Going, Going Gone…..

Anyone who doubts my geek/nerd bona fides should know this: I have a fairly large collection of baseball cards. This alone should land me in the Geek Hall of Fame, or at least earn me honorary membership.

I have a few thousand cards in my collection. Some I’ve had since I started collecting as a kid during the Ice Age. Others I bought as an adult, partly as a way to fill out my collection and replace some of the hundreds of cards I tossed away as a kid, little knowing that some of them would be worth thousands of dollars 50-odd years later (I’m talking to you, Nolan Ryan rookie card!).

(As an aside: The card that has sold for the most money ever is a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle in Gem-Mint condition, which sold for a record $12.6 million in 2022. That’s right – a baseball card sold for nearly $13 million. So it ain’t all geeks involved here, folks….)

I also started buying newer sets of cards as an adult, which are essentially worthless but still fun to open up. The vast majority of my cards were produced by Topps, though I also have other brands mixed in, mainly Fleer, Donruss, Upper Deck, and Score.

Topps had a monopoly on baseball cards during most of the 1950s through 1970s, which is why those cards still hold great monetary value on the collector’s market, while cards produced after 1980 are mostly pieces of cardboard with photos on the front and statistics on the back, and that you might be able to trade for a couple rocks, if you’re lucky.

As part of my baseball card hobby, I have a separate morbid nerd habit of making a running count of baseball cards featuring players from my childhood who have departed this mortal coil. That list continues to grow – not surprising, considering that my prime card collecting years as a kid roughly ran from 1967-1972.

A couple of baseball greats from my childhood recently joined the list of the dearly departed. One was Willie Mays, the legendary Giants center fielder who passed away on June 18 at the age of 93. Willie Mays was two things to me (and many others):

1. The most iconic athlete of the 1960s to millions of American kids who looked at Mays as a semi-mythical figure with one of the coolest names ever.
2. The greatest all-around baseball player ever – full stop, no arguments. He mastered the five tools: hitting for average, hitting for power, running, fielding and throwing. If he hadn’t spent a couple years in the military early in his career he probably would have broken Babe Ruth’s home run record before Hank Aaron did. Mays won two MVP awards and probably should have won at least six.

The other player who recently passed was Orlando Cepeda, who died on June 28 at age 86. “Cha Cha” was one of the early Latino stars in the majors, a native of Puerto Rico also known as the “Baby Bull.” His best years were also spent with the Giants, where he was a teammate of Mays.

But to me, Cepeda was and always will be the first baseman on the 1967-68 St. Louis Cardinals, my favorite baseball team of all time. He won the National League MVP in 1967 to lead the Redbirds – or, as he dubbed them, “El Birdos” – to the World Series title. Cepeda also helped El Birdos return to the World Series a year later, where they lost in spectacularly heartbreaking fashion to the Detroit GD Tigers, who beat my boyhood idol – the invincible Bob Gibson – in Game 7. Damn them….

So, two more baseball cards that I will ever after see in a different light, knowing that those faces will never smile or blink or laugh again.

*****

I’ve been very dedicated at organizing my baseball cards in various boxes and binders. One of the things I’ve done is collect at least nine Topps cards for every year I have been alive. The cards are placed in nine-card pages, and they must have one of the following: A Hall of Famer or future Hall of Famer; a St. Louis Cardinal; and a player with some relationship to my home state of North Carolina.

My favorite baseball card set is 1967 Topps, which is also the year I first got into collecting. I love the simple design, the photos were very good, and the cards have a cool green backing with stats listed vertically, the way I like ‘em. Up until a few weeks ago at least one player on my ’67 page was alive, a streak of 57 years that has seen the world change in once-unimaginable ways.

