Hal Woodeshick and

Card #350 - a disappointing 3rd choice in the 1959 Duff Drive baseball card draft.

In our Ashland neighborhood, baseball and football card collecting first arrived in a big way in 1959, baseball cards that summer and then football cards in the fall. Most of us were eight and nine years old and playing in our first year of little league.

1959 was the third summer for most of us in the neighborhood - the streets had been developed in 1955-56 and most families moved in at that time.

Why this hobby did not hit us to some extent in 1957 or 1958 I do not know, why it hit so big in 1959 was probably just a need to first attain a critical mass. Little did we know at the time that by a bit of life's serendipity the 1959 baseball cards were destined to become the most important and lasting images of our youth. In those days Topps released cards by series, with the lower number cards released in the spring and the higher numbers released gradually during the course of the season. Our collecting did not take off until summer and by that point the stores had sold their supply of boxes containing low number cards. So all of us had a good supply of 1959 high number cards, some middle number cards, and just a handful of low number cards.

At the end of the 1959 baseball season I had the bright idea of having the three of us with the most low number 1959 cards combine our cards and then by turns select a card until we had redistributed the entire group. Even combined we had only about half the lower numbers but it seemed like the only way for me to get my hands on the one Mickey Mantle in the neighborhood - which at the time was effectively the entire world. Unfortunately when we drew numbers for the selection order I ended up going last. The only cards of Mantle and Snider were selected with the first two picks, Snider had been my card. I ended up having to settle for Ernie Banks, who was not even one of the ultra-scarce low numbers.

There was some consolation for me in the fact that Mickey's 1959 picture was extremely dorky.

As our little draft proceeded, my idea continued to backfire badly; we were not sophisticated enough to realize that the fairest way to distribute the cards was to reverse the draft order after each round. Which meant that not only did I lose out by having to go last in the first round, but I went last in every round. By the end I was extremely depressed but had only myself and my bad luck to blame.

The elusive Hal Woodeshick card had been released with Topps' first series. For most of us the Cleveland Indians were the only team that mattered. Even today I find my attention drawn to the Indians' cards, and in that moment of realization I recapture part of the excitement of opening a pack of five cards and the rush of finding that one of them is an Indian.

Two key cards in the set, Mays was a scarce low number and Roseboro was from Ashland and many of us knew his parents. Mays was destined to become my favorite player and the Giants my favorite National League team - but that was a year or two in the future and largely the result of someone giving me this old comic with his life story.

Woodeshick had been traded with Jay Porter to Cleveland for Hank Aguirre and Jim Hegan on February 18, 1958. He split the 1958 campaign between the Indians and its top farm team, pitching only 71 innings for the Tribe that year. He was dealt to the Washington Senators along with Hal Naragon for Ed Fitz Gerald on May 25, 1959. Although he did not pitch an inning for Cleveland in 1959 he was with the team in spring training and ended up being pictured as an Indian on his first baseball card.

Because Woodeshick's card did not exist in our little neighborhood universe, we did not know that he was pictured in an Indians' uniform. Then in late September 1959 I visited the Ashland County Fair.

In the Hobby Building some older kid from another neighborhood had placed the entire 1959 baseball card set on display. The 572 cards were sequentially pasted to thick poster board with photo corners. The posters were hung from a wall inside the "limited access" display area, I believe the entire display area was enclosed with a wall of chicken wire, so I could only view them from a distance but they were close enough to read the names and make out the team logos on the cards. For the first time I was able to scan through the entire early series and see many of the cards for the first time. I discovered that I had already seen every Indian card but Woodeshick's, and since that day his card has been my elusive Holy Grail. It would be eight years before I would finally add it to my collection, a few days after discovering a mail order baseball card seller. And even now (almost 56 years later) the card holds a certain mystique for me. Hal had a decent major league career for several teams and died in 2009 at age 76.

I only seriously collected baseball cards for three years, stopping after the 1961 set, but the 1959 set always held the most magic. As the players in those sets have gradually died off over the years, I have almost without exception visualized them in the 1959 set.