Vintage Fridays: Wally Bunker, 1966 Topps #499

2015 Topps Heritage is in stores now. As it borrows its design from the unfathomably dull 1966 Topps set, I don't have any burning desire to collect it. I mean, just look at the card above: even Wally Bunker is bored to be a part of it. Block letters, straight lines, sickly lime green...pass. Still, I like to put my money where my mouth is, so I picked up a 20-card pack from Target tonight. For my money, Heritage is still the nicest-looking set Topps puts out on a yearly basis, but yeah, I'm sitting this one out. It's just as well, since I haven't completed last year's Heritage set...or 2008's, for that matter. Whoops.

Oh, and I'm still 0-for-2015 on Orioles cards. It's like Topps is trolling me at this point.

Vintage Fridays: Wally Bunker, 1965 Topps #290

Wally Bunker truly earned his ornate 1964 All-Star Rookie trophy, by way of his excellent age-19 season: 19-5 (a league-best .792 winning percentage), a 2.69 ERA, and a 1.04 WHIP. He was the ace on an Orioles staff that made a surprising run at the American League pennant, finishing a couple games short with 97 wins overall.

I'm sure Wally felt a great sense of accomplishment for dominating major league competition as a teenager. Similarly, I'm going to take a victory lap because I just finished a project that took nearly five years. My good card-collecting friend Max (a.k.a. jacobmrley) obtained the final four cards that I needed for my 1965 Topps set, and the package arrived in the mail this afternoon. I'll be posting blog entries for those cards in the next week or two, but if you're curious, the previously-elusive quartet are: Mickey Mantle, the Clay Carroll/Phil Niekro Braves Rookies card, the Athletics Rookies featuring Catfish Hunter, and the Red Sox Rookies featuring Jim Lonborg. I launched The Great 1965 Topps Project in November 2007, taking a shot in the dark at completing a decades-old 598-card set entirely through trades and donations with fellow Internet-dwelling collectors. I was astounded time and again over the past several years by the generosity of the folks I connected with through my blog. Many of you asked for little to no return from the cards you sent, and I feel like I'll never be able to repay your largesse. But I do look forward to trying! For now, I'm just going to savor the completion of a vintage card set that was released 17 years before I was born. Thanks to Max, Ed, Bob, Dave, Don, Jamie, and anyone else I've overlooked - I'll compile a full list of my contributors when I wrap up the set on my other blog. You are all good people.

Vintage Fridays: Wally Bunker, 1968 Topps #489

Yes, I know that we're in the midst of one of the most closely contested, thrilling, unpredictable World Series of our lifetime, but there are more important matters to discuss. Namely, the cartoon bird is back! MASN's Roch Kubatko and the Baltimore Sun's Dan Connolly have confirmed that the O's caps next year will feature a smiling caricature of an Oriole bird for the first time in a quarter-century. Supposedly it will be "a combination" of the two distinct birds that have been used. The original bird lasted from 1966 through 1974, and the newer bird was worn from 1975 through 1988. Though full details aren't available, I would assume (and hope) that the caps will be black with orange bills instead of including the white front panel that came about in later years. There are a lot of people who preferred the various ornithologically-correct bird logos that the Orioles cycled through from 1989 through 2011, but that grinning fowl is the iconic image of the franchise, and baseball takes itself too seriously as it is. As long as the new bird doesn't end up looking like the lame "Fun Bird" of last decade, it's all good.