Jun 12 2015 02:18 PM
When Choo Choo Coleman's Baseball Card Beats Babe Ruth's Or Mickey Mantle's
| “He caught as though he were fighting a swarm of bees,” wrote the New Yorker’s Roger [Angell] of Choo Choo Coleman, the Mets catcher in the early 1960s. When a pitcher who had been a minor league teammate of his was asked who the toughest guy in the league to pitch was he answered “Choo Choo Coleman.” The Mets’ manager, Casey Stengel, frequently boasted of his speed and how he put it to good use “running after passed balls.” It hardly mattered that, as [Angell] put it, speed was as “necessary to a catcher as good handwriting.” A fan poll in the New York Post rated him the “fastest Met” and the “cutest Met,” but noted [there’s] only one thing in the game he hasn’t quite learned: How to get on first.” In 462 career at-bats, Coleman hit .197 and had nine homers. Like other “original Mets” on the 1962 club during their first season, he symbolized both the futility and resilience of the worst team ever (42 wins and 120 losses). From outfield collisions to botched rundowns, the “Amazins” invented new ways to lose. Gasped Stengel “the only thing worse than a Mets game is a Mets doubleheader.”  Choo Choo Coleman appeared at a New York baseball card show in 2010, his first public appearance in almost 50 years. He signed his rare high #, short-printed 1966 Topps card for me. So what is Rick “Diesel” Edmunds, the owner of Dznutsandcards in West Huntington, West Virginia thinking? At the National Sports Collectors Convention in Cleveland in August, he had 35 1966 Choo Choo Coleman Topps baseball cards in his display case and told me he had another 65 at home. It turns out that he is having the last laugh. And so you can you by following his strategy buying and selling obscure baseball cards instead of the Mickey Mantles and Babe Ruths I have trumpeted. |
read the rest at http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidseidem ... y-mantles/
Disclaimer: By posting this article, I am not assuming that I know more about Choo Choo Coleman or Choo Choo Coleman's baseball cards or anything, really, than everybody else here. Actually, I know nothing. I don't even know what I'm doing here, or how I got here.