When is a baseball card not a baseball card at all, but still a baseball card?

Well, when it’s a 1970 Dayton Daily News baseball card, for one thing.

See here …

The Dayton Daily News has always been a bastion for great baseball information, located as they are just a George Foster or Ted Kluszewski home run up the road from the diamond hotbed of Cincinnati.

But the newspaper doesn’t just cover the Reds, no sir. They cover everything about the game. And, back in the days before the internet and ESPN, the Dayton Daily News sports section was sort of like a miniature, localized version of The Sporting News during the baseball season.

And, in the summer of 1970, the venerable newspaper set out to educate fans about their favorite players through a season-long series of player profiles, each condensed into a two-column block. On one side was the player picture, usually an AP photo, and on the other was a breakdown of player biographical information, how he was acquired by his current team, and some statistical highlights.

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The Daily News even called the profile a “Bubble-Gumless Card” right there over top of the player’s head, and gave it a “card number” to boot!

That undoubtedly led fans and collectors to clip these babies out and save them, and it also eventually led to their designation as M137 in The Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards (affiliate link).

So it’s no wonder you find various members of the 162-card set (see image of checklist in this Net54 thread) in slabbed form today, graded by PSA and others, and sought after by collectors.

(Note, the Daily News expanded this series to include other sports, spanning more than 300 total “cards” and reaching into 1971.)

So, are they cards or not?

Depends on your definition, and your perspective, but the 1970 Dayton Daily News remain fun, relatively cheap collectibles five decades later.

And, you know, if you collect a specific player from that era … dollars to donuts this issue ends up on your wantlist.

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Wow! Wax of the Day

While the Dayton Daily News was cranking out their ambitious series of baseball profiles in the summer of 1970, Topps was the only game in town when it came to “real” baseball card. Unless, that is, you were a fan of the cartoonish 1970 Fleer World Series cards, that came at you in snazzy wax packs that looked sort of like this eBay listing …

This one gives you a full wax box from fifty years ago — not a killer set, but definitely a killer piece of nostalgia. Check out the full lot on eBay here (affiliate link).