537 winning percentage.īaseball Almanac is pleased to present a unique set of rosters not easilyįound on the Internet. They played their home games at Busch Stadium (Park Factors: 100/99) where 1,682,783 fans witnessed their 1969 Cardinals finish the season with a. Louis Cardinals played 162 games during the regular season, won 87 games, lost 75 games, and finished in fourth position. Louis Cardinals Roster | Research by Baseball Almanac Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and Safety Information / Your California Privacy Rights are applicable to you. ^ Back to Top ^ © 2023 ESPN Internet Ventures. "I'll probably buy one today."įollow The Mag on Twitter and like us on Facebook. Every morning, he wakes up and checks to see if a new '64 Flood is for sale. Instead, he's still chasing a dream that reminds him of his past while also pushing him forward. "Lots of people do things that some people think are weird," he says. It's less clear why he decided to buy all of them. It's easy to understand why Hally loves Flood's card. Hally admits that his hoarding has created "a nightmare in the hobby." He has seen the posts about the collector. He keeps them in special boxes, stashing the most valuable mint-condition ones in a safe. Today he owns some 4,000 copies, likely close to a quarter of the population. Eventually he had acquired so many '64 Floods that dealers started setting them aside for him. He decided to purchase several copies of the card. "He's just got that look of determination in his eyes," Hally says. He was enchanted by the player's grave pose - glove up, hand nestled inside. When he first saw the '64 Flood, memories washed over him.
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Louis won its first World Series in 18 years.ĭecades later, while working at Atari, Hally started collecting cards. "He could do everything," says Hally, who smuggled his mom's transistor radio into school to listen to games. During the summer of '64, Hally, then 9 years old, played center field like his idol Flood. He's lived in California since 1969, when his family left tiny Centralia, Missouri. He spent 25 years at Atari designing games like Star Wars. When Hally picks up the phone, he chuckles. His name, the site says, is Mike Hally.Ī quick records search produces an address, then a number. The user's avatar is a tiny photograph of two cats lounging inside a home office. The message-board threads didn't reveal the collector's identity, but one commenter wrote that an eBay account belonging to Madcardbuyer seemed to be a locus of Flood-related activity. He's met him at card shows, but he can't recall his name. Cornering the market is not only difficult but also unlikely to be profitable as soon as supply expands again, inflated prices typically plummet.Ĭhris Buckler, a dealer in Kentucky, says he's sold about 10 cards to the so-called Flood guy. Reggie Jackson is rumored to have tried to buy every copy of his own rookie card one anonymous collector owns more than 300 of the 1,000 copies of Albert Pujols' 2001 Donruss Elite card. Very few, though, have sought out multiple copies of a single card. Many fans build collections around a single player. Klein wrote about the '64 Flood for Sports Collectors Daily, noting that it had attained "mythical status." "Perhaps he's just absent-minded and forgets to cross that card off his want list," someone offered. Others said they had heard a single buyer was gobbling up inventory. "This card was a pain," complained one collector. Numerous message-board threads pondered the riddle. A blogger who chronicled his pursuit of the entire '64 Topps set called it "one of the more perplexing cards" in the collection. The case of the '64 Flood has befuddled card hounds for years.
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Flood is best known for challenging baseball's reserve clause, spurring the creation of free agency. Such prices defy logic while the Cardinals' center fielder was an exceptional ballplayer - Flood won the Gold Glove seven times - he was no Mickey Mantle. "I did a little research and thought, 'This is fascinating,'" he says.Ī low-quality copy of the '64 Flood goes for about $30 - more than five times what it should, Klein estimates. Klein, a mortgage servicer who moonlights as a collector, looked up the card - the 1964 Topps Curt Flood, a middling, widely produced issue - and saw that it was inexplicably overpriced. Rich Klein stumbled across one such glitch a few years ago when he heard a rumor about a card that was confounding hobbyists. But every now and then, an aberration throws things into disarray. Subscribe today!īASEBALL CARD COLLECTING, like baseball itself, is a world governed by tidy metrics - achievement, timing, scarcity. This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's September 15 Renegades Issue.
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