Posts Tagged ‘Mickey Mantle’

Back to My Nerdy Roots…

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 by Nerdicus Finch

Thanks to a recent amazing gift from Mrs. Nerdicus Finch, I’ve had my interest in collecting baseball cards rekindled. Specifically, old-timey baseball cards. While the players weren’t very nerdy back then, collecting baseball cards is always nerdy, especially when you are as far away from childhood as I am. So I think this is a sufficiently nerdy topic for this web site.

There are so many awesome old baseball cards out there, so, to focus, I have decided to channel my interest in old-timey cards in a specific direction: I am going to try to assemble an entire set of 1933 Goudey cards. Goudey was an old chewing gum company and was a real innovator in the development of the kind of baseball cards that would later be popularized by Bowman and Topps in the 1950s. The 1933 set, a 240 card set, was Goudey’s first and is generally considered one of the three greatest baseball card sets of all time, along with the 1909-1911 T-206 set (which has the famous Honus Wagner card) and the 1952 Topps set (which has the famous Mickey Mantle card).

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Overheard in the YMCA Locker Room

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 by Nerdicus Finch

While in the locker room at the local YMCA last week, I overheard the following conversation:

Old Guy: Did you see that new Yankee Stadium?
Other Old Guy: Yeah.
Old Guy: Pretty nice – but the tickets are so expensive, no one will be able to afford to go.
Other Old Guy: Yeah.
Old Guy: If Mantle and DiMaggio were alive, they would never have let that happen!
Other Old Guy: You’re right.
Old Guy: Did you notice that the Yankees waited for them to die before they jacked up the ticket prices?
Other Old Guy: Yup.

I’ve heard some strange statements made by old guys regarding the greatness and superiority of old-timey baseball, but this one is particularly weird. The notion that two retired baseball legends were somehow keeping Yankees ticket prices in check is truly bizarre.

I was going to try to track down yearly ticket price data for the Yankees for the years before and after Mantle and DiMaggio died in order to debunk this nonsense, but it’s really not worth it. This theory is so goofy that I can’t justify responding to it at length.

Unfortunately for me, this strange conversation is not even close to the most disturbing thing about being in the locker room at the YMCA.