1953 Bowman Color

I picked up a lot of these for a dollar each. 30 for $30. Pretty hard to get these for a quarter each and they are beautiful cards. I wish they had the names on the front - I'm not going to pretend I can recognize most of these by face alone. Still the photography is really fantastic and I enjoy looking at them. (And if you haven't seen it yet, the Adventures of a Baseball Card Collector blog just did a terrific post with a lot of research revealing that this is the most error-filled set of all time.)

The first one here, Red Schoendienst, is off to the side because it's the only one I had already. It's available for trade, there's tape on the front but it's better than my other one which has paper loss. Also my first Joe Garagiola card, those are hard to come by. Great shot of Yankees star Allie Reynolds too.

Charlie Grimm and Joe Nuxhall's cards both show nice views through the Polo Grounds grandstands to the apartment buildings behind. Grimm's card also notes that he is a noted teller of "German dialect stories".

Johnny Lipon is fielding a ball with a blue stamp on it. The purple sky on Cass Michaels's card is interesting. I don't know if that's a print defect or a cool sunset. I did not realize when I bought this lot that most of the cards were from the somewhat-tougher high numbers. These last three photos are all from that part of the set.

There's Tigers star Johnny Pesky posing at Yankee Stadium. My first Pesky card too. I think he might have played for another team in addition to Detroit. Larry Miggins's card has some of the same pink sky as Cass Michaels.

It wasn't intentional on my part but there's a lot of blue sky with clouds here. Some paper loss even adds to the cloudy effect. From whatever angle though, these close-up glimpses of early '50's ballplayers are really nice to add to my collection.