This hobby is funny.  So many of us get caught up in the day-to-day grind of buying packs and looking for the good stuff, only to put stacks of cards away with the idea that we will sort them later. And we all know that rarely gets done as planned.

I’m now in the midst of what I’m calling the Great Purge of 2015, which is basically code for getting rid of almost all non-PC items. I did this once before in 2010 and ended up using the proceeds from the sale to buy a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle rookie card.

  
Well, I do have my eyes set on something big for my collection, but the other day I was thinking about the fact that I don’t have a single good card of Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby in my collection.

I was eying a relic card, but what I really wanted was something old. Something that could eventually make its way into my showcase.

Hornsby’s first documented card was produced in 1917 and over the following decade and a half he had a few others produced, which made things tricky when it came to deciding which one I wanted to add to my collection. 

I had to decide between buying a card showcasing a artist rendition — a poor one at that — or Hornsby, or a card that showed a picture of him.

Ultimately I settled on this 1927 York Caramels card of Hornsby, which is one of the nicer and not-so-easy to find of his cards from his playing days

  
Do you realize that Hornsby not only won the Triple Crown, but he did it twice, one of only two players to achieve the feat more than once. The other guy was Ted Williams.  

Additionally, Hornsby finished his career 70 hits shy of the magical 3,000 mark, tallied a .358 career batting average, three times led the league in batting with an average over .400, and twice was voted the Most Valuable Player of his league.  Oh, and he wasn’t elected to the Hall of Fame until his fifth year of eligibility. Crazy. 

This entry was posted on October 8, 2015 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Hall of Famers, New Addition with tags baseball, baseball cards, Rogers Hornsby, St. Louis Cardinals, Triple Crown. 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.