User Lists

3/11/24. Well, after my mother passed and left me some money, I said I'd let her buy me three luxury cards -- an Ernie Banks rookie, a Tom Seaver rookie, and one more Chicago White Stocking from the 1800's. With the addition of an 1888 R & S Die Cut -- Chicago White Stockings, I have completed her gifts. Thanks, Mother.

And now you can read the old description of this list that's been here forever.

Here's a list of the cards that are out of the binders, in cases, and on display on a shelf in our office (I also have my four display cases of Last Topps Card of Hall of Famers, The Merkle's Boner Collection, the T207 Cubs Team Set (partial), and the First Black Player on Every Team -- I don't include those here.

This display used to be only Hall of Famers (and an autographed 1970 Pete Rose) until sometime in 2016, when I opened it up to cards and players I just liked, and I expanded more fully into non-Topps. Now I label each card carefully, explaining why it's on display and/or some history of the player. Making it more personal to me and finding players with interesting histories really made it fun for me. I love these cards. Hope you enjoy it.

v3

1/23/24: Helton, Beltre, and Mauer. No Wagner. Probably next year. Not thrilled with the cards I'm adding, though.

This is my collection of the last Topps card of every Hall of Fame player who has a regular (base set) Topps card. I couldn't afford all the rookie cards and if I got into other companies, it'd be too intimidating. But I love this collection all the same. With this method, there are admittedly a lot of players in unfamiliar jerseys, but the cards also have more complete career stats than rookie cards, which is more relevant to HOF status. They are in order of year of induction. Enjoy.

The more I collect, the more interested I've become in getting a bit more free-form. Collecting all the Topps sets is nice, but other quirky "sets" are more fun.
Especially when I'm buying vintage cards, where I'm likely to only buy one card from the set, I need some reason to buy one card over another. I go for Cubs, but I don't know any of the non-stars from each other. So how to decide? I do a little research and find the cards of guys with quirky trivia attached to them.
Here are the cards I bought almost exclusively because there is odd trivia connected to the player. There's plenty of great trivia connected to other card I have, but I bought many of those cards for other reasons.
As always, feel free to suggest others. I'll probably want to buy them.

1/17/22: It's done! The display is up!

The History --

Looking at my displayed vintage baseball cards, I became disturbed that three of my four displays were virtually all white players, because I mostly display cards from the pre-Topps years, i.e., before 1951. So there just weren't many black players on cards. This bothered me.

So I decided to make another display of all the first black players on every team, using the 16 teams that existed before expansion (credit to kcjays for the idea).

This is the list of players. I am picturing the card I have for each player, usually a card from their first year with the team. Sometimes, that was prohibitively expensive, so I got another card. One card is missing at the moment. I'll update, of course, if I get different cards.

As always, it's never quite as easy as it should be. John Kennedy, the first black player on the Phillies, has no cards at all. That actually works out perfectly, as I have 15 slots in the display case I intend to use/create (from an old wall-mounted cassette holder). Hank Thompson, the first black player for both the Giants and the St. Louis Browns, has no card of him with the Browns. But I'll use a Giants card in the St. Louis slot and use Monte Irvin, who debuted for the Giants on the same day as Thompson, for the Giants. And Nino Escalera, the first black player on the Redlegs, has no vintage cards. But Chuck Harmon debuted for them the same day, so I'll go with him. It's complicated, but actually works out very well for my purposes.

As soon as I threw away most of my cassettes, I looked at the holders and thought "baseball card display!" I intend to put a color picture of each teams logo from the year behind the player. Except for Chief Wahoo. The irony there would just be too much, so I'll go with a generic "Cleveland." I might put logos of various negro league teams around the edges, but maybe not. I will post a picture of the display when it's up if I can figure out how to do that. It will have some holes for awhile and some cards will eventually be replaced, but I have a critical mass of the cards, so I can put this up as soon as I fix up the case. For now they'll all go into a binder.

My intent here, is not to create controversy or debate. I just want to honor these (sometimes forgotten) pioneers of baseball. Also, note that these are NOT the first 16 black players in baseball after 1947. Some teams, like the Dodgers, had more than one black player pretty quickly. They're also not all rookie cards -- the Robinson because I can't afford it -- the Virgil because he played for other teams before he became the first black Tiger, for example.

Note, while not all were successful, five of the first eight players on this list are now in the Hall of Fame. ALL of those players were told they wouldn't be on teams at all if they weren't black.

Enjoy.

V3

7/8/22. Looks like all my T205 Gold Border Cards got removed from my list. I'm guessing that's because someone fixed the checklist of those cards. I have now replaced them on the list. Fine with me. Gave me a chance to play with this list again....

9/14/17. IT IS DONE! Don't quite know when I started this, two or three years ago, I'd say. But I've done it. This is my collection of every player who was on the field during Merkle's Boner.

