The easiest article I've ever written

Last week I finished off an article about my Dodgers collection for the main Beckett Baseball magazine.

I'm really not up on the main magazine -- the Vintage Collector magazine is more my speed -- but I believe Beckett Baseball has a regular series where they take a look at contributing writers' collections.

I hope I'm not putting words in anyone else's mouth who has written a story like that for Beckett, but that's the easiest article in the world to write. The only problem for me was not prattling on for pages and pages. I was limited to a 1,000 words, but initially what I wrote was three times that (and could've been 10 times that). Fortunately, I edit for a living, so I cut it down to a tidy 995 relatively easily, even though I was writing about my babies.

The surprising thing for me is that a lot of what was left in the article was about Ron Cey. I like to think I'm an equal-opportunity collector when it comes to the Dodgers -- sure, Ismael Valdez, I'll let you in the collection. But this article made me notice that probably the most interesting part of my collection involves Cey.

One of the things I addressed was my selection of Ron Cey autographed cards. Here they are:

That's 23 of them (although two are the same card). I think I have 24 in total, I'll have to see what's missing here.

It's a combination of through-the-mail signatures and certified cards. I think there are a couple that were signed at a card show and then sent to me.

They all contain Cey's recognizable scrawl and, of course, the No. 10 inside the "R" loop, which illustrated how special he thought his Dodgers career was.

This is all I had of Cey's signed cards until mr. haverkamp found a couple stragglers in a dollar box at The National a few weeks ago and nicely sent them to me.

Um, signed Cubs cards.

Cey Cubs autographs had never made it into my collection before because, let's face it, I don't think I should be perpetuating a lie on cardboard. It's nice that Cey signed these cards but you can tell by the lack of any uniform number in the signature, he wasn't really feeling it. 

I will add these to my Cey autograph totals but they'll go in a separate part of the autograph binder where all my non-Dodgers signatures go.

I'm still a team collector at heart. Even though a lot of my article was about Cey, the overall theme was the Dodgers.

Hope you pick up a copy when it's available (I don't have a clear idea when that will be). Although if you're a reader of the blog, it's probably going to be all stuff you've read before. Cey, Cey, Cey, blah, blah, The Penguin, blah, blah, blah, 1975 Topps, blah, blah, blah.

Of course there's no word-count limit here, so maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised about the brevity.