WIN THESE SWELL PRIZES (59 years later)

September 17, 2016 6:37 PM

Daniel Day collected baseball cards when he was a kid in the 1950s. Some of those cards offered prizes if you filled in actual scores and mailed them back to Topps, the company that made the cards. The rules didn't include a year that the offer ended, so Day sent a card in as a lark. And Topps, knowing good PR when it sees it, sent the 70-year-old a genuine Louisville Slugger baseball glove as his prize. The story keeps getting cuter.
posted by Etrigan (11 comments total)

I sort of can't believe this is all part of the same story. One thing I don't quite get: did Day actually look up Jacobs's name, realize he had an MLB namesake back in the 50s, dig out the card, and send it to Topps along with his entry?
posted by chrominance at 6:53 PM on September 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh, also: I remember buying a sealed pack of 1982 Topps baseball cards back in, oh, 1997, and there was a half-fossilized piece of gum inside. Yes, I chewed the gum. Yes, it was a really bad idea.
posted by chrominance at 6:55 PM on September 17, 2016 [13 favorites]

I'm really hoping that this offer gets honored too.
posted by delfin at 7:13 PM on September 17, 2016 [6 favorites]

But the card clearly promised a Spalding!
posted by Sys Rq at 7:13 PM on September 17, 2016

I believe autocorrect has struck - his name is Darwin Day according to that article. Also, it was his late brother who collected the cards in the 50's.

But it is a really cute story!
posted by teponaztli at 7:39 PM on September 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

The rules didn't include a year that the offer ended, so Day sent a card in as a lark.

From the photo in the article, doesn't the card say the entry had to be mailed 2 days before the game was played? Still a cute story.
posted by stopgap at 7:59 PM on September 17, 2016

The card had to be mailed in before July 11, no year specified.

This is such a great story! Now I want to go chew some Bazooka.
posted by SisterHavana at 8:11 PM on September 17, 2016

Also, it was his late brother who collected the cards in the 50's.

I think just changing the name to Darwin would make the text correct. Unless I missed it somewhere else, they don't actually say which brother collected - but Darwin found them when cleaning his own house.

When Day's younger brother died, he was tasked with cleaning out his house in Virginia.

"It was such a consuming job that it made me think that maybe I ought to clean out my own house," he said. "So I did that, and I came across these cards."
posted by solotoro at 2:12 AM on September 18, 2016

It's a cute story, but the writing on the article is all over the place, starts somewhere in the middle, then goes to the end, then the beginning, then somewhere in the middle again, and peppered with these little anecdotes that don't really go anywhere.
posted by signal at 5:45 AM on September 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

Nice story, thanks for posting it!
posted by languagehat at 8:24 AM on September 18, 2016

Oh yeah, you're right, solotoro. I think? The constant use of "he" is more than a little confusing.
posted by teponaztli at 2:00 PM on September 18, 2016