Here’s a look:

The following Geek/Nerd-approved tables show Hall of Fame players from my prime baseball card collecting years. Some brief explanation:

• Table 1 lists all of the Hall-of-Fame players from my prime baseball card collecting years. It doesn’t include players who retired before I got into it (Stan Musial, Yogi Berra, Warren Spahn) or players who were playing but not yet stars when I got into it (Nolan Ryan, Carlton Fisk). It doesn’t include players who should be Hall of Famers but aren’t (Dick Allen). It also doesn’t include Pete Rose.
• Table 2 lists the players from Table 1 who were still alive at the beginning of 2020, a particularly sad year for baseball deaths, coinciding with COVID-19. Among those who passed in 2020 or early 2021 include Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Joe Morgan, Whitey Ford, Phil Niekro, Hank Aaron and Don Sutton.
• Table 3 lists the ones who are still alive today, July 2, 2024.

Position	HOF Players During the Late 60s/Early 70s	Alive at the Beginning of 2020	Alive Today
First Base	Ernie Banks, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Tony Perez, Harmon Killebrew	Orlando Cepeda, Tony Perez	Tony Perez
Second Base	Joe Morgan, Bill Mazeroski, Rod Carew	Joe Morgan, Rod Carew, Bill Mazeroski	Rod Carew, Bill Mazeroski
Shortstop	Luis Aparicio	Luis Aparicio	Luis Aparicio
Third Base	Eddie Matthews, Brooks Robinson, Ron Santo	Brooks Robinson
Catcher	Johnny Bench	Johnny Bench	Johnny Bench
Left Field	Carl Yastrzemski, Willie Stargell, Lou Brock, Billy Williams, Tony Oliva	Carl Yastrzemski, Lou Brock, Billy Williams, Tony Oliva	Carl Yastrzemski, Billy Williams, Tony Oliva
Center Field	Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle	Willie Mays
Right Field	Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Al Kaline, Roberto Clemente, Reggie Jackson	Hank Aaron, Al Kaline, Reggie Jackson	Reggie Jackson
Right-handed pitcher	Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Tom Seaver, Gaylord Perry, Jim Bunning, Phil Niekro, Jim Palmer, Don Sutton, Hoyt Wilhelm, Catfish Hunter, Ferguson Jenkins	Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Tom Seaver, Gaylord Perry, Phil Niekro, Jim Palmer, Don Sutton, Ferguson Jenkins	Juan Marichal, Jim Palmer, Ferguson Jenkins
Left-handed pitcher	Sandy Koufax, Whitey Ford, Steve Carlton	Sandy Koufax, Whitey Ford, Steve Carlton	Sandy Koufax, Steve Carlton

If I did my cipherin’ right, the column that lists all the HOFers from that era has 40 names on it. The one on the far right has 14.

Of the original list, Roberto Clemente died the earliest, going down in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve, 1972, while on a humanitarian mission to Nicaragua following an earthquake there. Clemente was only 38 at the time and still an active player.

The oldest current living player on the list is Luis Aparicio, who turned 90 this year. NOTE: I originally thought it was Koufax, but was corrected by a Facebook commenter named Roy who is on one of the baseball card groups I joined. Koufax turns 90 next year. He started his career in 1955 when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, but didn’t really hit his stride until 1961. The youngest is Johnny Bench, who’s a youthful 76.  The most recent retiree on the list is Reggie Jackson, who played his last game in 1987.

*****

I’m not sure why I wrote this blog. Maybe to talk a little about baseball cards. Maybe to honor the players who meant so much to me when I was a kid in the American suburbs during the long ago, a time and place that might as well be fossilized and studied in a lab.

Probably because it gave me a chance to present some Geektastic tables and stats, which I don’t do enough of on this blog.

Nah, probably because these players, and their cards, represented an important part of a magical period of life, when I was young and blissfully ignorant, and never gave much thought to the larger world and its myriad problems, and got great joy out of little rectangular pieces of cardboard, and the players on them, and could look at that cardboard for hours, never suspecting that the players on them would ever die, or I would ever grow old enough to feel sad about it, knowing that I and we and us won’t be far behind.