Over the weekend I bought this great 1910 T218 Mecca Jimmy Walsh card for $7. (By the way, it turns out that Walsh and I share a hometown (Newton, Mass.).) And while I was busy scrounging in my pockets and smoothing out dollar bills on the store counter to pay for that great boxing card, over at the latest Mastro auction at The National in Chicago, a guy paid $1.62 million for a copy of the T206 Honus Wagner. All this gets me thinking: Can you imagine buying a beat-up copy of any card of a baseball player from that era for less than $10?

The whole atmosphere surrounding baseball history is singular in its intensity. I guess that's what you get for being the national pastime, but when you step back, the whole situation seems a bit unreal. I mean, why isn't the same focus fixed on old football or boxing cards? I guess there's the argument that that focus is present, but you have to add the signifier that it's only present to a certain extent, and never at the fever pitch baseball experiences on a daily basis.




Here's what's keeping these other sports back: there are no 'white whale' cards in either sport that have pervaded the national conscience like baseball's T206 Wagner.

Wagner Sells for $1.62 million (AP)

Dear Friends,

What will you think of when you think of 2007? The year you fell in love? The year you said the hell with it all? Well, for us, I mean me, here at The Baseball Card Blog, 2007 was the year baseball cards crescendoed (if that's a real word). While 2006 saw a explosion in mainstream attention towards the hobby, 2007 was a year of ups and downs, with whatever mainstream attention given focused on the public and private sides of the drawn out Topps sale...

...2007 also saw the publication of Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson's The Card, a telling of the somewhat tawdry history of the former Gretzky/McNall T206 Wagner. Not surprisingly, the book didn't garner much press in hobby publications like Sports Collector's Digest, where Mastro Auctions is a large advertiser. O'Keeffe also achieved my own personal life goal this year when he became an obscure footnote in a text of importance by being quoted in The Mitchell Report...

...2007 saw me sell out to help Topps checklist an under-performing eTopps product, and branch out to Beckett.com for a few weeks there in the summer, if only to prove that writing on a schedule is harder than I thought...

...But mostly, 2007 was the year of collaboration, with the successful launch of A Pack A Day, the Cardboard Junkie/Baseball Card Blog alliance in creating The 792, and interactive projects like The Great Goudey Trade-away and Top Topps. Both proved to be unqualified successes thanks to Blog readers. And speaking of readers, 126,400 people visited The Blog (that's over 184,000 page views!), from all over the country and the world.

I got a lot of emails, answered a lot of questions, got some hate mail, made some friends, ate some bad food, went to some shows...

Not a bad year. Here's to another.



Fondly,


Ben

If I know anything about my audience, it's that they see right through the baseball card media's silence towards the recent, controversial book from Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson. In case you aren't familiar with The Card, it tells the story behind the most famous card in the hobby: The former Gretzky/McNall T206 Piedmont Honus Wagner. It raises some interesting ideas, including that the card has been trimmed, that PSA had knowledge of it being trimmed, that Mastro's kind of a jerk, and many more fun little tidbits that makes this hobby great.

I've written my fair share about the book, including a lengthy interview with one of the book's authors. In case you want more coverage, head over to Gelf Magazine. Gelf will also be hosting O'Keeffe and Thompson as part of their Varsity Letters reading series this Wednesday in New York City.

This trade comes in from Tony in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Giving: Ichiro, #104
Getting: Honus Wagner, 1994 Ted Williams Card Company

I know I'm the one who decided to trade away all his Goudey cards, and so far I don't regret that decision, but tonight I'm a little jealous. Tony's getting a great card of one of my favorite players: Ichiro Suzuki.

Don't get me wrong, I'll take a Wagner in trade any day of the week. It's just that this Ichiro is one heck of a beautiful card. Give 'im a good home, Tony.