The Ever Evasive Joe Schlabotnik

So why am I searching for Joe Schlabotnik? Fans of the Peanuts comics strips might remember Joe Schlabotnik as Charlie Brown's favorite baseball player. Good ol' Joe was a minor leaguer who occasionally got called up to the majors for a cup of coffee, as they say, but never became a big star. Fitting that he was Charlie Brown's favorite player.

Sadly, Charlie Brown was forever searching for that prized Joe Schlabotnik baseball card. He would open pack after pack and never find a Joe Schlabotnik card. Lucy, of course, would come along, purchase a single pack and walk away with a Joe Schlabotnik card. Poor Chuck...

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Such was the life of a kid growing up in the 1970s. If you collected baseball cards, you probably had a Joe Schlabotnik of your very own. I did. Mine was the 1975 Topps Pete Rose (a subject of my next post). No matter how many packs I opened, I never found a Pete Rose. In fact, it wasn't until this year - my 44th trip around the sun - that I finally got a copy of that card. I purchased the entire 1975 Topps set on eBay. It wasn't as exciting as finding it in a wax pack back in 1975 would've been, but it was still pretty neat. Yes, I said "neat." That's how I would've described in 1975 and that's how I still describe it in 2012.

This blog is dedicated to the baseball cards that made growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s a magical time. Baseball was pure magic then. It had yet to go corporate, big league players weren't shooting steroids and packs of baseball cards cost less than a buck each (lots less).

Posts on this blog will focus on various baseball cards - sometimes individual cards, sometimes sets, sometimes particular teams - and will touch on baseball and life in the 1970s and 1980s in the midwest. I welcome your comments on this trip down memory lane. And for those of you thinking this might be the beginnings of my midlife crisis, well, you're right. Maybe this will be therapeutic for us all.