Bummed

Last night I was phenomenally bored with everything taking place on the internet. Bored by the blogs. Bored by Twitter. Bored by baseball. Just a whole lot of bleah.

I wanted to attribute it to the fact that it's the baseball offseason. But normally that doesn't faze my interest in baseball cards. I'm just as interested in cards in November as I am in the middle of June.

And the fact that there is very little new card product at this time of year doesn't affect my mood either. I can pick up those repacks of cards from the '80s and be just as happy, if not happier.

So, I don't know what it was that made me feel that way. But to help chase away the card blues, I picked up my 1,800-page Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards for a little light reading.

Actually I was trying to find some of the obscure cards that people have been sending me lately. You folks are really making me work.

I didn't find much of what I was looking for, but I did come across the 1974 TCMA 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers set listing. One of the first TCMA sets, it paid tribute to The Boys of Summer. I wrote about the cards in one of my first posts. And I'm dangerously close to repeating myself in this post, so I'll ignore most of the details of the set. You can read about it in that old post if you like.

This was one of the first sets I ever purchased through a mail-order catalog. And it was cool seeing it for the first time listed with prices next to it. I've never seen it listed that way before (the information in this book is so vast that I could never uncover everything that's in it).

It's a 40-card set and every player who had even one appearance with the Dodgers is featured in the set.

Every player.

I cross-referenced the set with baseball-reference.com and it checked out. TCMA didn't miss a single player on that team. And it included the coaches and the manager, too.

This year is the 60th anniversary of the famous Boys of Summer team. I've heard some mention of the anniversary, but not nearly as much as I think there should be. I guess the time period is just getting too distant for people today. Not enough shiny.

But I thought I'd show all of the cards in the set here, to recognize the anniversary of one of the greatest teams in baseball lore in my own way.

Here they are:

There's one card missing from the pages that I use to store this set. That's because I had it signed through the mail by Brooklyn Dodgers starter Carl Erskine.

He's in a special spot.

The pages that store the cards are old-style pages with bigger and looser pockets than your current pages. I had to use those kind of pages because a lot of the cards aren't uniform and some are too big to fit into the pages.

This annoys me a little because the pages aren't the nice clear ones you can buy today. They're rather dingy and over-sized and I exclude them from my Dodger binders for that reason.

But thanks to this exercise I will no longer be excluding them from the binders. They will get their rightful place with the rest of the Dodger cards.

And I'm no longer bummed.

Thanks to the Bums.