1949 LEAF
This set really sounded the starting gun for postwar baseball cards. I'm fleshing out the history of my Leaf cards through the lens of player nicknames. This month it was the turn of "Wig" Weigel, a part-time catcher who would have played his entire MLB career without a baseball card had Leaf left him off the checklist. It wouldn't have been an obscure fate for the White Sox backstop. Nobody was getting baseball cards made during WW2. Even when the cards came back, it would take a full generation to solve the mystery of exactly who was in the set.
STILL WORKING ON ADDING 1952 TOPPS...
I profiled two more cards from my '52 set building project, taking the total number of explored cards up to 259 out of 407. One of the players didn't do much on the diamond, aside from giving up 4 home runs to Mickey Mantle and walking Eddie Yost 17 times. Lou Kretlow, however, managed to transition his wild baseball career into an even wilder world record on the golf course. Johnny Schmitz, on the other hand, was an excellent pitcher before seeing his career turn into that of a journeyman as soon as he appeared in the '52 Topps checklist.
Collecting Update: I picked up my third Monte Irvin card from the set this month after seeing one come up for sale at a price too good to pass up. This is becoming a habit. I supposedly have another '52 Hall of Famer on the way to my mailbox. It has been sliding back and forth on frozen highways between two far off cities and I am hoping it eventually makes it way to my collection.
...AND WRITING ABOUT REFRACTORS
January also saw the second annual report on the state of the landscape facing collectors of the 1993 Finest Refractor set. It's a streak! Feel free to skip this one if you're not deep into the weeds of this set (You're either really into this or you're not). I am continuing to track the availability of each card in the checklist and am working on additional ways to analyze this data. Eventually the goal is to develop a scoring system that will automatically identify and rank which cards set collectors should prioritize, details that are so sorely out of date or lacking in their entirety from a set wrapped in myths and legends. While this functionality is not yet built into the public facing part of the report, it is being tested internally to see if the output holds up against actual experience. I want to build the resource I wish was available to me when I started chasing these cards. Let me know if you have tried to build or seen anything similar for a particular set.
NEXT MONTH: WALLET CARDS!
My birthday comes next month and I've spotted a card-shaped present tucked away in the closet. The changing of the calendar also means it will be time for my favorite part of collecting: New wallet cards. February will be a period of nothing but Wallet Card posts. There will be extended studies of multiple past selections (1987 Topps Bo Jackson, 1995 Pinnacle Griffey, plus another card). There will also be the unveiling of the 2026 Wallet Cards, and an insane sendoff for the cards subjected to this treatment in 2025. Bring hearing protection. It gets loud.
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