September Vintage Card Show - Random Crap - Casey

lol it's december and I've barely posted any of these things

GTFO YOU LOOSER

Casey is one of my favorites and I've been subconsciously building a player collection of his without realizing it. His 1940 Play Ball card still eludes me however. This 1959 All Star card is cool and a scarce high number.

It also has drawings on the back! That sly ol' Casey... talking all funny... that couldn't possibly backfire and get him fired after a World Series loss and land him on an expansion team.

Oh.

Damn Yankees.

Sick Art

No, the art is not necessarily sick, but I sure am. Sick enough to where I don't want to take the time to write a post about Charlie Silvera (SPOILERS!) for my cartoon series so I'm copping out and posting a sketch instead. Don't worry, I'll live, but you really don't want to know what I've got. Actually, by making that statement, you know exactly what I've got so sorry about that. I can write an art post in my sleep so I'll go ahead and knock this one out lickety split and go back to watching the game. And crying when baseball season is over later tonight. Or crying because there's a game tomorrow and I have to work. Wait, there's no crying in baseball. I'll watch The Notebook on Netflix instead. Then there will be no crying, just gagging. Screw it, WATCH PONIES.

Ok, onto ze arts. Those of you have have been watching my mid-life crisis intently, you'll know that on September 1st I decided I would take some time every day to practice drawing for a month and see what happens. The first thing I drew on the 1st? A tiny scribble of Pinkie Pie smaller than a dime on some scratch paper at work. I have a scan of it... on my dead flash drive. BACK UP YO SHIT KIDS. The first thing I drew that evening when I sat down with a #2 pencil and a stack of printer paper? The Ol' Perfessor.

Casey here is kind of a baseline for my art I guess. I'd drawn some cartoons to stick in trade packages and drunkenly scribbled some girls and stuff at 2AM but I had not until that point sat down and seriously tried to draw something. Why Casey Stengel? Well, I love Casey. The man was an insane genius and those are the best kind of geniuses. I had a card of his sitting on my desk staring at me. And Casey has an AWESOME face. I really like drawing old gnarly looking dudes for some reason. Yes I know he's a Yankee, and I've already posted Yankee art and Y U DRAW YANKEE? I like the Yankees, at least old Yankees before right around the Don Mattingly era.

So here's my first drawing of this grand experiment. #2 is up in the title image if you're interested. The sketch page for this drawing is kinda ridiculous, actually. I've set up a Deviant Art account and as soon as I re-scan everything and figure out how to upload I'll start posting all my crap over there. Oh, I'll still be posting it over here too, you aren't getting off the hook that easy.

So, can any of you figure out which card I sketched? I sure hope it's not that hard to figure out...

June Vintage Show Top Ten #8

Two of my favorite things in one card: 1960 Topps and the Ol' Perfessor.

1960 Topps #227 Casey Stengel

Look at this wonderfully beat up old mess. The card is looking rough too. Yankees are always at a premium when buying vintage cards, but thankfully the rich card snobs who love snapping up Yanks don't like the crummy grades. You know, the ones where PSA sends the card back to you ungraded  along with a restraining order. This is one of those cards. Big ol' crease right across the NY logo, another going right through his schnozz and grimy scuff marks everywhere. Looks like a Red Sox fan got a hold of this one. There was actually two of these in the bargain box. This scuffed up hot mess and one that was so worn that it had corners rounder than playing cards. I chose this one for some reason.

1960 Topps manager cards have completely cartoonized backs. Some of the other manager's cartoons have fairly generic faces drawn but not Stengel's. The artist made sure that Casey's cartoon looked as much as the Old Man of the Mountain as possible. Even the cartoon of his World Series exploits makes him look like a craggy Dick Tracy villain. The artist's tour de force in this set has to be Casey explaining exactly how he won all those pennants to a nonplussed Oscar Madison. "It's a habit I developed... George Weiss keeps sending me Hall of Famers, and I keep winning pennants..."  Note carefully that Casey was once the manager of my beloved Braves! Remember when Joe Torre was hired as manager of the Yankees and everyone was like " Torre? THAT bum? How the hell did he get the job? Got some incriminating pictures of George or something?" Yeah, it was pretty much the same thing for Casey after managing the hapless Braves (and Bees). I still claim Casey as a bona-fide Brave. Now I gotta track down his 1940 Play Ball card.

I haven't really been paying attention to the Topps 60 thing

But if this card ain't on it, the whole thing is a friggin' sham.

I'm feeling a little sorry for Mets fans.

There are a few Mets fans out there who understandably feel like this:


Just remember folks...

It could always be worse. Much worse.

Card Of the Week 9/29/08

Card of the Week is of the Old Perfesser, Casey Stengel. I didn't realize it when I started this post, but Casey passed away on this day back in 1975. Casey was a pretty good outfielder for the Dodgers, Pirates, Giants and Braves. He's better known as the manager of the Yankees during their heyday in the 50's, and lead the team to 7 World Series Championships, including 5 straight from 1949-1953. He's best known for being a bit of a nut who ran circles around the brutal New York press with his "Stengelese" - baseball ramblings that straddled the line between genius and insane. He worked his magic with the press as manager of the Yankees and the expansion New York Mets. And oh Lord did the Stengelese come in handy as manager of the hapless '62 Mets. Casey both played for and managed the Braves, so the combination of team loyalty and my love for eccentric screwballs who mangle the language has made him one of my all time favorites. In fact, his 1940 Play Ball card where he is pictured as manager of the Braves is in my top 5 "Dream cards" list along with the '35 Goudey Ruth and '54 Topps Aaron cards. I don't have that card, but I do have this one:

There's the Perfesser in his Boston uniform! So what the heck is this, a reprint? Let's check the back:

1942 Play Ball? What the heck? Play Ball didn't release a baseball card set in '42 due to the war. But TCMA sure did in 1983... In fact between '83 and '84 they printed up sets of cards using the Play Ball design to fill in the war years of 1942 to 1946 when no major baseball card sets were released. The cards are standard sized, follow the 1940 design very closely and have different color ink for the borders on the front for each year. Like a lot of oddball issues from the '80s not a whole lot of collectors are familiar with them. You have to watch out for sellers trying to pawn them off for the same price as an original Play Ball card. The best option is just to buy a complete set, some of which can be found at Fritsch. There's also a second 1942 Play Ball set floating around out there too from independent manufacturer HRT/RES. " Independent manufacturer" being a nice way of saying a couple of card collectors in Philly who got together and printed up some of their own sets in the '70s. These aren't 'official' issues and as such are sort of on the fringe of collecting, but for pre-war enthusiasts without a whole lot of cash these kind of oddball sets along with reprint sets are a good value and a neat way to find some new cards for a team collection.

I already have a few legitimate vintage Stengel cards (although one of them I'm pretty sure is a fake, but that's a subject for another post) but none of them show him as a Brave. This one here isn't an original from the '40s, but it's from a set that was printed when I first started collecting, so it's original enough for me.