When I picked up trading card collecting as my COVID-19 Pandemic Hobby (TM), I was thinking it would be an inexpensive way to reconnect with a hobby I had as a kid, and finally get a hold of some of the cards I could never get way back then. Well, I was wrong on both counts.
While things were cheap when I started, I ultimately wasn't finding a lot of stuff I really enjoyed. I mean, "Santas Around the World" sounds like it could be interesting; however, the reality was that most of the cards I was finding were cheaply made cash grabs. I quickly got disillusioned.
So, I decided to focus more on baseball cards. It was something I collected as a kid, but now, I had more money to sink into the hobby. Unfortunately, again, I found that the baseball card hobby had become a warped and twisted version of the hobby I once knew. In many aspects, it was closer to a lottery or flat out gambling than it was about collecting cards of the best players in the game.
Then I decided that while I would dabble in the current baseball card market from time to time, my focus was going to be on one classic release that I would try and collect the entire set. After looking around, and reading up on things a bit, I came upon 1955 Bowman as the set I would collect. There are several reasons for this. These are just a few of them, more will be revealed as the project goes on.
First off, the card design is like no other set ever made. At a time when televisions were just starting to make their way into homes across the country, Bowman decided to make a set of cards where the borders looked like the giant, boxy console tv sets of the time. The design of the cards is extremely divisive, even today. I love the 1950's style, but the fact the edges get damaged and bent so easily makes it hard to get nice cards these days. Some people think they look dated and lame.
Next up are the card backs. On the left half of most cards, there is a short paragraph about the player. Sometimes it's a story about who they looked up to, their greatest moment in baseball, or sometimes it's just a life story that goes places you cannot imagine. Most of them are sweet and inspiring, some of them are just strange.
The next thing that I love about the cards is just how messy the whole set is. For no good reason, there are two styles of television set on the fronts. Many card have the wrong player named on the front. The cards aren't a uniform size. Sometimes it looks like the printing plates shifted, so you get crazy looking double images on some cards. At times it looks like a set of cards made by people that didn't know how to work a printing press, despite the fact that Bowman had made cards for 20+ years at this point. For whatever reason, I kind of find that charming. I know. I'm weird like that.
Despite the messiness, Bowman took a lot of risks with this set. For one, it was one of the largest sets of cards that had been made at the time, clocking in at 320 cards. This meant Bowman went much deeper onto rosters to find content for their set than their rival Topps did. Bowman also had the extra difficulty of dealing with exclusivity contracts which didn't allow certain stars of the game to have Bowman cards (including Jackie Robinson and Ted Williams). While Bowman managed to keep some players away from Topps (the two sets only shared roughly 40 cards), lacking certain players dramatically hurt them in the market.
To make up for the lack of some stars, Bowman dug DEEP onto rosters to find players, and in some cases made cards of players that hadn't seen the field in a couple of years, just because they were talking about a contract. They also made cards for umpires. Yes. Umpires.
So a little bit about why I'm collecting this set. I plan on making posts...occasionally. I want to give each card I find a spotlight, so I'm going to research each player I find and give them a short career retrospective as I highlight their cards.
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