Monday, July 24, 2017

A Venerable Old Card Part 60

I was first introduced to the Mothers Cookies baseball cards sometime back in the late 1990s after the Cardinals traded for Mark McGwire.  I spent a lot of time trying to track down his cards which included a whole bunch of different cards from Mother's Cookies.  Sort of seemed like a bottomless pit of sorts....




I cannot tell you how many different McGwire cards that they put out while he was on the A's, but I felt like every time I found one another one would pop up that I didn't have yet.  Eventually I moved on from tracking down all of the Mothers Cookies McGwire cards and generally ignored these cards for the most part.  Although, after searching through my closet of cards for a few minutes I found a copy of a Mother's Cookies Willie McGee from a Giants team set.  



Now, both of the McGwire and McGee Mother's Cookies cards are really cool and I like the simplicity of the design.  Edge to edge pictures on baseball cards always look nice.  Plus, if you ever read these posts, there have now been 60 of them, most of them are actually cards from the 1990s.  Not sure that actually qualifies them as really being all that old.  However, I have an actual old card for this weeks old card post with an old former Major League player.  

Cookie?  


These look like Famous Amos cookies.  

Being a Minor League card guy I was surprised to find out awhile back that Mother's Cookies had actually dabbled in Minor League baseball cards back in 1952.  The set featured players from the Pacific Coast League.  The eight team league featured teams that were not affiliated with a particular Major League team, yet there were dozens of players who made the jump from the PCL to the Majors.  

I actually ended up picking up a manager card of former Giants slugger Mel Ott.  After looking through the cards in the set there was no obvious connection to the Cardinals or Durham Bulls starting me down, so I picked out a copy of a card on Ebay and went for it.  

Here's what I ended up with.......



The background coloring on the card seems very 1950s.  The cards all have something in the pastel family.  I also like all of the uniforms on the cards.  Minor League teams have gone to absurd names like the Baby Cakes, and the whatnot, but the PCL had good names with good uniforms.  I know that some would consider the simple blue and white jersey boring, but I like it.

Overall, I really love this card.  It's not a hard task to find Minor League cards of players from the 1980s and even into the 1970s.  However, once you start getting into the mid 1970s it gets harder and harder.  This Mother's Cookies set seems to be one of the best looking vintage Minor League sets, but it's also something that isn't too hard to find.  It also doesn't cost an arm and a leg to buy the cards.

Thinking I might need to find a few more of these early Mother's Cookies cards in the near future to sort of balance out all of the McGwire junk wax era cards I picked up back in the day.


5 comments:

  1. I grew up going to Candlestick and the Coliseum on baseball card day when they'd hand out a partial Mother's Cookies team sets. I've got a bunch of them still in my collection. That Ott is beautiful. Don't think I've ever seen one of these in person.

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    1. Some really nice looking cards in the set, inexpensive too. I believe that there are both San Francisco Seals cards in the set in addition to the Oakland Oaks cards. Be kind of cool for a Bay Area collector to find....

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    2. Lol. The ever growing list of things to collect. :)

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  2. Those cookies have been around awhile! What a nice Ott!

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