Three players made their Cubs 2022 debut while I was at Camp Arcadia. I didn't have the time or technology to make their cards, so the task was saved for my return home.
All three are pitchers. Two, Assad and Padilla, made their MLB debuts, while Farrell is a veteran on his second go-around with the Cubs.
I mentioned yesterday that I was away from home the past two weeks. Allow me to elaborate.
Mrs. WW and I spent the time away at Camp Arcadia, a Lutheran camp in northern Michigan along the shore of Lake Michigan. We weren't there as guests, but as workers. The camp needed end-of-season staff as their summer college crew has gone back to school. We were looking for something to do and I was also looking to get away from home for a while (me, the retired principal wanted to be away from the school as the year got under way - the new guy needed to establish himself without me around).
We answered the camps call for help and spent two long and tiring, but also rewarding weeks. Mrs. WW worked in the kitchen while I was on the housekeeping team. I cleaned more toilets than I can count, swept sand away from floors, did many loads of towels, and became the king of folding fitted sheets.. We worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week, but there were some breaks during the day to catch our breath.
After work we got to enjoy the beauty of the camp and the sunsets.
Even though the camp is in northern Michigan, I did find a nice Cubs connection.
This is the camp's softball field. Check out the scoreboard.
It looks like they borrowed the design from the Wrigley Field marquee.
I've been out of town the past two weeks and have been running a bunch of scheduled posts. I've run out of those and hope to be able to get something up tomorrow.
I've got 20,692 Cubs cards from 304 different brands listed on a spreadsheet. A random number generator picked five cards, one each from the past several decades.
1900s - 1970s: 1970 Kelloggs #50 Ernie Banks This card has me so conflicted. On one hand you have a smiling Mr. Cub in the home pinstripes. On the other hand, he is at Shea Stadium.
1980s: 1982 Topps #62 Mike Tyson Before there was the powerful and crazy boxer, there was the second baseman. As opposed to the hard hitting boxer, the infielder was pretty light-hitting. After hitting just .185 for the 1981 Cubs, he was released towards the end of spring training in 1982, ending his 10-year career.
1990s: 1994 Triple Play #75 Mike Morgan The Cubs were one of eleven big-league stops for Morgan. I didn't realize it until I started working on this, but he played more years with the Cubs than with any of the other ten teams. The 1994 season was his worst. A 2-10 record with an ERA of 6.69 is pretty bad. Good thing for him the season was cut short by the strike. He had three different stints on the DL, but obviously never got healthy.
2000s: 2008 Heritage #580 Kosuke Fukudome Remember when he was all the rage? He had cards and inserts in just about everything in 2008.
2010s: 2010 Topps Update #85 Andre Dawson This card is a short print variation. Starlin Castro is the real #85 in the set, but the Hawk got an SP card.
The Baseball Scoops set was put out by a company called Nu-card in 1961. The set has 80 cards, but they are numbered from 401 - 480. They don't have a team listed, so the team sets, like the Fleer sets of the same era, are pretty arbitrary.
The 1993 Premier set was it's finale. The set size dropped back to 132 cards but they also had a couple of insert sets, good for another 26 cards. The Cubs in the set took a big hit as there were just four.
Premier was back in 1992 with a bigger set. It went from 132 cards to 198. The set must have come out later in the season because it includes players that were new to their teams in 1992. Sammy Sosa was traded to the Cubs in late March and he is show with the Cubs.
Though the set size went up by 66 cards, the number of Cubs remained the same, eight.
I've finished up looking at the regular O-Pee-Chee cards, so let's move on to another of their sets.
Companies were trying to keep up with Upper Deck and their higher quality card, so in 1991 we saw the debut of Topps Stadium Club and Fleer Ultra. O-Pee-Chee entered the fray too, with a set called Premier.
This was the first time OPC produced their own baseball card set, a set not based on the Topps set. There were 132 card, and they came seven to a pack. The player's position on the front of the card was bilingual, as was all of the information on the back.
It was developed and sold exclusively to the Canadian market. Because of that, it was heavily slanted towards the Blue Jays and Expos. They make up 29 of the set, leaving the other 22 teams divided among 103 cards.
Having eight cards, the Cubs did fairly well.
The 1974 is the last of my three incomplete sets. The 1974 set was a complete duplicate of the Topps set, all 660 cards. This was the first time Topps issued all the cards at once and OPC did the same thing. There weren't any high number cards to worry about.
That made it seem odd that I would have trouble finding any of the cards. Even odder, the cards I'm missing are no-name rookie cards. I was originally missing four of the rookie cards when I started putting the OPC sets together last winter. Two of them have since showed up, but I'm still missing two.
The rookies on the missing cards are not big names. One card, #603, has Barry Foote, Tom Lundstedt, Charlie Moore, and Sergio Robles. The rookies on the other card, #604, are Terry Hughes, John Knox, Andre Thornton, and Frank White. I can't figure out what makes those two cards so tough to find.
The backs have a change of color along with the usual bilingual changes.
