Rollin' on 73's

Playing with my cards as an adult usually leads to me doing everything but actually "playing" with them. Or at least play with them how I would have as a child.

Currently my card-"playing" is basically updating spreadsheets, writing some blog posts, listing my want/trade lists, and occasionally pulling something cool from packs or from an envelope from a blogger. Sort of the adult version of playing. Pretty fun in a boring grown up way.

I look over the card before relegating it to it's home, be it binder or box. Mostly I don't play with cards these days. My trading is done online. My selling and purchasing is done mostly online. I do like to buy random stuff at the hobby shops and Walmart and Target but my face to face interaction with other collectors is basically nil.

When the weather started to get warmer this spring I wanted to change all that and take my cards out for a little spin. I took my "good box" of cards with the random relics, inserts and of course my new (to me) 1973 cards that I got from ebay and the flea market.

Turned out to be a bad idea.



I found this card while weed eating a few months after the rains and tornadoes had passed through Norman.



I remember some of the cards blowing away, but I thought I had retrieved all of them.

Kind of sad, but I got another Cardenas in another lot later so I'm good. Just kind of funny that I've already got a casualty this early in my quest to collect the 1973 set.

In addition to the other current stuff out there, I'm working on finishing the 1980 and 1973 sets.

The 1980 set was my favorite when I was a kid and 1973 is my birth year. I thought it'd be fun to try and collect those two sets as a reprieve from all the chrome and auto relic cards that are found in the newer sets. Not to mention the insert intensive sets of the past few months. A&G and Topps series two comes to mind.

What originally drew me to the set was all the cool action shots.








Not only really cool horizontal action shots like the three above, but also cool vertical shots.





They also look good as photos without the borders and logos.





I like horizontal and I like tight shots. I wanted to play around with this shot and turn a vertical card into a horizontal shot. The newspaper and photo editors out there will probably not like my creativity with the cropping, but it looks good to me.

I probably cropped this one a little too tight.

Here is the original for reference.


Obviously a vertical shot so I didn't have a lot to work with. I probably should have left in a little more glove, but I really wanted to highlight his expression. It's a great candid shot. This out performs the wacky "Photo Day" card in last years updates and highlights.


Here is Oklahoma's own Lindy McDaniel as a Yankee. He spent most of his career with the Cardinals, but by this time he was in the Yankee system.

He's doing the tried and true fake windup pose in his card.



A strong chin, pointy little noise. He reminds me of someone....




Can you see the resemblance? A little Quagmire-esque.

This post is all over the place, but I'm too tired to do a more thorough post on the 1973 set.

Let me know what you think of the '73 set. Oh yeah and as for the title. When I first starting writing this I had come across a Weird Al video that I thought was funny. I thought it related to the dirt that I found on the backs of these cards.

I was originally looking for the song "Riding Dirty", but found this one instead.



I can sort of see me as the "white and nerdy" guy hangin' wit my cards in the backyard. Just being white and nerdy. Mowing the yard and seeing my crumpled up card in the dirt. Rollin' on '73's. Getting durty wit the '73's. I'm actually too white for this song. I'm so white, I'm actually translucent. You get the picture.

Thanks for reading.