**Note: With the All-Star game taking place this week at Yankee Stadium, I will spend the next several days showcasing cards from my Yankee collection.

Josh Hamilton was simply inspiring yesterday at Yankee Stadium. His story is amazing — even though it has been told hundreds of times over during the last year and a half — but this blog will not be about Hamilton. Instead it is about Yankee Stadium … or a piece of it anyway. In this card, 2001 Topps Heritage Grandstand Glory Yogi Berra, resides a piece of a seat used in Yankee Stadium. But this isn’t like any generic seat card. It’s not just some non-descript piece of grainy wood resting inside the card’s window like the vast majority of seat cards. What we truly have here is a card with character.

This Berra card features a swatch of wood with original green paint, and then a second layer (red) on top, partly chipped off. The imperfection of the swatch shows the decade of use at The Stadium. Who knows how many people sat on this piece of wood while watching Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson, or even Yogi Berra. Or perhaps this seat is from decades before — the days of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Murder’s Row. How many championships has this seat seen? Many collectors do not think about memorabilia cards in this way. Because the market is so saturated with memorabilia cards, bats, jerseys, seats or otherwise, many collectors look at these non-patch cards and toss them aside or sell them on eBay for pennies on the dollar — after all it’s just a piece of wood, right? Well, yes and no. I’d agree that had this card looked like the rest. But the reality is this card is a beauty in every sense of the word. Just think, when we’re looking at the New Yankee Stadium next year, and occasionally getting updates about bulldozers and wrecking balls destroying The Cathedral much as they had Ebbets Field nearly five decades earlier, I’ll be able to look at this card see a piece of a seat that sat in the open air in The House That Ruth Built.

This entry was posted on July 15, 2008 at 12:20 am and is filed under Card of the Day with tags Babe Ruth, Ebbets Field, Home Run Derby, Josh Hamilton, Lou Gehrig, New York, New York Yankees, Reggie Jackson, Topps, Topps Heritage, vintage, Yankee Stadium, Yankee Stadium Seat, Yankees, Yogi Berra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.