Most vintage collectors know that Mickey Mantle doesn't have a 1954 Topps card. Topps and Bowman were fighting over exclusive player contracts and Mantle landed in Bowman’s sets in 1954 and 1955, leaving a two-year gap in his Topps run.

Fewer collectors know that a 1954 Topps-style Mantle actually does exist, you just couldn’t find it in a pack. It appeared in the August 23, 1954 issue of Sports Illustrated, only the second issue the magazine ever published.

In the early 1950s, Bowman was the established leader in baseball cards, having entered the market in 1948. Topps was the aggressive newcomer, and its 407-card 1952 set was its first major challenge to Bowman. Both companies knew that stars sold packs so the fight over exclusive contracts escalated into lawsuits, with many players appearing in one company’s set but not the other’s.

Mantle was one of the biggest prizes: he appeared in the 1952 and 1953 Topps sets, then vanished from Topps for two years because of his Bowman contract. Ted Williams went the other way: Topps made him both the first and last cards of its 1954 set, and Bowman was forced to pull its own Williams card (#66) and replace it with Jimmy Piersall. That withdrawn Bowman Williams remains one of the great rarities of 1950s cards.

Sports Illustrated debuted on August 16, 1954, with Eddie Mathews on the cover. Inside was a foldout of 27 reproductions of 1954 Topps cards, featuring Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Duke Snider and Mathews himself. A week later the second issue ran another 27-card foldout, this time all New York Yankees. Fifteen were color reproductions of 1954 Topps cards, including Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford and Phil Rizzuto. The other twelve were black-and-white cards of Yankees who weren’t in the Topps set: Gil McDougald, Allie Reynolds, Enos Slaughter and others.

Mantle was one of the twelve.

The foldout ran as part of a Sports Illustrated promotion with Topps. Strictly speaking, it’s not a 1954 Topps card: it was printed on magazine paper rather than card stock, with a black-and-white player image set in a 1954 Topps-style design, and it was never distributed in packs. But unlike fantasy cards made decades later, it genuinely dates to 1954, printed in the middle of the very season Mantle was off-limits to Topps.

The card companies' rivalry ended in 1956, when Topps bought Bowman’s baseball card business. Mantle returned to Topps that year on his famous #135, and the Bowman name disappeared from baseball cards for decades.

These first two issues of Sports Illustrated are surprisingly affordable. Copies with the foldouts intact often just sell for a few hundred dollars. The first issue carries the history, and the second carries the Mantle.

For me, these magazines sit at a great intersection: the birth of Sports Illustrated, the golden age of cardboard, and one of the hobby’s most consequential business rivalries. Bowman had Mantle’s 1954 baseball card, but Sports Illustrated had his picture. For one week in August, that was enough to give collectors the Topps Mantle they never had...

...here's my contribution: Gus Hill from Allen & Ginter's N43 World's Champions set - a great example of how wonderfully strange Allen & Ginter was long before Topps revived the name.

Hill wasn't a baseball player. He was a champion club swinger, a popular form of athletic entertainment in the late 19th century. Indian clubs - wooden, bowling-pin-shaped implements - were swung in elaborate patterns combining strength, coordination and performance. Hill became one of the best-known practitioners of the sport and that's how he ended up on a tobacco card.

The N43 World's Champions set is particularly spectacular. Unlike the tiny cigarette-card format of N28 and N29, the 50 N43 cards were oversized - roughly 3¼ × 4¾ inches - with a small portrait surrounded by a larger illustrated scene showing the athlete in action. Hill's card is a perfect example, with the portrait almost secondary to the wonderfully Victorian depiction of him swinging his clubs.

It's also a great connection to modern Allen & Ginter.

Today we think of A&G as the wonderfully weird baseball product where a pack might contain a Hall of Famer, actor, musician or champion in some obscure pursuit. Allen & Ginter was doing exactly that early on as Gus Hill was famous enough in 1888 to share a checklist with baseball players, boxers, wrestlers, oarsmen and other champions of the age. Today, virtually nobody remembers him.

And that's one of my favorite things about these cards: they're not simply early sports cards, they're little snapshots of who America considered famous 138 years ago. 1888 Allen & Ginter N43 World's Champions - Gus Hill, Champion Club Swinger: proof that Allen & Ginter didn't become weird when Topps brought it back.

It was weird from the beginning.🙃

Carter Jensen capped his rookie season by winning both AL Player of the Month and AL Rookie of the Month for September. The 23-year-old catcher hit .338/.407/.788 with eight home runs, while leading MLB with 19 extra-base hits and a 1.194 OPS.

It’s not quite the same as watching the Royals (or Mariners) play baseball in October, but after this season I’m willing to grade on an extremely generous curve.

Jensen’s performance, along with the emergence of several other young Royals, offers genuine hope that October baseball may not be too far away.

The Royals lost for the 13th time in their last 18 games yesterday, blowing yet another late lead - this time against @Curt_Burner's Pirates (for the second time in two days, by the way...). But there was one bright spot: Carter Jensen broke Bob "The Hammer" Hamelin’s franchise record for home runs by a rookie, a mark that had stood since 1994.

Now let’s just hope young Carter doesn’t break Hamelin’s other record: appearing on one of the worst baseball cards of all time…