New Collecting Goals--One New Team and One "New" Set

I've been toying around with the idea of adding the Washington Senators to my collecting goals. Since they moved to Texas and became the Rangers in 1972 it's a natural extension of my Rangers team collection. I've received a few Senators cards in trades with other bloggers.

This 1971 Topps Ted Williams card came courtesy of the Troll. He is about to run a contest that includes an autographed Frank Howard card. Be sure you don't enter so I can win.

I've also been attempting to trade for Senators cards on the Topps MCG site. I was offered the following deal recently:

I gladly took their 1960 Roy Sievers for my 1959 Roy McMillan. Of course, it wasn't until I did a little more research that I found out that the Senators I should be after are on cards from 1962 to 1971.

I went to the great site, baseball-almanac.com for this info about the Senators.

"Like magicians using sleight of hand, the Lords of Baseball played a round of "now-you-see-them-now-you-don't" with the Washington Senators in 1960, and then added a "now-you-see-them-again" to finish the trick.
Washington DC owned one of the American League's six original franchises, but after years of losing seasons, the fan base became disinterested and distracted. Owner Calvin Griffith saw greener pastures to the west and moved his franchise to Minnesota in 1960.
Knowing that lawmakers on Capitol Hill were not happy with a situation in which the national pastime would not be played in the national capital (the same lawmakers who decided whether baseball was exempt from antitrust laws) the Lords of the game awarded an expansion franchises to Washington right after Griffith departed with his team.
The second generation of Washington Senators picked up right where their predecessors left off, losing their first-ever game to the White Sox 4-3 on April 10, 1961 at Griffith Stadium. As the decade progressed, fans and lawmakers alike must have wondered why they wanted the Senators back. In their first four years, this edition of the Senators lost 100, 101, 106, and 105 games. In the next few seasons they were able to climb to the middle of the pack and when they hired Ted Williams to manage the team in 1969, they hit their high water mark with an 86-76 record and fourth place. They returned to their losing ways in 1970-71.
The only excitement for the franchise was the slugging of big Frank Howard, who had one of his best years for the 1969 team with forty-eight home runs, one-hundred eleven runs batted in and a .296 average. Howard hit over forty homers in 1968 and 1970 as well. While Howard was slugging and Williams was managing, new owner Bob Short (he bought the club in 1968) was being wooed by the city fathers of Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas. Baseball had seriously looked at this area for its 1969 expansion, but decided to go elsewhere.
Seeing his opportunity, Short closed a deal to move the Senators to Dallas for the 1972 season. With Washington lawmakers now indifferent to the move (due to the embroiling controversies of the era like the Vietnam War), baseball gave its approval. The Senators closed out an era of baseball history with a forfeit loss to the New York Yankees on September 30, 1971. Ironically, the Senators were leading the game 7-5 with two outs in the ninth when swarms of fans rushed onto the field, eventually forcing the forfeit."

This looks like an element of collecting that may lead me to finally plunge into the COMC scene. It should be fun.

The second of my new goals is my first attempt at a vintage set. I'm going to start collecting the 1973 Topps set. I really like this set. I'll go into it more later, but the mixture of great action shots with the more standard posed shots really appeals to me. I like the player silhouettes incorporated into the design. I've got some of the Rangers and and handful of the Hall of Famers. Thanks to the "Old Man" trades I've posted about, I have Willie Mays, the Ryan and Carlton Strike Out Leaders card, Pete Rose, Ferguson Jenkins and Carlton Fisk. Thanks to Topps MCG, I have a few others like these.

I know what your thinking. "Man, that dude is so lucky...he has a Bill Gogolewski card!!" Well, hold onto your hats, because thanks to the foresite of other people on the site, I had two different offers out for that Gogo card and both people accepted so I have TWO of them. Don't be jealous.

So, it looks like more COMC or Ebay lots and maybe I'll get lucky and hit a show or two and run across some more. Maybe even a blog trade or two will net me a few.

I do love this hobby.