Compare and contrast

Whenever I see those two words together, I get the shivers.  Compare and contrast were the buzzwords for my high school English teachers when they wanted me to write a load of b.s. about a book that we were reading.   My whole problem was, I could never grasp just how to do it.

Likely because I spent too much time in 1st period English trying to look up the skirts of the beautiful young ladies that sat across from me in class.    Memories....

While going through the blasters (yes, I said blasters plural...) of 2013 Heritage I've bought recently, I came across one card that hit me right away.

Card #200, Clayton Kershaw of the LA Dodgers.  Now before you go out of your mind thinking that I'm turning into another Dodger blogger, don't hit that panic button just yet.  There are plenty of other great people out there that can take care of the Brooklyn side just fine.

What hit me about the card is the comparison to the #200 card of the '64 set, one Mr. Sandy Koufax.

Both players had great seasons prior to the release of the card (Kershaw's W-L record aside), and were/are star left handers for the Dodgers.  The only contrast really between the 2 players is that Koufax was part of the 1963 World Series champion team, while Kershaw's 2012 Dodger squad finished 2 games from a wild card spot, and 8 games out of first.

While I'm sure that Topps had known for a least a year that Kershaw was going to be #200 in the set to make the comparison to the '64 set a lot more tolerable, I thought about the other cards in the set and how they compared to each other.

I'm sure I'll be able to find a few other card #'s in the set that will be either as close as the Kershaw-Koufax pairing, or as far apart as the sun and the moon. 

Now only if high school English had more cards, maybe compare and contrast would have meant a lot more to me....

Thanks for reading, Robert