My first year collecting cards was the 1975 Topps set, which will forever be my “classic” set. Still love looking through them. I remember hating Teddy Martinez because it seemed like every damn pack I bought, there he was. A Mendoza-like batsman, with no ability to get on base and no speed. I never would tear up a card, but many of Teddy were clothes-pinned to the spokes of my bicycle.

My memory may be faulty on tihs, but I seem to recall in the mis sixties that one year Sandy Koufax was incredibly hard to get. tHe next year Topps flooded the market with Koufax’s.
At least in Southern California..

I imagine myself as a kid dealing with all the duplicates, particularly players I have no interest in. Christ, another fucking Brad Ausmus! as I rip all the unwanted cards up.

“I’ve scoured the Boston newspapers of the day, though, and find nothing which even suggests that there was a team known as the Boston Pilgrims in 1903. Or, for that matter, the Puritans. They’re both wonderful names, but I can’t find even a shred of evidence that they were names used by anyone in Boston at the time.”

Baseball-reference.com has Red Sox going by the name Americans until 1908.

The fluidity of team names is really something to behold in the early days of baseball. It’s always good to have the ability to call a trivia opponent on a technicality when they mention the Red Sox as the answer to the question “Who won the first modern World Series?” (I believe Bill Dineen and company were most often calling themselves the Pilgrims in 1903).