco card and the other Thomsons that I have. I really want to display the GU,auto and Red man but due to one of my cats love for cardboard it wouldn't be a good idea. The last thing I'd want to find is a half chewed up card that has been ripped from its case, next to a grinning cat. So at the moment they will all live in a box with my Lind collection.

Massive thank you to John again! I hope to repay you soon.

Favorite cards part 4

No Lind this time! Here we have another Bobby Thomson card. It is a little newer than the last Thomson that I featured and is very shiny! I like shiny and I like this card.

I picked up this card in a trade with the Hairylemon from SCF. He held onto this card for me while I ran around making trades in order to prise it from his grasp! I cant remember exactly what I traded for it, I want to say it was a Carl Erskine auto but I honestly cant remember. I suppose I could load up SCF and check but that would be to easy.

This card is from Topps Tribute and was released in 2002. This is my only relic card of Thomson but I hope to add a jersey card and an auto to the collection as soon as I can, although this collection is on the back burner at the moment so I'm not going to actively seek out either the jersey or auto until I finish off a few other projects. That's not to say I wont trade for either an auto or a jersey card if one was offered, I'd even consider buying if the price was right.

Tribute was re-released last year and it looked good. But there were some issues with the cards and the questionable relics that were included. Where did they come from? People who opened these packs were met with a disclaimer on the back of the card 'The relics contained in this card are not from any specific game, event, or season' ( It actually says this on most, if not all relic cards now). It soon came to light that many of the so called bat relics were in fact stadium relics, pieces of seats from the stadium. This upset quite a few people who thought they were getting a genuine piece of history and not a piece of wood that had endured years of abuse from the sweaty cracks of overweight baseball fans. The card I have from 2002 says 'Authentic game used bat'. Now I haven't looked into to it very much and for all I know Topps pulled the same trick back then that they did last year. I can only go with what is written on the back of the card. No where in the small print on the back of the card does it mention where the bat came from. I suppose with a player like Thomson there are plenty of GU bats available and to be honest the guy is still kicking so what would stop Topps putting a bat in his hand now and throwing a ball at him and calling that game used? Like so many relics available in this hobby we have to use a little faith and a lot of trust in where they actually came from.

With that said and done this is still one of the prize cards of my collection and I'm proud to own it.

Tribute is being released again this year, quite soon I think. I guess that it will still be an expensive product ( last year was around $200 a pack) so I will not be picking any up. I'll just wait for the big spenders to bust a bunch of cases and then pick up their 'big mojo hits' on Ebay for a fraction of the price of a single pack.

Just a reminder from a previous post - The Sheffield card mystery has still not been solved but I have had some interesting answers. There will be a prize for whoever can tell me where it could have come from. If a definitive answer is not found I will give the prize to whichever answer seems to be the most likely. I don't know what the prize is yet but it will be an auto or a relic card, maybe even both.

Favorite cards part two

My second post on my favorite cards features a fellow Brit. Born in Glasgow before moving to the states at a young age this player hit one of the most famous home runs in baseball history.

Every baseball fan knows the story of the "shot heard 'round the world" which occurred in 1951 between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. Thomson hit a walk off home run off of Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca at the polo grounds which allowed the Giants to win the pennant. The Giants went to the world series only to lose in six games to the Yankees.
The card above is a 1953 Red Man tobacco card. Issued in pouches of tobacco, I think the last time a card was issued in a smoking product. The card was part of a promotion in which you had to remove the tab at the bottom of the card and send them in to receive a baseball cap, which a lot of people did and so making it a little harder to find the card in a complete form with the tab intact. As you can in the picture above, my card has the tab intact.
Considering the age of the card it is still in great condition. The corners are a little rounded and there are a few wrinkles on the card but overall the card is awesome!
This card was brought to my attention by another UK collector who trades on the sports card forum under the name 'Hairylemon'. He was aware that I was trying to put together a Bobby Thomson collection and thought that this little gem would fit in nicely, he was right. I picked this up from Ebay for about $12 shipped to the UK. I think this was a fair price and I was very happy to get it.
The card was much bigger than I expected it to be, I thought it might have been around the size of a typical early 50's card and was surprised to see that it was even bigger! Due to its size its a little bit hard to display and so unfortunately it stays in a box out of sight, living with a few other cards from the 50's that I have.
It should also be noted that Bobby Thomson was inducted into the Scottish sports hall of fame and had a baseball field named after him in Glasgow.

Up next is another Adam Lind card.