Pastels on baseball cards?

Today's post, which features a smattering of '54 Bowman, has been in the works for well over a year now. And that isn't because it's super great or anything, it's just because I started the draft for it... and never came back! I would imagine I'm not alone (I hope), when it comes to doing that sort of thing.

Even though I'm not actively collecting the set, I'm still not going to pass up an opportunity to acquire some singles on the cheap, which is exactly what everything shown here today was:

Paul had the distinction of serving up Frank Robinson's first career home run.

By all accounts, Clint was the first catcher to wear glasses during a game.

"Mandrake the Magician" is one of the coolest nicknames ever!

The '54 set contains some really wonderful trivia, this tidbit on the back of Sal Yvars' card is a perfect example.

Billy is among a long list of once great players who's names are rarely, if ever, mentioned in this day and age.

Pitched games one, five, and seven (won the first two) in the 1947 World Series for the champion Yankees.

 Here's another great trivia question. Since the release of set, there have been eight more unassisted triple play's recorded, the last one being by Eric Bruntlett in 2009.

A member of the 1948 championship winning Cleveland team, who is probably best known for the photograph showing his locker room embrace with teammate, Larry Doby, that came after his game 4 World Series victory.

I can't really think of anything to say about Bobby "blue eyes", that hasn't already been said before. So instead I will just return to trivia well, and say that I had no idea that Lon Warneke became an umpire after finishing up his near(?) hall of fame playing days.

All these cards came from a COMC seller that was having a fire sale (the kind that don't happen on the site anymore) in early 2016. I think I got to it about 20 minutes after it started, and even though the port had already been cannibalized by other sellers, I was still able to pick up a few things, including these 54's. The best part of those now non-existent fire sales, was of course... the prices! Eight of the nine cards shown here fell into the 0.90 to $1.20 range, Bobby T. was the only exception, for him I had pay around $2.50 -- which at the time (and still now) seemed like an excellent price.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.