Hoyt Wilhelm, etc.

I thought I'd open the cards aspect of my blog with a tribute to my main collection. When I first started collecting baseball cards again in 2006 after a brief stint of hockey card collecting (don't ask why, just fly past that), I wanted to have an actual player collection. So I thought to myself, "Who is my favorite baseball player?"

Not even close, the answer to that is Roberto Clemente. Courageous, always had time for the fans, and was a darn good baseball player as well. However, a quick look at the prices on his cards strayed me away from that alley. Now I thought, "Who is my favorite INEXPENSIVE baseball player that I could collect on a budget of...let's see what I have in my pocket...one dollar, two...why do I have these three pennies...three dollars and three cents?"

I'm not sure where I'd first heard of him, but I thought to myself, "Hoyt Wilhelm." I'd remembered reading in a book once that he was the first reliever elected to the Hall of Fame and he'd also hit a home run in his first ever major league at-bat in 1952. And never hit another one until retiring...in 1972. And...his cards didn't cost much.

So here's a sample of one of my favorites (which I received as a gift, by the way) :

That's his '53 Topps card. What? It's in bad condition, you say? I would think it would be, its 58 years old. I understand that some people care about the condition of their cards nowadays, but I ain't one of them. I have a formula (I think) : Worse condition = Cheaper. Cheaper = Better for me!

Oh, but I'm not only a player collector. So why is my blog called "dime boxes"? Certainly that '53 Hoyt Wilhelm isn't "low-end"!

Well, more to come on that later.