It was from his last active year, passed on to me by an older cousin, who had a shoebox full of the things, when I was starting school. Old ones had no value. We played games of chance with baseball cards at recess, at least in every small boys circle I ever saw, but only current season cards were acceptable for use in these.
There were two forms for these games.
In one, one boy flipped down a card (they could be made to rotate about their long axis as they fell with a little finger action). The other then flipped a card, and if his landed same side up as the first card he got both cards, if his landed opposite side up, the first boy got both cards.
In the second, three boys simultaneously flipped a card down. The odd man out, the one showing the statistics side while the other two showed the face side, or vice versa, got all three cards.
No one would risk something like a Mickey Mantle or a Hank Aaron or a Warren Spahn or a Sandy Koufax at these games, of course. Someone stole a Mickey Mantle I had, surreptitiously, after I'd shown it to him, and it still rankles a little. We hated the Yankees in our household, being for some unaccountable reason Pirates fans (I know of no family connection to Pittsburg), and I would far rather have had a Harvey Haddix, but still --- a Mickey Mantle card was a treasure.
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