A common theme of many pop culture bloggers is to come up with a humorous side to our older collector obsessions, usually because of how greediness long ago swooped down and ravaged our once-sacred hobbies. None has been more deviant from its onus than the baseball card industry, that time-honored pastime for young boys who collected their heroes and traded with their pals, all for measly start-up cost of fifty cents per pack (plus stale bubblegum). Okay, so I stand corrected -- '70s Star Wars fans feel far more disenfranchised, but I digress.
These days, many of us have moved onto collecting records or tiki mugs or vintage clothes. There are some hot shots who collect Modernist furniture, and then there's the investor class... those endowed with law degrees and Med-School diplomas (who instill class envy in all of us pathetic losers) -- they buy up old tobacco cards from before World War I, encase them in hard-plastics, with a bare code and a standard-grading. Big whoop!
Besides loving the graphic design of cards like the 1960 Topps series (my all-time favorite) or the two-colour lithography of, say, the 1949 Bowman set, one thing I get great joy out of is seeing my heroes in all types of different uniforms. Something about the journey... the traveling... the changing of your home. I've had wanderlust ever since I was a kid, traveling across country with my family at age five, from Newark, Delaware to Monterey, California.
One of my dad's baseball heroes was Baltimore Orioles great Frank Robinson, who, by the 1980s (when I was playing little league), was the manager of the San Francisco Giants. Robinson later managed the Orioles in the late '80s, and I managed to get him to autograph my scorebook before a game in '88. But the more I found out about Frank, the more I enjoyed seeing his youthful-yet-sage-like image, especially in the later years, when he went from team-to-team as a manager. I wonder where he liked to eat after games in Cleveland? It's little stupid shit like that that a card can make me think about. How cool would it be to have dinner and talk baseball with Frank Robinson, even today? (I'm not getting laid this week, am I honey?)
Well, I recently went through some of my old cards which I'd bought in Cooperstown, NY in 1988, and came across this one Frank Robinson card, which has him captioned as the manager of Santurce, 1972. The back has no manufacturer designation, though I'm guessing it was TCMA, who did lots of these types of baseball sets back then. The back of the card does give Frank's lifetime achievments (nothing about the Santurce team), and says along the top: "Card No. 10 of 12, Series No. 9." Mind you, Frank wasn't a pro manager until 1975, and still played three more seasons after '72, so this one's quite the curio.
Santurce is likely the museum district of San Juan, Puerto Rico, which I strolled through myself back in February of 2000. Didn't see a baseball stadium there, but I am reminded of that 1972 Mike Schmidt Puerto Rican league baseball card that was always way out of my price-range when I was a kid.
Anyone know anything more about this Robinson card?
