Flipping pages, not cards

When I was a kid, I would collect anything -- bottle caps, seashells, rocks, live frogs (don't ask). So when it came to baseball, I didn't collect just cards, but posters, ticket stubs, postcards and yearbooks.

Since I lived so far away from my favorite team and couldn't attend Dodger games in person, I would send away for the annual Dodgers yearbook through the mail. I did that every season, and I have each Dodger yearbook from 1974-85. (But my favorite is the one from 1966 -- when Koufax was king). The 1980 yearbook is my second favorite, because it blended card collecting with my favorite team. It was a neat idea, although I'm sure it wasn't original in the realm of yearbooks. The cards on the front cover are from the 1980 Topps set.

My only complaint was that the Dodgers didn't issue their own cards in the yearbook, like some other yearbooks had done.

Inside, the yearbook featured pictures of various Dodger cards from over the years. On each player's page, was a display of cards from their career. Here is The Penguin himself:

I like that they chose to feature his rookie card from 1973 (his actual real rookie card is from the 1972 set), but covered up the reason why I STILL don't have that card. Of course, that reason is it's Mike Schimidt's rookie card, and it can fetch around $150 these days if you believe those Beckett dudes (and I don't).

In the yearbook, you also got to see cards of players who competed for other teams before they came to L.A, and since I mostly collected Dodgers, that was cool. Here's the page for Dave Goltz, a total bust for the Dodgers (ugh, I can still see Art Howe rounding the bases after tagging Goltz's worthless offering for a two-run homer in that disaster of a special playoff game against the Astros in 1980):

Of course, the yearbook write-up on this page ("true workhorse," "most sought after player") had me thinking he was the second coming of Jim Palmer. Silly school boys, they'll believe anything.

For players that were just coming up from Triple A that year, who didn't have many cards issued yet (this was before the days of Fleer and Donruss, and WAY before the days of draft-pick cards, and first-year cards, and first-picture-of-a-future-player-in-diapers cards), the yearbook producers devised their own design, which was basically a black-and-white rip-off of 1978 Topps:

Nice 'fro, Pedro.

The yearbook is fun to look at now-and-then, but I don't look at the others all that much. I haven't collected baseball memorabilia besides cards for a long time. Over on Treasure Never Buried, there's a recent post on the RC Cola can collectibles. I don't know what you do with that stuff. Or coins, or bobbleheads, or blankets, for that matter. Or anything that's not 2 1/2-by-3 1/2, or a dimension close to that (love the Allen and Ginter minis).

But then I'm a card dweeb, so what do I know.