#48 -- "The Boys of Summer" by Roger Kahn
Geez, I seem to have read a lot about baseball this year -- more than I've read about any sport I actually, you know, watch here in 2008. I'm relatively sure I read this one as a kid, but I probably wasn't too interested -- the Brooklyn Dodgers weren't even around any more, I wanted to read about teams like the Astros and Blue Jays!
My loss (if I did indeed read it and dismiss it) -- one of the finer baseball books I've read. I was really, really impressed by this, beautifully written, honest and unsparing. Makes me wonder what else I missed out on when I was young.
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Staying with baseball: there's a new blog set up devoted to the 1978 Topps baseball card set, which were my favorite cards as a kid -- though I didn't start buying cards until two seasons later. In about sixth grade, I bought a shoebox full of these cards at a garage sale, and I loved those cards like no others -- I'll eternally remember them as having perfect photography and design, though the truth may be a little less grand.
A lot of the appeal, I think, was a bit of exotic nostalgia. Though these cards only came out a few years before I started following baseball, a lot of the team uniforms changed drastically by the time I got clued in. So seeing these cards was like looking through a time warp. Anyway, the link is here: 78 Topps.
Glad it showed up because blogs I like seem to be dropping like flies lately. Fire Joe Morgan just called it quits. Covered in Oil is down to one of its three writers. When I started this (with the intention of it being a hockey blog), I was inspired by three blogs -- Sidearm Delivery, Hockey Rants, and CIO. Now only one remains, and it just barely.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
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5 comments:
not influenced by me?!?
well, then!
You've inspired me in so many other ways, though. The cockroach incident.
Like I said, I initially thought this would be a hockey blog... so I drew my inspiration there.
Nice. I was just going through my collection the other day. I started out with Topps, moved to mainly Donruss and then it was all Upper Deck from there. Ah. Those days were fun.
Donruss cards were always really exotic when I was growing up. I'd see them in magazine ads, but no place near me sold them ... when a friend of mine had some Donruss cards in his collection (this was, oh, 1983 or so) I was jealous as hell.
Wow. I never knew how lucky I was, I guess. Exotic. I like that. Makes me want to drink a mai tai and smooth on some Hawaiian Tropic, admiring my collection in the sunlight. ;)
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