As Close As I May Come To PCL Cards

I'm from the west coast of the United States of America, and if you're a baseball fan and you come from where I come from - particularly if you're of a certain "vintage", age-wise - you've heard a lot of talk about the old Pacific Coast League of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. There are still old-timers around my hometown of San Francisco that wax rhapsodic about the San Francisco Seals of the PCL, or folks across the bay who pledged undying love to the Oakland Oaks. I'd imagine it's the same in LA, Sacramento, Seattle and so on.

It wasn't really a minor league back then. It was all that fans west of the Mississippi had in terms of baseball - and that's a lot of real estate. Think of it as something between AAA and the National & American Leagues. Actually, these paragraphs I've swiped from Wikipedia gives you a pretty good sense of the league in its heyday:

During the first half of the 20th century, the Pacific Coast League developed into one of the premier regional baseball leagues. The cities enfranchised by the other two high-minor leagues, the International League and the American Association, were generally coordinated geographically with the major leagues, but such was not the case with the PCL. With no major league baseball team existing west of St. Louis, the PCL was unrivaled for American west coast baseball. Although it was never recognized as a true major league, its quality of play was considered very high. 

Drawing from a strong pool of talent in the area, the PCL produced many outstanding players, including such future major-league Hall of Famers as Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Tony Lazzeri, Paul Waner, Earl Averill, Bobby Doerr, Joe Gordon, and Ernie Lombardi. Amid success experienced after World War II, league President Pants Rowland began to envision the PCL as a third major league. During 1945 the league voted to become a major league. However, the American League and National League were uninterested in allowing it to join their ranks.

The PCL that still exists today is actually the league where I saw my first in-person baseball game ever, a Sacramento Solons game probably around 1975. Today, the San Francisco Giants' AAA team is in the current PCL - the Sacramento Rivercats.

I'd wondered what baseball cards might be like for the PCL of the 1940s and 1950s. I quickly found out that while Bowman, Zeenut, Signal Oil and others made cards, they're both hard to find and quite expensive (I do recognize that one has much to do with the other). Sure, I can pick up a few guys here and there - and I may do just that - but I decided to get started with a cheapo 36-card reprint set I found on eBay: the 1949 Bowman Pacific Coast League 1987 Card Collectors Co. set.

There's no Ted Williams nor Joe Dimaggio in there, but these small cards are fun to look at and have around for sure. They're exact replicas of cards featuring the Seals, Oaks, Solons, Seattle Raniers, Hollywood Stars, Los Angeles Angels, San Diego Padres and Portland Lucky Beavers. Maybe I'll gaze at these for a while, and stop my PCL journey there. Then again, maybe I won't. I may have to start an Albie Glossop collection, because a name like that is worth building a collection of.