{"id":5984,"date":"2018-09-17T09:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T09:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/2018\/09\/17\/inside-the-pack-my-favorite-card-of-all-time\/"},"modified":"2018-09-17T09:00:20","modified_gmt":"2018-09-17T09:00:20","slug":"inside-the-pack-my-favorite-card-of-all-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/inside-the-pack-my-favorite-card-of-all-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Pack: My Favorite Card of All Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have no ties to the New York Yankees. I have no ties to their former captain, Thurman Munson. I wasn’t alive to watch him play. I wasn’t alive to collect the 1971 Topps set as it was released.<\/p>\n

None of that matters. Card number 5 from the 1971 Topps set, of Thurman Munson, is my favorite card of all time.<\/p>\n

One day when I was a kid, my dad came home from the flea market with a few binders of old baseball cards, and contained among the binders were a few dozen 1971 Topps cards. I fell in love with the set right then and there, which, as I’ve noted in other posts, I completed over the course of about 15 years.<\/p>\n

The binders contained a mix of names I’d never heard of at the time and big stars. Thurman Munson was somewhere in the middle for me. I was only 10 or 11 years old, and I knew he was a great player, but I also knew he wasn’t a Hall of Famer. But when I saw the card, I was entranced.<\/p>\n

I know why this set stuck with me so well: it was the first vintage set I was exposed to more than one card at a time; my dad bought the cards for me; the black borders were unique. However, I don’t really have a good reason why this particular card captured my love so quickly. I do have a few theories, though. It’s one of the few horizontally-oriented cards in the set, and that just made it cool. It’s got the big ol’ Topps All-Star Rookie trophy on the front, almost as tall as Munson himself; more cool points. It’s the only card of a player I can think of where the second year Topps card is worth more than the Topps rookie card. The photograph is incredible, a true action shot of a play at the plate, and yet it leaves you wondering: was the runner safe or out?<\/p>\n

The version of this card in my dad’s haul from the flea market was beat up pretty badly. I didn’t wait too long until I got a better copy…and then another better one…and then another. Unlike most cards that I upgrade, I don’t always sell the poorer versions of this card: I like it that much.<\/p>\n

\"\"
I never bought this card. I regret it to this day.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’ve also found over the years that the card is quite the conversation starter among collectors. As a freshman in college I went to a new card shop in town. The owner and I started talking about 1971, and I told him about my love of this card; he said, “Oh man, you gotta see this!” He pulled out a 1\/1 manufactured relic from 2005 Topps Rookie Cup, a product that had just been released (and is now one of my favorite modern releases ever, but perhaps that’s a story for another post). This card was an original Munson, with the trophy area cut out and a manufactured relic trophy in its place. It was so cool, and he wanted $100 for it. I was a poor college student and that was out of the question. I’ve never regretted not buying something more, and I’m constantly hoping the card will resurface one day. But what I don’t regret is the conversation; the card shop owner became one of my closest friends, someone I still speak to and see regularly.<\/p>\n

At card shows, I frequently talk to both dealers and buyers about the card, but at this year’s National something different happened. A buyer at my table had been asking me trivia questions for a bit, and when the topic of my favorite card came up, he asked me: “Who’s sliding into home plate?”<\/p>\n

I was stupified. Not only did I not know the answer, I never even thought to try and find out the answer over the 20 years I had been in love with this card. I told him how embarrassed I was that I didn’t know the answer, and I was relieved when he told me that he had no idea, either.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, the internet knows all, but it turns out that for Bruce Markusen over at The Hardball Times<\/a>, this wasn’t an easy one to figure out. He did eventually learn that it was Chuck Dobson, a name that’s now seared in my memory as another piece of my favorite card of all time.<\/p>\n

Spoiler alert: he was safe at the plate.<\/p>\n

What’s your favorite card of all time? Comment below for a chance to win a grab bag from Big League Cards!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have no ties to the New York Yankees. I have no ties to their former captain, Thurman Munson. I wasn’t alive to watch him play. I wasn’t alive to collect the 1971 Topps set as it was released. None of that matters. Card number 5 from the 1971 Topps set, of Thurman Munson, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"amp_validity":null,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5984"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mojobro.com\/bigleaguecards\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}