I found this card in one of the $0.50 portions from my 'local' stack sale seller - I claimed it because I knew it was kind of odd off the bat, featuring not a baseball player, but an
author who has written his fair share of baseball books.
I keep thinking he is one of the experts they kept showing in Ken Burns' Baseball miniseries from the 1990s - the authority figures that look to be at least in their late 70s or older that share an anecdote about an old-timey player and/or talk about the good old days.
I'm not sure how the card came to be to be - I assume it was a custom card printed professionally, so the cards can be casually passed around at various book signings and other events.
I wasn't even really paying attention the the idea that it looks like it was signed on the back of the card - that's kind of a nice bonus.
While it's not the strangest card printed, it's just not like a regular card - maybe having it in hand, takes me different places in my collecting mind.
5 comments:
Seaford is a town on Long Island. Looks like Honig is from the NY area, though I could not find anything specifically tying him to Seaford online, perhaps he went to high school there.
Very cool find. I think Big Leagues Cards were a type of "pay for your own card" deal. I have several different of guys that maybe never had an actual baseball card, or maybe they went on to be a coach or manager and wanted a card for that. I don't see them in my Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.
Yeah, as above, Big League Cards was a custom printing service. People would buy them as gifts--you know, some kid in your family is in Little League, have a baseball card of them printed. Others as promotional giveaways. Like Big League Chew gum, it was promoted by Jim Bouton. There's a Washington Post article about them here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1987/02/19/when-success-is-in-the-cards/d06c5f15-21ab-44b5-af3d-ad3669d101a9/
Honig is a baseball author, known for "Baseball When The Grass Was Real". I'm guessing he had the card printed up for signings and such, if people didn't buy a book or didn't want the book signed.
I had seen a few cards with this same back before, but never knew what they were from. Thanks to your posting this, I, and everyone else now do :)
Terrific find.
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