I can always use more color in my life

 

It's Easter weekend and one of my favorite parts of the holiday -- now that I'm required to limit my chocolate intake and nobody is buying me baseball card packs to put in my basket -- is all of the color.

 

I live where it's cold and gray just about six months out of the year and everyone's idea of fashion is to dress like a vampire. So I'm pretty desperate for something colorful by the time April hits. I also grew up in the '70s and '80s when people were not ashamed of color. For example, cards were always colorful, not something reserved for a parallel.

 

One of the best examples of that is my beloved 1975 Topps set. And one of the best spin-offs of that set is my beloved 1980 Baseball Immortals set.

 

I opined about the Baseball Immortals set a little over a year ago when I acquired cards 1-189 from it all in one shot. What a great day that was.

 

But I was still missing 10 cards from the set. Those were the ones added as other players were inducted into the Hall of Fame during the mid-1980s. I was told they were a little tricky to get.

 

I didn't do anything about it for several months and then I started nosing around.

 

Three of the cards came pretty quickly, McCovey, Doerr and Billy Williams.

Then after several more weeks or months of searching, I found the Lombardi, Hunter and Dandridge cards. Interestingly, when I showed the Dandridge card on Twitter, someone who was also collecting the set said that was the only card he was missing and he had given up on searching for it.

That intrigued me, because I had spotted the Dandridge card at least a couple of times recently on ebay.

But none of this was helping me get the four final cards, which were Arky Vaughn, Enos Slaughter, Hoyt Wilhelm and Lou Brock.

I had seem the Wilhelm and Brock around but the Vaughn only once and the Slaughter no times. I prepared myself for a good, long wait.

Then, after not even a week, there was a sale with several of the Baseball Immortals, about 24 or so and the four I needed were included!!! I'm still recovering from the pulled muscle I suffered hitting the "buy it now" button.

There they are, the final four, as colorful as a marching band.

There are a few edge and corner issues but nothing that concerns me. The set is now complete, every card from 1-199! What's even better is that other collector who was without the Dandridge found one after I told him I had spotted the card!

So I announced that my set was complete over there and, as usual, I got one of those "don't forget" people. "You forgot the variations, blah, blah, blah." Those "master-set" people.

I don't do "master sets." That's something I never heard of until the junk wax era hit, I think it's a conspiracy to keep people collecting the same set for the rest of their lives. Sure, I can see that for 1975 Topps, but for nothing else.

Some of the different color combos for some of the cards are fun, but I think I'm done thinking about collecting this. It's a wrap.

This is one of my all-time favorite oddball sets and has been from the time I was a young teenager and saw these for the very first time, probably from a TCMA or Renata Galasso mail-order catalog.

Interestingly, I store these in the same binder as a couple of other mail-order oddball sets from the glory days of Galasso, Collier and Aronstein.

This is the set that kicks off that binder. The subject matter is close to the same but the look couldn't be more different.

Yet I love this set just as much as the Baseball Immortals.

It will also come in handy when it starts snowing in May and I need a colorless set to fit the mood.