Sunday, April 26, 2009

Weird Bobby Thigpen Find

I found this card on eBay, at an over inflated price, so I thought. My instincts were right, after an investigation.

It turns out that this card is an oddball made by Simon & Schuster in 1991. It just goes to show that every company will produce their own set of oddball cards, if you give them enough time.

Before I tracked down the information, I considered turning this oddball eBay scan over to two sources: fellow bloggers and a certain brother of the pitcher, who reads this blog.

Now that I found the information about this card, I can kill both birds with one stone. First, I wondered about the legitimacy of this card. But being part of a set by a reputable company, I can also eliminate the second question. Is that really a picture of Bobby as a kid?

I'm 99.9% sure that this would be a photo of Bobby as a child. There are too many fail safes preventing this from being just some random kid. Still, it wouldn't be impossible for this kid to be Joe Schmo from Idaho. I have more confidence having found decent source information.

No matter how many cards that you can track down of a player that you collect, there will always be one more lurking around a corner, out of your sight. It happens a lot with regional sets and oddball one off releases. Always keep your eyes open and check your facts. Cards love to hide on you!

3 comments:

Matthew said...

These came in sheets in a book about Major League stars as kids. The book had twenty or so short stories with pictures and each player featured had a card. They were perforated and had short write-ups on the back. I seem to remember them being slightly off of the standard side. I owned the set about twenty years ago, but I'm pretty sure I spilled Jolly Good soda all over them.

Kevin said...

I had the football version of these cards + book, the spoils of a Christmas Yankee swap in school. I remember a hilarious junior-high photo of Mike Singletary with Buckwheat-esque hair.

Scott said...

Wow! That is Bobby, or at least it looks like every other picture we have of him in pictures from when we were kids. They made a baseball card from it? Really? Weird.

And how did I miss this post? :) I'll get Dad to take a look at the picture and see if he has an 'original' of it.

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