A Great Little Card....Cards.

The Cardinals won their first World Series in 1926 when they met up with the Yankees in the World Series.  The Fall Classic lasted seven games and ended when Babe Ruth tried to steal second base down a single run in the ninth inning.  The Cardinals actually had a Hall of Famer on the mound at the end of the game in the person of pitcher Pete Alexander.

The story is best told by Ronald Reagan and Doris Day.....  

What happened to the ending?  Some sort of artistic license or something with Alexander striking out the last batter.  I am not sure there is an actual video of the caught stealing.

As a card collector I have spent a lot of time and money trying to track down cards of all the Hall of Famers on the Cardinals.  The obvious ones like Stan Musial and Bob Gibson of long since been taken care of, but I also try to collect the players who were just passing through St. Louis.  

Some of them were good during there stop over, like Orlando Cepeda.........

who won a World Series with the Cardinals in 1967 and a National League pennant in 1968.  I recently was able to track down an autograph of Cha Cha wearing the birds on the bat.

There were also some less than memorable Hall of Famers who have made a stop in the Lou.  One from my time watching the Cardinals was Dennis Eckersley who followed LaRussa over to the Cardinals in the mid 1990s.  Eck had his moments with the Cardinals.......

but the Cardinals years were not kind to the Hall of Fame pitcher.  I still found a cool autograph of him as from his time in St. Louis. 

Which brings me back to Old Pete Alexander.  There are some pretty pricy cards of the Hall of Famer out there floating around on the internet, but he was really just a Cardinal for a few years.  He had the famous save in the last game of the 1926 World Series and then pitched three more seasons for Cardinals, all over 40 years of age.  Really Alexander's Hall of Fame years took place with the Phillies in the teens and the Cubs in the early 1920s.  Which translate into some sort of compromise in terms of a Pete Alexander baseball card.  

I found a good one from the 1960s.  

The scan is large, but this is actually a mini.  The card is out of the 1963 Bazooka All-Time Greats set.  These cards are their set, not a part of the regular Bazooka cards, but they were also given out a little bit differently than the normal Bazooka card.  Like many other baseball cards connected to food products, the Bazooka cards came attached to the box.  The greats cards were actually placed inside the boxes of gum at the rate of 1 card per 5 boxes.  

The cards tend to look a little bit nicer than some of the other Bazooka cards from that era.  So, I found my Alexander card and I could have walked away a happy card collector, but did you know that there is an actual Cardinals card in the set?  Not a Phillies player who played for the Cardinals....

Cardinals player.  The Alexander card is a little bit nicer in terms of condition.  I am not sure if all of the Bazooka cards from this set had variations, but apparently the Hornsby cards came with a light and a dark (like the Alexander card) backgrounds.  Not sure if there is any price difference either, but neither card was very expensive.