Worth the Waite

 I was bad at posting cards I got in the summer, so I figure December is better than never for showing good cards. 

In a Net54 purchase, I picked up a 1929 R316 Kashin Waite Hoyt. It's a surprisingly affordable set, for pre-war. You can get commons in decent condition for as little as $10 on eBay, and this Hoyt was $35. It has a stain, but it's in good condition otherwise. Until this Thursday, Waite Hoyt cards accounted for the two most expensive cards I've bought personally, as I bought a 1933 Goudey Hoyt in September 2020.

I also got some pre-war cricket cards. I know most of you all don't care about cricket cards, but I enjoy picking them up occasionally. I got two 50-card sets in good condition for $20 each shipped  -  from Thailand. If I was buying baseball cigarette cards, that might buy me two beat-up commons. And cricket is close enough to baseball that I can enjoy watching and reading about it.

The cards took two months to arrive, but they were worth the wait. The two sets were the 1928 Wills set and 1938 John Player & Sons set. I also got a 1937 British Authors set for my dad, because it had cards of some authors he likes. 

The top two cards, a 1934 Players Jack Hobbs and a 1934 Carreras Herbert Sutcliffe, paired well with their 1928 cards. 

Jack Hobbs was the one of the greatest cricketers of all time, starring until he was 51. His career lasted from 1905 to 1934. Herbert Sutcliffe was his batting partner from 1924 onward.

Cricket is weird because the aging pattern is completely different. Many of the players in these sets were in their 40s, and some were in their 50s like Jack Hobbs and Wilfred Rhodes, on the left. A bowler, Rhodes was 50 when this card was issued, and his career was from 1898 to 1930. 

The card of the late Roy Kilner reminds me of the 1964 Topps Ken Hubbs.

K.S Duleepsinhji was nephew of the great Ranjitsinhji. He may have been as good, but his career was shortened by recurrent illness. The Duleep Trophy, one of the premier competitions in Indian cricket, is named after him. 

This is the only horizontal card in either set.

The 1938 set is annoying because the backs are adhesive, as they were designed to be stuck into albums. I need to put them into binder pages, because I can't get go through them without them sticking to me temporarily.

Don Bradman, an Australian. is widely considered the greatest batsman of all-time. He played from 1927 to 1949, and for his career had a batting average of 99.94 in Test matches, and a 95.14 average in First Class matches. A century, where you score 100 runs, is a great achievement, so averaging almost a century per match for over twenty years is amazing.

I like looking at the player's faces. I feel like you could make up a cheesy story with how they look. The cast:

Norman Yardley: The boy evil genius.

Robert Wyatt: His hired thug.

Peter Smith: Head of Scotland Yard.

I was going to do more, but the cards were infuriatingly sticky so I quit.