Baseball Things I Miss

[Guest Mets Guy in Michigan]

batmagadanleadoff wrote: 1974 Rack packs were 39 cents. [fimg=444]http://www.robertedwardauctions.com/auction/2013images/Item_25272_1.jpg[/fimg] In 1974. Follow the link to the photo above and you'll discover that this lot of three unopened '74 rack packs sold at auction for $948.00. It couldn't have been the Ron Hodges card driving up the price.

That is AWESOME!!!!!

The year I finally started buying cards with my own money. I love that set! And today, a rack pack in my local stores costs $4.99 with two packets instead of three, and I'm sure there aren't as many cards.

[batmagadanleadoff]

I remember Gene Hiser the Cub (see rack pack) from around the '73 or '74 season. I remember reading an article, probably in TSN, touting his eyesight. He was supposed to have just about the best eyesight in all of baseball. I guess this meant that he could see the pitch real well as he swung and missed it. Let's just say that his MLB career didn't pan out He accumulated 263 AB's spread out over five seasons, all with the Cubs, and hit just one HR. It was against the Mets.

[Benjamin Grimm]

batmagadanleadoff wrote: Not that the Mets yearbooks are great shakes. I swear that the last two I bought, I did so out of habit and one of those, I still haven't even bothered to look at. Really. Still, they probably weight four or fives times what a 70's yearbook weighs and aren't remotely as interesting or engaging.

That's where I'm at too. I've been buying these big fat yearbooks out of habit, and then shelving them with barely a glance. I had figured that I'd appreciate them in the future even if I don't appreciate them in the present. But it finally occurred to me that I'm not likely ever to feel much nostalgia for any current or future Mets teams, so my last yearbook was the one from 2014.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: Whatever happened to sports cartoonists?

If you're talking about the Bill Gallo type, who would have a regular feature inside the pages of the newspaper, I'm not aware of any but I'd be surprised if the breed had gone completely extinct. There is still Ed Murawinsky, whose work often appears on the back page of the Daily News, including that cover that you post whenever the Mets play in Philadelphia.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Murawinsky was fired back in September along with Madden et al.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Really? I totally missed that.

(David Hinckley, by the way, has resurfaced at The Huffington Post. His TV columns were one of the best things in the News in recent years.)