What's the Big Idea?

Wow, I really mailed it in here on the blog during March. It was my lowest blog post output since April of 2016, when I was away from home and the internet for most of the month. I didn't have any good excuses last month, except that I just haven't been feeling it. I've felt a little out-of-touch in general over the last couple of months, and that feeling has extended into my blogging, too. I hope that I can break out of that funk soon, but it might be time to head back to the doctor and see if maybe my medication isn't doing the job anymore. I would describe what I'm feeling as a pretty consistent low-grade anxiety attack. Enough about that, though. Let's get to the meat of the post, The Big Idea.

I've been toying with the idea of starting a Wally Moon player collection for a while. He is pretty famous among collectors for his bushy unibrow, a feature that also appears on my face. I was thinking about his cards, and then I went on the PSA website and noticed that the Wally Moon Basic Set only has 12 items on it, his Topps cards from 1954-1965. That led me to eBay, where I lost control of my impulses and wound up with a complete run in a matter of days. A series of offers and coupons didn't help my self-control any, and I wound up making a little progress on the Wally Moon Master Set, to boot. I've already shared these pictures on Twitter, but I'll share them here as well.

This was probably the prize of the bunch. It's Wally's rookie card from 1954 Topps. I didn't get an amazing deal on it, but I got a pretty good deal and it's a nice-looking piece of cardboard.

I especially like the backs on these vintage cards, although Moon's cards tend to recycle the same group of factoids over and over. 

The 1955 card features the same headshot as the 1954 Topps card, but a different image off to the side.

Moon's 1956 card has another repeat of the headshot, but this time the the other image is an exciting play at the plate. I picked up the Gray Back variation to fill this spot in the Basic Set. 

Finally, 1957 gives us a different picture to look at, with Wally wielding a bat and staring into the camera.

The back of the 1957 is a little less colorful than previous designs, but I guess they can't all have cartoons. This is the first card to have more than a couple rows of statistics.

His 1958 card is a little bland with that green background, but I also really like the way this card looks. I can't explain why, though.

Cartoons also return for his 1958 card, but at the expense of the multiple years of statistics that appeared on his 1957 card.

There isn't really an ugly card in this run, and Moon's 1959 issue is another nice-looking piece of cardboard. It is also the first one in the run to show him as a Dodger. I am not really a fan of the Cardinals or the Dodgers, but I am a fan of Wally Moon.

This card back mixes a small cartoon with a full stat box. I am a fan of this layout, especially in the pre-internet days when cards were the primary source of information about a players stats. I lived through the later part of that era, and I remember selecting favorite players largely by comparing the numbers on the back of cards.

We break into the 1960's with this garish pink and yellow number. This is the design used for Moon's 2017 Topps Archives autograph card, although Topps used blue and red instead of pink and yellow for that one. They also used different pictures, but ones that are remarkably similar to the ones on this card.

This is where my impatience kind of bit me. This one is graded an 8, but it has the (PD) qualifier due to printing marks all over the front of the card. That knocks it down two whole grades in PSA's calculations. I really don't mind the marks all that much, but I may upgrade this someday. I like the person in the background of this photo, partially obscured by Wally's arm. It would be nice if today's Heritage cards had some people or cars or something interesting in the background.

Here's another card with full stats on the back, along with a cartoon, but no biographical paragraph.

Again, I got bitten by my impulsive nature here, and bought a card with a cracked case. It's a nice-looking card, but that crack in the case is unsightly. There are a few variations of this card, but this is the one I got. There are also Venezuelan variants of this card, which are hard to come by.

The back of the case for this 1962 card is also cracked. One of the tougher cards from the Wally Moon Master Set is going to be the Venezuelan version of the 1962 NL Batting Leaders card, which also features a guy named Bob Clemente on the front. Condition isn't going to be a deal-breaker on that one. I'll just be happy to get a copy of it, graded or not.

Jumping into 1963, here's another really good-looking card. My parents were only a year old in 1963, so I don't have the familiarity with designs of this vintage that some collectors do. One enjoyable thing about grabbing these cards is that I get to look at some designs that I'm not well-versed in.

The card backs from here on through to 1965 feature big blocks of stats.

While his earlier cards featured a hint of a smile here and there, his last few cards show a ballplayer who is all business.

I am running out of things to say about the card backs. This one has a scratch-off trivia question, but the answer can be seen by holding the card up to the light at an angle.

This 1965 card marks the end of Wally's Topps run, as he would retire after the 1965 season, and wouldn't get a card in the 1966 set.

This is the card back that is most familiar to me out of the bunch, as I bought and sorted a ton of 2014 Topps Heritage in an attempt to collect the set by busting packs. That didn't work out for me, but I did see a lot of card backs that looked a lot like this one. 

I found a few other items for my Wally Moon collection, and I'll add some of them here at the end of this post. This is a Topps Stamp from 1962. I think these also are available in panels, with different pairings of players. I started with this single, though, because it was relatively cheap.

I also picked up the White Back variation of Moon's 1956 card, again because it was pretty cheap. 

Finally, here is a 1961 Post Cereal card. This is the perforated version, but there are also hand-cut versions out there. I think I need both types if I want to build the Master Set. I do want to build the Master Set, but I've cleared out most of the low-hanging fruit. I can't afford to build the rest of it at this blistering pace.