Sites I Like: RustyWilly’s HOF Portrait Gallery
December 28th, 2009 | Published in Oddball, Sites I Like
One problem with collecting rookie cards is that it locks you in to the cards that you will include in your collection. Whether you collect rookie cards of Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, or players from your favorite college or team, there’s not much wiggle room: if you want to complete your collection, you’ll probably have to purchase some cards that aren’t very attractive. Check out Bobby Mitchell’s rookie card, for example. He looks like he’s ordering a five dollar footlong while falling over backward.
One way to avoid this is to choose your own “best card” for each player you want in your collection. A great example of such a personalized collection is RustyWilly’s HOF Portrait Gallery. Rather than collecting whatever happens to be the rookie card of each Hall of Famer, RustyWilly chose a nice head shot of each player. He didn’t limit himself to major sets, either, so he has cards from Kelloggs, Swell, Stop N Go, 7 Eleven, and Wonder Bread. Not only did this give him a wider selection of images to choose from, it allowed him to include Hall of Famers who didn’t appear on cards in major issues, and hence didn’t have rookie cards. (See R is for Rookie Cards for the definition of “rookie card.”)
Clicking on an image in RustyWilly’s gallery brings up large scans of both the front and back of the card. The card backs are a nice feature, since they provide little bios of the Hall of Famers. They’re also a ton of work, which is why I haven’t included them in my own gallery.
RustyWilly also has a Baseball HOF Portrait Gallery. I don’t know much about baseball cards, though, so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
