Memorabilia Monday: Mickey Mantle Minor League Card

First things first -- thank you to everyone who perused my trade bait post yesterday.  I had two people put in claims for the Matt Harvey refractor in the space of 30 minutes, so that was a bit stress-inducing, but hopefully everything will be okay there.

A second point -- I know I have only been blogging about my collection for about 2 months now, but there's a former SABR member in me who really enjoys the baseball history side of things.  I mean, when Bill James Revised Historical Baseball Abstract came out, I counted up references to different books and tried to find cheaply as many of his source materials as I could so I could own them.  It's made my two recent moves more difficult to have 400 pounds of baseball books to lug around, but I enjoy reading about baseball a ton. With that eye and love for history, I decided I wanted to take on the task of blogging the 1982 Topps Set (and maybe the other two as well...so long as people are still blogging 10 years from now), likely including the "Traded" set as well.  It's just getting started, but it is located at http://1982Topps.blogspot.com (see the tab above for the link as well).

Finally, I'm being lame this week for memorabilia Monday.  I'm only posting an insert from the October 1984 issue of Baseball Cards magazine of Mickey Mantle:

  

It has some discoloration, and it's pretty bent up from the years it spent being unloved in storage, but this card was at the very beginning of the "pre-rookie" rage that took place just before the complete junk wax era of the late 1980s.  Collectors in the mid-80s discovered the cards that TCMA had been putting out for minor league teams and drove the prices for those cards sky high.

I think Bob Lemke was responsible for creating these cards for Krausse Publications and Baseball Cards Magazine.  This was likely the start of his work that he carries on today in creating custom-made cards that never were but perhaps should have been -- like a Mickey Mantle minor league card from 1950.