Morsch Tells a Vague Story(ies)

Outta Feltfield: The magic of baseball cards continues well into adulthood
Published: Wednesday, February 24, 2010

By Mike Morsch
Executive Editor

It's a bad sign when the name of your own blog is misspelled. I assume that "Outta Feltfield" will include discussions on pool table coverings, etc. After leaving a comment in that vein, my comment was deleted and the spelling was corrected.

There has always been a little magic in baseball cards. They almost always remind me of a story that makes me smile.

I think Morsch just writes these and doesn't review them, because I would certainly correct two consecutive sentences that so clumsily use "always." And as we shall see, this story that brings a smile to the author's face is pretty hard to peg down.

Pitchers and catchers reported last week, which is the first sign for me that maybe all this snow won’t hang around forever. As a nod to the start of the new season, I decided I would buy my first pack of 2010 Topps baseball cards, kind of my own official kickoff ceremony.

I go way back with baseball cards. The first time I remember my dad buying me a pack of Topps cards was in 1964, and the first card I remember seeing was of Gus Triandos, who longtime Phillies fans will remember. It was a bit confusing for a 5-year-old because the card said “Phillies” on it but Gus was pictured wearing a Detroit Tigers hat. (He had been traded to the Phillies in December of 1963 and had not yet been pictured in a Phillies uniform when the baseball card was produced.)

So is this the story? His dad buying him a pack of Topps cards in 1964? Plus, two sentences of meaningless detail on the history of Gus Triandos.

And it’s a bit odd to think about more than 40 years later that the first card I remember was a Phillies player. I would have had no idea then as a lad growing up in the middle of Illinois that suburban Philadelphia would someday be my home and that the Phillies would someday be my team.

Wow. What an amazing coincidence. Did you know that "Kennedy" and "Lincoln" have the same number of letters?

The pack of cards cost a nickel, I think, and I got it at a little diner called “Ginny’s” in South Pekin, Ill., a town of about 1,000 people. That was where my dad was born and raised, and by 1964 he, a couple of his brothers and some of his other South Pekin cronies were playing what was called “town team” baseball. Many of the small towns in that area of Illinois had teams and every Sunday during the summer months we would be at one of those local ballparks, watching my dad play baseball. He was in his mid-30s at the time and still a pretty good ballplayer.

Okay, so… is this the same story he mentioned above - how he acquired his first pack of cards? And what the heck - nobody cares about the town of South Pekin, Ill.

After each game, our family would join other team members at a local watering hole or at Ginny’s diner. My folks weren’t drinkers, and even though the rules for 5-year-olds frequenting taverns in 1964 seemed to be a little more liberal than they are today, we’d usually end up at the diner for a cheeseburger.

… What? I'm confused… are they at Ginny's or at the "local watering hole" - or are they one in the same? To sum up (I think): people went to Ginny's or the watering hole; his parents didn't drink; kids could go in bars; they went to the diner. This paragraph is unnecessary.

Ginny’s had a glass case near the front door on which the cash register sat, and it just happened to be at the perfect eye level for a 5-year-old to peer in and look at all the candy, bubble gum and of course, the baseball cards. And that’s how I got started collecting baseball cards, with that first pack out of Ginny’s glass treasure case.

Keep that in mind: 1964 - "And that's how I got started."

Through the years, I don’t recall my dad ever collecting ballcards himself, although he certainly was aware how much joy they brought to his young son. I recall in 1971 — and I know it was 1971 because of the style of the Topps baseball cards from that year — that my dad provided me with a lifelong memory.

Alright - so is THIS the story that always brings a smile to his face? The 1971 lifelong memory story? And what the heck, is he claiming he can ID a baseball card by its year of issue, based on the style of said card?

Pop was an elementary school superintendent, as I have mentioned many times in this space. As such, he carried a briefcase, one of those hard-shelled ones. One day he came home from school and called me into the dining room, where he sat his briefcase up on the table. When he clicked open the latches and lifted the lid, the case revealed what appeared to me to be dozens of packs of unopened ballcards, lined up throughout the entire briefcase like stacks of $100 bills ready to be used as ransom money, just like in the movies. You can imagine how cool that was to a little kid.

I sat out on my front stoop and opened all those packs of 1971 Topps cards, complaining because I got seven Pete Rose cards. I was a Pirates fan then — 1971 became even bigger for me because the Pirates eventually won the World Series that year — and didn’t much care for Rose and the Cincinnati Reds. (Years later, in the mid-1980s, I packaged some of those extra 1971 Pete Rose cards into trade deals that got me a 1960 Mickey Mantle, a 1963 Sandy Koufax and a 1964 Willie Mays, so it turned out pretty good after all.)

To be honest, at this point I stopped reading. I felt like Steven Seagal confronting the naked cake girl in "Under Siege" - "What kind of babbling bull*&$# is this???"

I collected baseball cards off and on through the years, well into adulthood. And my mom was one of those moms who didn’t throw out all my old cards — we were a baseball family and mom would never have done that. So I have all those old cards from when I was a kid.

And that’s part of the history that prompted me to buy a box of 10 packs of Topps cards last week on the very day that pitchers and catchers reported. One attraction of this year’s Topps cards is that one in every six packs contains a redemption card, good for one original Topps card from a past year. You could get a 1957 Hank Aaron, a 1979 Bombo Rivera or last year’s Ryan Howard.

"And that's part of the history"… what is? He told two separate stories, each filled with paragraphs of inconsequential detail, all leading to… what? I don't understand this at all.

The first official card I laid eyes on this year was Angels shortstop Erick Aybar. The first Phillies player I got was Roy Halladay, although he is still pictured in a Toronto Blue Jays uniform.

I did get one redemption card and logged into the Topps Web site and typed in my code, to see what card I got. It was a card of a player named Bill Zepp, who had a cup of coffee as a pitcher for parts of three seasons with the Minnesota Twins and Detroit Tigers. It looks like he was around long enough to have his picture on only one year’s bubblegum card, the card that eventually will be mine.

From 1971. And the magic continues. How cool is that?

Um… what's from 1971? The Bill Zepp card? Because that's not cool. That's a crappy card to get stuck with.

Did he mean the suitcase full of cards he got from 1971? Because I thought he got his first cards in 1964 at Ginny's, when he stated "And that's how I got started collecting baseball cards."