BASEBALL BATHROOM DECOR

Baseball cards from the 1950s and 60s, back when the teams were not all the same as we know today. The old St. Browns had become the Baltimore Orioles, but the Brooklyn Dodgers and NY Giants were still in New York. The Philadelphia Athletics had moved to Kansas City but had not yet gone all the way to Oakland on the west coast. Milwaukee's team was the Braves and the Cincinnati team temporarily changed their name from the Reds to the Redlegs as a result of Senator Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt. A new expansion team in Houston was called the Colt 45s; it would be a couple of more years before their new domed stadium opened and they would change their name to the Astros.

As kids, we would play various games by flipping baseball cards. The two most popular were "Heads & Tails" and "Touchies." Heads & Tails was best for two players. The first kid would hold his card with one edge on the tip of his thumb and the other edge on the tips of his fingers. Then, he would flip the card onto the ground. The second player would do likewise and try to land heads or tails to match the first card. The winner would take possession of both cards. A match (i.e., two heads or two tails) would go to the second player; a mismatch (one head and one tail) would go to the first player. The odds of winning were pretty even and although many individual cards might change hands, both players would usually end up with approximately as many cards as they started out with.

Touchies was a game for any number of players. Players would hold their card by the corner and, taking turns standing behind the playing line, would flip it much like throwing a frisbee. The object was to have your card land touching one of the previously thrown cards. At first players would throw their cards as far and as scattered as they could to make it difficult for the next players to touch their cards. But eventually someone, either by accident or design, would land a card close to the playing line. Then each player, in turn, would try to touch the easy mark before any one else. As the number of close in cards accumulated in greater numbers, someone would eventually touch another card and win the pot. The winner took all the cards that had been played. In this game large numbers of cards could change hands and some kids could get wiped out.

Needless to say there were various strategies to flipping baseball cards. Everyone wanted a Mickey Mantle, but few kids ever got one in their pack of bubble gum cards. However, there was always some kid, usually a stranger on another block, who was lucky enough to get several duplicates. If you were lucky enough to have a card of a favorite player, you might not want to risk it in a game of Heads & Tails. But if you were down to your last few cards in a game of Touchies, and the potential winnings included a really big pot, you might risk that Mickey Mantle or Warren Spahn after all. Heads & Tails was pretty straight forward, but as you can imagine there were frequent disputes in Touchies as to just how close a card might be without actually touching another.

Cards in this group include the following:
1958 Del Rice, Milwaukee Braves
1959 Yogi Berra, NY Yankees
1959 Ed Bailey, Cincinnati Redlegs
1965 Ernie Banks, Chicago Cubs
1955 Don Hoak, Brooklyn Dodgers
1956 Wes Westrum, NY Giants
1963 Dave Giusti, Houston Colt 45s
1954 Johnny Lipon, Baltimore Orioles
1964 Mickey Mantle, NY Yankees
1961 Johnny Kucks, Kansas City Athletics

Baseball season is back! To celebrate this is an HDR image from a game I attended back in 2007.

Almost looks like a painting...