I am still struggling with the Bob Feller post, though it is no fault of the commenters on my previous post. There were good suggestions there. I am more put off by the amount of research it would take to bring a fresh look to a post about Feller. Time is at a premium at the moment, so it is hard to set aside the time. In the background I have also been struggling with the direction of my collection. As a vintage set builder, I am finding myself caught between Scylla and Charybdis*.
On the one hand, my baseball set journey is down to sets with expensive high numbers. On the other hand, there are vintage sets for basketball, football and hockey I am interested in and, while they are more affordable, they seem less available. As set builder, I just couldn't bring myself to build a low number only set. I have to build it all. So, I am faced with a future where I only get a few cards at a time with significant dry spells in between. So, I wondered, what can I do to have a regular collecting fix without breaking the bank? And it finally occurred to me.
As a young man, I loved the annual Street and Smith Baseball Yearbook. I had planned to buy the editions I had as a teen. The prices seemed reasonable, so why not try to collect the entire series? Normally, these types of questions are a fool's errand and end with me deciding the price tag was too high to take it on. This time it actually looks achievable.
Street and Smith was published annually from 1941 through 2005, when the brand was absorbed into The Sporting News. For example, here is the 1943 edition.
It cost me $25 delivered. So, pretty affordable. The one thing that will make it a challenge is that, at some point, the publisher decided to have multiple different covers for each edition. Based on the incomplete checklist I found at Beckett, this appears to have started around 1963. One problem is that the Beckett checklist is incomplete. There are covers I know exist that aren't on the list. The second problem is that the publisher got a little wild at the end and it appears that the final three editions (2003 through 2005) had 15 different covers each. At the moment, I have a list of 178 different versions over the 65 year history. 15 different covers for a year seems excessive, but given that copies of those years go for around $5 it isn't insurmountable. I am mainly going to focus on getting at least one for each year. the way these things work out, others will drop into my lap without even trying. At some point I will have to decide if I really want 15 slightly different versions of the same edition.
* Believe it or not that reference has nothing to do with the release of the Odyssey movie. I actual read the book several years ago, though I found it tedious. I do like the allusion, but it is not something that is used in normal conversation. So, you get to deal with it a little bit of pretentiousness on my part.
What I am listening to: Green Manalishi by Judas Priest
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