196(9) At A Time - A Recap

Whew! That was fun but exhausting. I started doing two pages a week back in May. I think there may have been one week that I skipped, but otherwise I kept plugging along, 18 cards a week until finishing yesterday.

First a few thoughts....

• I really enjoyed looking back at this set, which were the first cards that I really remember as a kid. A lot of memories came back to me as I went through them, and that was fun.
• Just like a marathon runner, I hit the wall, probably around card #450. There are only so many ways you can say the same thing about a bunch of mediocre players. And in this set, because of expansion, there was a boat load of mediocre players. I wonder how many times I wrote "...and those games in 1969 were the last of his career"? But despite hitting the wall, I just kept at it. To those of you going through a set one card at a time, my advice is to watch out for that wall! You will hit it, so be prepared for it.
• I'm glad with my decision to keep the writing limited to the players' 1969 season instead of doing a career-long bio. SInce the cards are from 1969, it seems logical to me to talk only about what was going on in 1969. The only exception I made was for players who would later end up with the Cubs.
• There were a lot of past/present/future Cubs in the set: 100 by my count. I wonder how that compares with other teams? It seem high to me.
• A total of 247 players had either no hat or an airbrushed hat. Wow, that is a lot!
• There were 45 present/future hall of fame players in the set. That, too seems like a lot.
  
• I still don't like the Mets!

I decided to do the set nine cards at a time because I didn't think I had the patience to go through the set one card at a time. For those of you who are even more impatient than that, here is the entire run of 664 cards in less than three minutes!






Thanks for sticking with me the past nine months! I hope you enjoyed the set as much as I did!