I Found A Card For The Spahn Guy!

I’m in a bunch of Facebook baseball card trading groups. These groups are often made up of many of the same people, so I decided some time ago to stick primarily to one that calls itself Cardboard Obsession. It’s a closed group and you need a proven track record of trading honorably with several members of the group before you can be admitted. Members will often post not only what they want to trade but cards from their personal collections as well. That’s how I came to learn about “the Spahn guy.”

From time to time this fellow posted new additions to his Warren Spahn collection, and I watched with pleasure as his collection grew. If there’s one trait we collectors share, it’s excitement for a fellow collector when he or she gets a new card of the player they collect. I go to the Cardboard Obsession Facebook page every day, so I knew the group had a serious Spahn collector even though I couldn’t quite remember his name.

For those of you unfamiliar with Warren Spahn, he was a left-handed pitcher who thrived during the the late 1940’s, the 1950’s and the early 1960’s. All told the Hall of Famer spent twenty-one seasons in the majors, and it might have been even more if he had not lost three years to World War II. Spahn was a Brave, first in Boston, then in Milwaukee, for most of his career. It’s stunning how good this seventeen-time All Star was. He won 363 games, three ERA titles and one Cy Young Award. In the baseball card and memorabilia world, the better you are, the more material there is pertaining to you, so there is a wealth of Warren Spahn cards and memorabilia to be had. The fellow on the Cardboard Obsession page has a lot of it. Not too long ago I grabbed this picture of just some of his Spahn cards, which appear below.

When I was at the Tristar Show, which I wrote about a short time ago, I spent hours going through hundreds of boxes of cards. At one point, while rummaging through someone’s dime box, I stumbled on a Spahn card that I had never seen before. I instantly thought of the Spahn guy, and not knowing whether our man had the card or not, I bought it. You can’t go wrong with ten cents. My subsequent research indicated it came from a 1992 Ziploc storage bag issue that totaled eleven cards, all Hall of Famers. The cards were inserted into packages of Ziploc bags. Here’s the card I purchased:

My next stop was the Facebook Cardboard Obsession page where I found my man, named Scott. I messaged him and asked if he had this card, and he didn’t! I then told him I got it for him as a gift and if he gave me his address it would be in the mail shortly. After it arrived, Scott sent me this photo:

It’s so pleasurable helping another collector add a card to his or her collection. It just doesn’t get any better than this!

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Warren Spahn painting by Perez-Steele Great Moments Artwork, 1987