The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. This item is unavailable.The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book

A look at baseball in the 1950s presents more than two hundred cards, with amusing bios on some of the game's most colorful characters and observations on the baseball card phenomenon

This is an irreverent but affectionate trip back to the 1950s - "before the graphics got better and the game got worse" - when baseball cards ruled the American schoolyard. It presents more than 200 cards with biographies, accompanied by observations on trading, boarding, collecting, flipping and "other aberrations of the baseball-card life". Among the anecdotes are Phil Linz's harmonica-playing, which once so infuriated general manager Ralph Houk that he fined Linz heavily and threatened to tear him limb from limb; Sam Jones, who never owned a hat that really fitted; Rip Sewall, who threw a pitch called the "blooper ball"; Rollie Sheldon, who threw pitches which were impossible to name; and Dick "Turk" Farrell, who even in his final years caused his catchers to put sponge in their mitts to withstand the sting of his fastball. Also included is a list of major league nicknames.