Keep Durham Odd

It's been a little slow the past two weeks looking for additional color variations of the La Pizza Royale cards I have been collecting of former Durham Bulls players Rusty Staub and Gene Mauch.  The cards have multiple color variations, I have picked up a few already......

but the remaining cards are going to be tough.  The Staub cards are especially going to be tough.  A little disappointing, but along the way searching to find these Canadian pizza cards, I ran into a few other oddball cards of some former Durham Bulls players.

I really like this group of cards.   

The first card comes from a Bob Parker set.  He did a bunch of hand drawn picture sets, but I do not know much about him beyond the style of cards he made, and several of them were of the Reds.  This card is from his 1977 Cincinnati Reds set.  The orange card stock is unique to say the least.....

Frank McCormick played for the Durham Bulls during the 1936 season.  He went on to win the National League MVP for the Reds in 1940, and as it says underneath his name on the card, is in the team's Hall of Fame.  The Reds also won the World Series that season.  The little pictures around McCormick remind me a lot of the cartoons on the backs of Topps cards.  Definitely something different.  I believe there is a card in this set of Johnny Vander Meer, who was also a Durham Bulls player, so I might need to find that one.  

Speaking of Vander Meer....

This is from the 1976 Laughlin Diamond Jubilee set, which celebrated the 100th Anniversary of the National League.  The cards all have this style of cartoon picture.  Vander Meer is not a Hall of Famer, but is a notable former Durham Bulls player because of the consecutive no-hitters in back to back starts during the 1938 season.  

The back of the card gives out some details about the two no hitters.  There are also other former Durham Bulls players in the Laughlin set, along a Cardinals player or two that might be worthy of some effort in the near future.  

Last card.  

This is from the 1947 Signal Gasoline set, which featured players from the Pacific Coast League.  From what I have read about Minor League Baseball during this era, the PCL was the most competitive and talent rich league outside of the Majors.  Some really good names played for these teams during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.  

This card reminds me a lot of the Frank McCormick card minus the orange card stock.  

Albosta pitched for the Durham Bulls during the 1941 season.  He won 15 games in just 23 games started, and had an ERA of only 1.74.  His time on the Durham Bulls actually gets mentioned on the back of the card.  He made it up to the Dodgers that same season where he got two spot starts.  

Albosta did not have much of a Major League career, but he missed several years for World War II.  He pitched the 1942 season for the Montreal Royals, who were a top Minor League affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers, but entered the Army at the end of the season.  He ended up pitching for the Pirates briefly after the war, but than played the rest of his career in the Minors.  

He played the last several years of his career with a semi-pro team in Saginaw, Michigan.  I drive through that town seemingly every year.  It's got the giant curved bridge in the middle of I-75.  

It's not the Mackinac Bridge, or the Ambassador Bridge.  Still unique.  

I wish I knew something more about this set, but I do not.  There are not many old Minor League cards, but the PCL seems to have quite a few.  This is my second PCL cards that is more than 50 years old.  I also have a manger card of long time Giants great Met Ott managing the Oakland Oaks.  This is from an early 1950s Mothers Cookies set.  

Always nice to find some interesting cards for the collection.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 60

I was first introduced to the Mothers Cookies baseball cards sometime back in the late 1990s after the Cardinals traded for Mark McGwire.  I spent a lot of time trying to track down his cards which included a whole bunch of different cards from Mother's Cookies.  Sort of seemed like a bottomless pit of sorts....

I cannot tell you how many different McGwire cards that they put out while he was on the A's, but I felt like every time I found one another one would pop up that I didn't have yet.  Eventually I moved on from tracking down all of the Mothers Cookies McGwire cards and generally ignored these cards for the most part.  Although, after searching through my closet of cards for a few minutes I found a copy of a Mother's Cookies Willie McGee from a Giants team set.  

Now, both of the McGwire and McGee Mother's Cookies cards are really cool and I like the simplicity of the design.  Edge to edge pictures on baseball cards always look nice.  Plus, if you ever read these posts, there have now been 60 of them, most of them are actually cards from the 1990s.  Not sure that actually qualifies them as really being all that old.  However, I have an actual old card for this weeks old card post with an old former Major League player.  

Cookie?  

These look like Famous Amos cookies.  

Being a Minor League card guy I was surprised to find out awhile back that Mother's Cookies had actually dabbled in Minor League baseball cards back in 1952.  The set featured players from the Pacific Coast League.  The eight team league featured teams that were not affiliated with a particular Major League team, yet there were dozens of players who made the jump from the PCL to the Majors.  

I actually ended up picking up a manager card of former Giants slugger Mel Ott.  After looking through the cards in the set there was no obvious connection to the Cardinals or Durham Bulls starting me down, so I picked out a copy of a card on Ebay and went for it.  

Here's what I ended up with.......

The background coloring on the card seems very 1950s.  The cards all have something in the pastel family.  I also like all of the uniforms on the cards.  Minor League teams have gone to absurd names like the Baby Cakes, and the whatnot, but the PCL had good names with good uniforms.  I know that some would consider the simple blue and white jersey boring, but I like it.

Overall, I really love this card.  It's not a hard task to find Minor League cards of players from the 1980s and even into the 1970s.  However, once you start getting into the mid 1970s it gets harder and harder.  This Mother's Cookies set seems to be one of the best looking vintage Minor League sets, but it's also something that isn't too hard to find.  It also doesn't cost an arm and a leg to buy the cards.

Thinking I might need to find a few more of these early Mother's Cookies cards in the near future to sort of balance out all of the McGwire junk wax era cards I picked up back in the day.