A few of my favorite screw-ups: 1951 Bowman Overprints edition

Did you see this great write-up about the blog? Check it out when you get a chance. All right, let's talk about screwed-up baseball cards.

I've written lots in the past about my love for screwed-up baseball cards. Severe, horrendous miscuts, wrong fronts, wrong backs!, diamond-cut cards, cards missing foil, cards with typos, cards at the edge of a sheet, cards missing a color, cards with the wrong photo—or the wrong facsimile signature. And what about cards that have problems with color registration? Those are great. But the best? The best are overprints.

What's an overprint, you say? Well, it's simple really: instead of a card having one image on its front and one image on its back, an overprint has multiple images. Sometimes printers do this to test the ink or the alignment of their presses. Other times they feed the wrong sheet by accident.

Whatever the reason, the result is one awesomely weird baseball card. Overprints are more commonly seen with stamps or paper currency, but with baseball cards, they aren't that easy to come by. They're by-products of the printing process, to be used as test prints or samples during production by the people on press during the run. With stamps or paper currency, it's easier to understand that overprints would be released, to extend the usage and life of regular stamps or notes. But if you opened your penny pack or pack of five cards in 1951 and got a card that looked like this, you'd notice. And you'd probably feel pretty angry.

So how did I get these? I got these six on eBay. They were cheap, too, which initially lead me to believe that they were fakes, but after handling them and handling other 1951 Bowman cards from my collection, the overprints feel about the same weight, and the cardboard feels right. (Granted, they could still be fakes, but I'm not too worried about it.) In terms of them having a value, I don't know how to assess that. I like them, but there weren't too many bids on the cards I won, and my winning bids were low, less than $10 each. So value? I'm not sure.

They've got blank backs, and each card has at least three images printed over each other on their fronts. There isn't too much written about them on the Web, but here's what I've found:

T206 "Ghost" overprints (From the T206 Museum, 2004)
1951 Bowman overprinted uncut sheet auction results (From a Robert Edward Auction, 2009)

And file under "Overprint (disambiguation)": 
What is an overprint? (From a Net54 thread, 2008)

Leave a comment on this post if you know anything else about overprints!

Give Me Your Creases, Your Misspellings, Your Dinged Corners...

It's 'Best Of' season. So to get into the spirit, I thought I'd post a little something about my favorite purchases of 2007. A few caveats before I begin. I'm not counting cards I got in the wildly popular Great Goudey Trade-away, nor I am taking into account the cards I packed into storage after moving back in September. So really, my own Best Of should be called Best Purchases September through December, 2007.

Best Card of a Wizened Old Timer/Manager:
1951 Bowman Bucky Harris
On the wall of my parents' kitchen is a panoramic photograph from the 1924 World Series, with both lineups (Washington Senators and New York Giants) assembled along the third base line. Walter Johnson is in his pitcher's warmup sweater, Bill Terry looks to be maybe all of twenty-four, there's an oompah band in the right corner getting ready to strike up, and there are a few faces blurred out from moving while the camera moved. The reason I'm mentioning this is because about halfway up the photo, in the center of the packed stands, President Coolidge is flanked by John McGraw and the young Senators player/manager Bucky Harris. Flash ahead 27 years and here's Harris back helming the Senators. Another fun thing about Bucky Harris: though the guy had nine career regular-season home runs over 12 seasons, he managed two dingers in the '24 World Series.


Worst Spelling Error Left Uncorrected:
2006-07 Upper Deck Derk Fisher [sic] I bought a pack of these cards at Target thinking they were from this year. Getting this card of Fisher more than made up for my disappointment (I was trying to determine who to draft for my fantasy basketball team, currently mired in last). Not a bad design, not memorable... I'm still trying to figure out what the defender's tattoo is; it's either one of the ThunderCats or is of Justin Bateman in Teen Wolf Too.


Best Miscut: 1953 Topps Clem Labine
I love miscut cards, the older the better. I love how it accentuates the fact that it's all about cardboard––and machines that cut cardboard––image be damned. Another fun thing: it's self-reflexive. One of the ads on the outfield wall behind Labine is for Topps Gum.


Best Use of a Nickname:
1963 Topps Choo Choo Coleman
It's almost as if the Topps copywriters bet each other they could write a whole card and never once mention a player's real name.

On an unrelated note, someone should write an essay on the effectiveness of the careers of Choo Choo Coleman and Pumpsie Green on race relations within their respective cities (New York and Boston). I know very little about Coleman, but how can a grown man command respect while being referred to as 'Choo Choo'?

As for Green, I have always considered him to be the unfortunate symbol of the deep-seated racism and segregationist beliefs of the Boston Red Sox of the 1950s, from Yawkey to Higgins. It would be interesting to read about what civil leaders and thinkers from the time thought about the teams and these two men.