Bowl Pick 'Em Contest Winnings, Part XVIII

College football will be here again before we know it IS HERE, so I've got to get my prize from last season's Bowl Pick 'Em contest at Cards on Cards posted! My prize for a second place tie was a very generously sized box of cards, so I felt a bit overwhelmed even sorting through them. I finally sorted them out by player, and, as usual, I'll plan to post them all eventually, but I might quit halfway through, we'll see.

Part I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII

1970 Topps #503 Dal Maxvill
1973 Topps #269 Tim McCarver
1975 Topps
#296 Alan Foster
#610 Ron Hunt
#649 Jack Heidemann
1980 Topps #563 Will McEnaney
2013 Panini Cooperstown
#6 Rogers Hornsby
#35 Joe Medwick
#39 Dizzy Dean

I've got some old cards and old players today, with Panini's 2013 Cooperstown set rounding out the post. I've met Dal Maxvill and Ron Hunt at autograph signings, and now I realize I really need to track down a Tim McCarver signing sometime. The older cards are pretty great, regardless of the slightly rough condition on some of them.

#246 St. Louis Cardinals

This team, presumably actually the 1974 team, finished second in the NL East, long before anyone uttered the word Wildcard in baseball, so missed the playoffs. 1975 was even worse, with a 4th place finish.

December Card Show Autographs

After skipping November, I returned to the monthly card show in December, and came away with quite a handful of autographs.

Red Schoendienst     Tom Herr
 Bob Tewksbury     Jack Clark     Ron Hunt

That wasn't even the full contingent of players signing at the show. Cecil Cooper was there, despite having no St. Louis connections I'm aware of. Also, hockey player Bob Plager was there. He's well-known locally from his time with the Blues and he continues to work for the team, but I just don't have the room to start a puck collection too.

As for players I did get, Red Schoendienst has been on my want list for quite awhile. I've missed a few of his signings for various reasons, so I blocked out my calendar and bought advance tickets to make sure I made it to this one. Ron Hunt only played for the Cardinals at the very end of his career, but he did play here, so I decided I should have a ball with his autograph. Despite having one of the shorter lines there, his line moved the slowest, because he really wanted to talk to every fan that approached him. I thought that was pretty great, he could have signed and gotten out of there in 30 minutes, but he took his time and actually thanked the autograph seekers. Tom Herr and Jack Clark were Cardinals just before I started watching baseball, and both were part of the 1985 team that nearly won the World Series, and both were also All-Stars earlier that year. Finally, there was Bob Tewksbury, who wasn't dominant during his playing career, but he was probably the ace of the Cardinals staff when I was first getting into baseball, so that was another autograph I was excited to get. My favorite memory of him, though, is when he played for Minnesota in 1998 and lobbed some eephus pitches to Mark McGwire to keep the ball in the park.