Hollywood bit players on baseball cards: Part 28

Who played Sheriff Bender, here pulling a gun on a bad guy, in a 1960 episode of Wagon Train?

It's former Cardinals and Dodgers star Wally Moon! The 1954 NL Rookie of the Year, the outfielder played five seasons for the Cardinals and seven seasons for the Dodgers. While in Los Angeles he won three World Series rings and managed to land a guest spot on his children's favorite TV show. It would be his only acting credit, though game footage with Moon can be seen in the 1962 Lee Remick film Experiment in Terror.

I have three of Moon's cards.

Art on the back: 1973 Topps football

The cartoons in the '73 football set were not player-specific or even team specific,  just random NFL facts. Still, there are some fun ones, like this one. Imagine how far away 1978 sounded to a 10-year-old in 1973.

I don't have a lot of '73's, but was able to find some entertaining cartoons. Like these . . .

. . . and these.

 

Time Traveling Again

Time to show off my cards from the monthly time travel trade with Diamond Jesters. He's almost up to his 200th time travel trade and will be having a giveaway for that trade, so now's a great time to start participating if you haven't yet.

Here's what I got this time around.

One vintage baseball card this time. Tigers outfielder Don Demeter wearing a cap with the Tigers' classic old English P.

Here's the oldest and best football card. I love seeing Yankee Stadium on football cards.

Three more 70's gridiron stars. The oddly cropped photo of Jack Rudnay is my favorite.

Finally, ten modern baseball cards. Lots of starpower here. Munson is a reprint but still a nice add to my Cards Your Mom Threw Out set.

Cards and vintage stuff: August 9th, 1938

Heavy fighting on two continents dominated the news on August 9th, 1938. In Spain, Republicans surprised Nationalist forces in the Battle of the Segre, while the Japanese continued to attempt their excursion into Soviet territory in the Battle of Lake Khasan.

It was Primary Day in much of the United States. Most notably, President Roosevelt unsuccessfully campaigned for liberal Democratic candidates in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. In Arkansas, Hattie Caraway, the first woman to be elected a U.S. Senator, narrowly won her state's primary, assuring her re-election. 

Meanwhile, in Pulaski County, Bernie Hoff was running for Sheriff and Collector for Pulaski County.

 

The primary date is on the back of the matchcover. Hoff appears to have served as Collector from 1929 to 1938, so it appears he lost this election. 

The team closest to Arkansas, the St. Louis Browns, were home and split a doubleheader with Cleveland. Harlond Clift (Harland on his 1942 Play Ball card and 1983 TCMA reprint) was a factor in both games. In the opener, he scored the first run and then, with the Browns behind Bob Feller 3-1 in the eighth, followed Glenn McQuillen's leadoff single with a single of his own, knocking Feller out of the game, and reliever Denny Galehouse blew the lead, as after a sac bunt Red Kress hit a 2-run single to tie the game, and after a couple more runners got on, pitcher Lefty Mills drove in the eventual winning run with a groundout. In the second game, Cleveland hurler Earl Whitehill did what Feller could not, shutting down the Browns for a whole game, en route to an 8-1 triumph. Clift did reach base three times, with a double and two walks.
 

Odds and ends

I've been getting lucky on a few ultra-cheap eBay auctions. I usually take a look at what is going for really cheap. Here's a bit of what I've gotten lately. None of these were worth their own post by themselves.

Eleven shiny blue foil cards from 2017 Topps Opening Day. Some reasonably big stars and of course very shiny cards. $1.11 - a dime a card. Funny thing is I only have two cards from the base set that year.

Eleven cards from 2004 Fleer Tradition. Not as interesting a set but $0.49 with no bids I figured "why not". No one else wanted them, and I needed ten of the eleven (Catalanotto's the dupe) so I'm happy with them.

1961 Topps Willie Kirkland. I bid a quarter as I always do, and I came up outbid at $0.27, which I knew meant it wasn't any higher. I bid $0.32 figuring it would eventually get topped but it didn't.

Finally, two autographed Phillies cards for $0.50. I've interviewed Glanville for my blog and that's a great card of his, so it's fun to have an autographed copy.

Johnny's Trading Spot contest - the prizes are changing

Won another contest at Johnny's Trading Spot. Those of you haven't entered because the cards haven't fit into your collection might want to rethink - looks like Johnny is shifting from modern sets with vintage players, to stars from 1990s and 2000s sets. Those of you who build those sets know it's easy to accumulate the commons rather quickly, but the big stars are a lot harder to get a hold of.

Rivera is of course my favorite here, but that photo of Frank Thomas looking like he's dancing is pretty great. I also like the one where Ripken is shaking a disembodied hand. These will certainly help my setbuilding for these Stadium Club and Upper Deck sets.

Vintage backgrounds: 1977 Topps Bob Forsch

Bob Forsch's 1977 Topps card is one of the better "parking lot" cards. It's close enough to the cars that someone who can tell a make and model of any older car could probably identify some of these.

There are plenty of interesting backgrounds in the '77 set but nothing else that really stood out for inclusion in a blog post. So what's next for this series? Lately, I've been more interested in the players' equipment, specifically what is written on them. So I plan to do yet another pass through my vintage cards and look for anything written on equipment that looks interesting. Maybe a name or nickname on a glove, something written on the bill of a cap, or a player's number on a bat knob that marks it as belonging to a player other than the person holding the bat. This may or may not end up being too ambitious for me, especially as I am also thinking of looking at this on my modern cards too. I'm thinking three or four of these at a time for a somewhat interesting blog post. What do you think?

 

Shiny Rockies

I was the only bidder on 13 mostly shiny cards for $0.95. I guess not many people care about the Rockies these days. They were a fun team when they first came into the league, but aren't very interesting these days, I guess. I see they're 40 games out in the standings right now. Still, I'll take cheap shiny cards from any team.

These were the non shiny cards. Still have a lenticular, a blue parallel, and Ian Desmond throwing his helmet.

Here are the shiny, foily cards. Hard to tell from the picture but even the A&G has some foil. I've grown to like X-Fractors more over the years.

1959 Topps High Number Lot

I was able to pick up a cheap lot of '59s in low-grade condition. I hadn't checked the card numbers, and was pleasantly surprised that it was mostly high-numbers. High numbers for the '59 set aren't as rare as for some other years, but they're still significantly rarer than other series for that set.

There were only three cards in the lot of 25 that were not high-numbers and two were Hall of Famers. Not a Hall-of-Fame job trimming these, but that doesn't bother me too much.

Here are some of the high-numbered cards I needed. Mike Garcia is the biggest name and probably best photo of these.

The rest of the high numbers were five all-star cards! My favorite of these is the Moose Skowron, of course.

I ended up with six cards to trade. There was a bit of duplication so there were two Blaylocks and Morgans. I already had a Bamberger, as well as Geiger and Arias. I think my other copies of Geiger and Bamberger are in pretty good shape, otherwise everything else to trade is pretty rough.

Lots of fun cartoons on the back, but I'll spare you those and just show you my favorite, which has instantly become one of my favorite vintage card backs.

Trade with Walkingshadow

I did another trade with Ben, not a blogger but Walkingshadow on TCDB. He needed a few of my '96 Donrusses, I needed a few of his '98 Scores. Here's what I got.

Nice collection of photos, from Score's swan song. I'm down to 17 needs for the set, mostly stars.