I leave the rest of my original description of this list below:

I've always loved it, but for about three years now -- ever since I decided I needed at least one tobacco card, a Cub -- I've been a bit obsessed with Merkle's Boner. Perhaps I just like the name. Perhaps I like that it led to the last Cubs World Series win before 2016. I dunno. I'm just going with it.

I'm not going to recount the story here. I'll leave it to those who are interested to look up. Suffice it to say, Merkle made a pretty understandable base running error that arguably won the Cubs the 1908 pennant. He never lived it down.

I thought I'd be done once I got Merkle and Tinker and Evers and Chance. But then I wondered what other tobacco cards I could shoot for, and it occurred to me that there was a pitcher that day. And another guy on base. And a guy who got the hit. There's the guy who fielded the ball. And, less connected to the play, but of course on the field, were the catcher, third baseman, and two other outfielders.

I lean towards T205s whenever possible, because they have stats and are beautiful. I hope to own all of these someday. It'll take awhile. But here's my Merkle's Boner gallery. Enjoy.

V3

August 2021: big changes on the team, not too much on this list, though. Once I like a guy, I usually keep liking him.

September 21, 2020. Yu moves in. Hamels never made it. Kimbrel doesn't look like he has much of a chance.

I've been a Cubs fan all my life. The conscious-of-baseball part of my life starts in about 1970. I've watched some pretty bad teams, but there were always players -- some great, some just fun -- whom I loved to watch. This is my attempt to compile my favorite 75, roughly in order of preference. (It started as 50, expanded to 91, then I cut it back to 75 -- so many players I remember). As you can see, it's not just about stats. There are some odd choices in here. Some, I just liked their grit. Some just had great nicknames. The deeper you get into the list, the more they blend together in order of preference. And I'm probably forgetting quite a few....

The representative cards are the the oldest card I have of each player as a Cub. (Had to pick SOME criteria).
Hope you enjoy it. Feel free to remind me of players I probably loved but left off the list.

Update: 4/14/21. I noticed today was one of the top birthdays, so I looked through this list. Seems I hadn't updated that Roy Halladay and Marvin Miller are in the Hall of Fame. Now I have. But I have not updated the WAR for active players. Perhaps I'll remember to when they retire.

Sometime late in 2017, I started paying attention to the birthdays listed on the site. Then I decided I wanted to make a list of the top 10 baseball birthdays, completely subjective, of course.

So here they are.

Methodology: Well first, I used this site. Thank goodness for whomever thought to put "HOF" in red for those players. Because, otherwise, this would have taken forever. I cruised through every day of the year, looking for the red HOF. If I found an "anchor" Hall of Famer, I'd look through the rest of the list, looking for other HOFers, but also all-stars, league leaders, players and managers who had an impact on the game. Then I listed all those players for the dates that seems promising. If there was just one "minor" HOFer, that wouldn't be enough to look at that date more carefully. One "major" HOFer, and I'd check it out. Two HOFers and I'd look closely. Remember, in the end, I cruised past every baseball player who is listed in this database.

But THEN I stumbled into the fact that Baseball Reference has sortable lists of every player born on each day -- sortable by WAR! So I basically started the whole project over and reviewed every...single...day...to see what players had the highest WAR on each day, and I listed the top candidates. I got down to about 60 days pretty easily, then cut it to 41 without a lot of trouble, then found my way down to 25, which I then arranged in "order."
But first, I searched for a similar list on the internet. To my relief, I didn't find one, really. I did find a list of baseball birthdays by total war of all players, but I didn't consider that as a factor.

In the end, I basically looked at the top three WAR for each date, and then checked to see if other significant players were also born on that date. I didn't give a ton of credit to dates with one player with a huge WAR, but no significant other stars to back him up. Think Babe Ruth, Cy Young. There is probably a slight modern slant. I decided to focus on players, but used other prominent baseball figures as tie-breakers. (Think Marvin Miller.)

These candidates dates are just my opinion. Feel free to argue. Or to research better dates.

As to the cards I picked, if I had one of his cards in my collection, I went with my favorite of those, otherwise, I just picked what I liked. Just so I don't have to state whether I have the card every. single. time, if it's 1969 or later, I definitely own the card.

All stats from Baseball Reference.com

Picking a top 25 wasn't too hard. Ordering them 1 to 25 was almost random silliness.

I've been working on this list for a long, long time. And now I've finally pulled the trigger. So without further babbling, I present my list of the Top 25 Baseball Birthdays.
Enjoy.

v3

Here's my collection of T207 Cubs. I have the eight that are realistic to get. The other two in the set are virtually impossible to find, expensive short prints.
This set is displayed on a large velvet "C" surrounded by black roses and trimmed in red like a baseball, with blood-dripping, hand-painted label. You know, because these cards are creepy....

I LOVE this "set."