Fantastic Trade with @benhenry!

I may need to rethink my position on not buying Topps Heritage in bulk in 2015.  To recap, I bought a lot of Topps Heritage this year.  And by a lot, I mean I bought enough to get me within striking distance of a complete set including all short-prints and basic insert sets.  Not only was opening the packs with my wife and my oldest son an absolute blast, it yielded me several cards that I've been able to trade off in exchange for some amazing additions to my Phillies collection.

One such recent trade was with Ben Henry of the The Baseball Card Blog.  I sent Ben a bunch of Topps Heritage inserts and parallels and he in turn sent me the collection of cards featured in the photo at the top of this post.  I added a few Phillies oddballs - namely some 1984 Topps Tiffany cards, a badly miscut 1975 Topps Willie Montanez and a few wrong-backed 1987 Topps cards.  Ben also threw in several recent Topps Phillies cards which had already been claimed by my two sons prior to me taking the picture seen here.

The oddballs and newer Phillies cards are cool, but the true highlights in the package were the older Phillies cards.  Ben sent two cards from the 1949 Bowman set getting me a little closer to my long-term goal of having one of each vintage Phillies Bowman card.  Both "Dutch" and "The Hat" look great with the other '49 Bowmans in my collection.

Ben also sent two cards needed for my 1953 Topps Phillies set - Willie Jones and Tommy Glaviano.  These are just gorgeous cards and if I ever become rich and famous, I'd like to think I'd spend my time putting together a complete 1953 Topps set.  Finally, Ben sent the 1966 Topps Richie Allen card, which spent only a few short months on my "Ten Most Wanted - Vintage" list on the sidebar.

Thanks again for the trade, Ben!  And there's a good chance I'll have some 2015 Topps Heritage to send your way this time next year.

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Notwithstanding the awesome trade with Ben, there was another unwanted card that I pulled from our packs of 2014 Topps Heritage that has gone on to bigger and better things.  I'll need to cover this in a future post, but thanks again to reader Steve F. who alerted me to this card's value.

1948 Bowman #24 Emil (Dutch) Leonard

I have a lot of Phillies baseball cards in my collection. Until recently however, the oldest cards in my collection were from the 1951 Bowman set, as my Dad has been slowly but steadily adding '51 Bowman Phillies cards to "his" collection. The Phillies were established in 1883, so this means there are 67 years of Phillies baseball cards missing from my collection. Now I'm not about to break the bank on a bunch of rare early 20th Century tobacco cards, but I have recently scoured eBay and won a few reasonably priced pre-1950 Phillies cards. I'll be featuring these cards in posts over the next few weeks.

Some readers of this blog would maintain that 1948 was a very good year. In this year of monumental debuts, Bowman released its first baseball card set - a 48-card black and white mini set. The set featured the first widely circulated baseball cards of Stan Musial, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto and Warren Spahn. There are only two Phillies cards in the '48 Bowman set - this Dutch Leonard card and Emil Verban - so I'm half way to completing the Phillies team set.

Between 1933 and 1953, Dutch Leonard enjoyed a 20-year Major League career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Washington Senators, Phillies and Chicago Cubs. He was a five-time All-Star, winning a total of 191 games behind an incredibly deceptive knuckleball. Wearing number 20, he pitched for the Phils in 1947 and 1948 back when the team originally wore the blue cap and cream colored uniform combo they presently wear as their day-game alternate uniforms. Over his two-year span with the Phils, Dutch's record was 29-29 with a 2.60 ERA. He completed 35 of his 59 games started - a testament to the durability of that era's pitchers. Dutch was traded to the Chicago Cubs in December 1948 with Monk Dubiel for Hank Borowy and Eddie Waitkus.

Dutch passed away in April 1983 in Springfield, Illinois, at the age of 74.

And one more thing: Ask for Blony Bubble Gum.