Sometimes I'm reminded of how little I actually know about collecting baseball cards.

About a month or so ago, I busted a box of 2010 Series 2. As many of you are aware, I'm collecting the "Cards Your Mom Threw Out" subset, with a particular quixotic pursuit of all the original back cards. It's been slow going, needless to say.

One of the cards in my box looked like this:

Unusual - I thought it was just another crappy Yankee insert. I didn't stop to think how Babe Ruth couldn't possibly have been born in 1910, or that the card actually has his birthdate - in 1895! It seems unusual, possibly valuable - maybe a short print. At least nobody smacked a pie in the Babe's face. I put it in a penny sleeve and continued on my merry way.

Occasionally I would come across that card on my desk, and wonder what its story was, but it was never really more than idle curiosity. Once the box break was done, the card joined the rest in a pile of odds and ends on the bookshelf.

You see where this is going, don't you?

Fast forward to today. I'm doing a inventory (think of it as a "stocktake" for my cards) and I'm logging in my Yo Momma cards. Not really paying much attention to the names, just the numbers, I happen to notice on a website that the 1995 Yo Mamma card for Series 2 belongs to...

...Babe Ruth

Thanks to eBay, I confirmed that this card pictured above was indeed the card. I had CMT-102 in my collection all along, and didn't even know it. Now, the trick was to find the damn thing.

First place I looked - the pile of insert cards from the box break. Logical place, right? Not there.

Second place: with the duplicate base cards...nope.

Third place: underneath the box hits from my Obak box...nada.

Now I'm getting annoyed - where could it be? Oh, how I hope I didn't leave it on the desk for my dog to eat or my wife to throw away!

I notice that I also can't find a stack of cards that I've set aside for trades. These cards were in the same general area of the desk as the Ruth card. Shit - she couldn't have thrown them all away, could she?

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity but probably wasn't even five minutes, I found the stack of trade cards on the top shelf. Sure enough, the Ruth card was there, too, along with a stack of unredeemed Million Card Giveaway cards. Still in the penny sleeve, I scanned the Babe and put him in his proper place - with the rest of my Cards Your Mom (not my mom, she would never do such a thing!) Threw Out. A happy ending.










Oh, wait, I didn't tell you the best part. Here's the back of that card:


It's an original back card! After a month of being annoyed because I got screwed since the only CYMTO original back card I got in the box was a 2008 Ryan Zimmerman, it turns out I had a second one all along.

I just didn't know it.


(For the record, I did notice that "reprint" in the bottom left-hand corner of the card. I just thought it meant that it was a reprint of a 1995 Topps insert set. You see, that big red "3" confused me, and I thought it was the 3 of a set, and Topps had reprinted all of them. I have no idea why I thought Topps would have done such a thing on this, the 115th anniversary of the Babe, but there you go. I can be shockingly dumb sometimes.)