Vintage Fridays: Milt Pappas, 1965 Topps #270

This fine Milt Pappas card just happens to be featured in my next post for my other blog, The Great 1965 Topps Project. It should be ready to go later this weekend. It may be hard to remember back this far, but I actually started that blog before this one, all the way back in November 2007. I wanted to build a vintage 598-card set, one that was over four decades old, completely from the ground up. I would not buy cards from eBay or hobby shops (aside from my set starter, Steve Barber, which was an eBay purchase); I would only supplement the set with trades and/or donations from my readers. Things started slow, and by last September I'd only acquired about fifty cards. I was struggling to find a good format, eventually deciding upon full biographies and separate posts for each card. But in the past few months, things have really taken off.

Currently, I've completed nearly 37% of the set: 219 cards. After sometimes going a month or more without a card to write up, I've now got a list a page long of cards that are backed up and need to be posted. Even though I've been steady enough to update the blog three or four times per week, I'm actually falling further behind (I have two more trades in the works right now). It's a great problem to have, and it's encouraging to know that more collectors/readers are finding my blog and enjoying the work I'm putting into it. Some contributors have even suggested that my writing is a major reason that they're sending the cards; they're curious to see what I have to say about that particular player. I'm glad that I started the Project; not only am I making great strides in what had been a fairly sparse vintage collection, but I'm learning a lot about the men that populated the baseball universe in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Now I can tell you who the previously-unknown-to-me Duke Carmel and Gary Geiger are, in addition to pretty good players that had also escaped my attention (Al Worthington, Tony Taylor, et. al.). I've also gotten some awesome cards of Hall of Famers that I thought I would be waiting on forever (Whitey Ford and Willie Mays are two of the biggest thrills, even if Whitey is a Yankee).

If you're a regular reader of my Orioles blog but you'd somehow missed out on The Great 1965 Topps Project, I hope you'll give it a look and that you might enjoy tracking my progress. As I've learned in the past year, the Internet is full of incredible and generous people, if you know where to look.