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A follower of my blog recently wrote to inquire about the now six-weeks' absence of new postings; he was concerned about my health.
I appreciate the concern for the fact is my health has played the major part in the lack of new material in this space.
However, I have not totally abandoned the creation of new custom cards. In the coming days I'll share my latest with you.
The first is an addition to my "Donovan's Drive-Ins" series of minor league players in the 1956 Topps format.
Rather than rehash the "back story," I'll give you this link: Donovan's backstory .
With the number of Satchel Paige photos I have in my "futures file," I doubt that I'll ever run out of Paige custom-card ideas.
While the triptych cartoons on the backs of 1956 Topps make creating new cards challenging, the set was one of my favorites, so I'll continue to turn them out.
You can order this card. Unless otherwise noted, all of my custom cards are available to collectors for $9.95 each, postpaid. Complete checklists of all my custom baseball, football and non-sports custom cards were published on this blog in late May (football), July 6 (non-sports) and Sept. 19 (baseball). To order, email me at scbcguy@yahoo.com for directions on paying via check/money order, or to my PayPal account.
It's taken me nearly four years but I've now completed the second of a real fantasy card series.
This purports to be a 1956 Topps-style regional form the Donovan's Drive-In chain of Southern California.
You can read the back story on my blog posting of May 16, 2012, here: Donovan's '56 Maz.
Some years back in my perusal of microfilms of 1950 back issues of The Sporting News, I read the contemporary accounts of the first $100,000 pitching phenom, Paul Pettit. His story epitomizes the bonus baby phenomenon of that era.
For their $100,000 gamble on a high school kid, the Pittsburgh Pirates got a return of exactly one major-league victory in the 12 games in which Pettit appeared at the big-league level in 1951 and 1953.
My fantasy card looks back to the 12 seasons Pettit played in the minors. Early on he was a pitcher, then, after arm injuries, he hung on as an outfielder and first baseman in the higher minors. He played in five seasons for the Pirates' Pacific Coast League farm club, the Hollywood Stars.
If you're a veteran vintage baseball card collector, you may recognize the background of my new card as that used by Topps for Dale Long's 1956 card.
There are no career-contemporary baseball cards for Pettit. I'd like to make a 1953 Topps-style card, but I have yet to find a suitable photo, though I do have the germ of an idea that piques my interest.
For all the ink that he got as an impossibly handsome high school hero, there really isn't a lot of material on Pettit to be readily found on the internet. Over the years I set aside dozens of notes about his baseball struggles, but I don't want to author a definitive biographical sketch.
I'm just going to share my fantasy card creation of one of baseball's most interesting players of the early 1950s.
