Cardboard Heroes

This book is an homage to a golden era of baseball card collecting when they were acquired one card or one wax pack at a time, handled, mangled, and worn out. As a young baseball fan, there was nothing more exciting than opening a new pack of baseball cards and slowly revealing who was included. Would there be a major star, a favorite Giants player, or somebody I had never even heard of? As they say in baseball, “hope springs eternal.” The next pack could be THE pack!

This book is a compilation of these players’ stories as told through my accounts surrounding 360 personally curated cards from my childhood collection. The cards range from the late 1950s to the late 1970s and include examples from every team in that era. I selected these cards for a variety of reasons: the player, the picture on the card, the uniform, a collecting memory, or a personal connection to the player. You will see and read about Hall-of-Famers, virtual unknowns, great trades, bad trades, nicknames, and more.