Updated Food for Thought: Hot Stove Edition

A few baseball-card-related thoughts as we approach winter...

If Jon Lester signs with a team other than the Athletics—which is how it seems things will shake out—does that mean we'll never see a card of Lester in an A's uniform? This probably happens a lot, but the two players who come to mind are Reggie Jackson (Orioles) and Don Baylor (Athletics), both in 1976. Another guy who could fit this bill is Yoenis Cespedes, the slugging outfielder the Red Sox obtained in exchange for Lester. The Sox have a logjam in the outfield and the feeling is that Cespedes walks after next year.

This also brings up an interesting take on the purpose of end-of-year series like Topps Update and Topps Heritage High Numbers. Topps Update is a showcase for All-Star cards, rookies, and guys who fell through the cracks in the regular set. Heritage High Numbers is chock full of rookies and other end-of-the-bench guys who didn't get cards in the regular series. Gone are the days when traded players get cards of them in their new uniforms. Were it up to me, High Numbers and Update would be a more traditional mix of rookies and traded players. This would solve the problem of guys like Lester, Cespedes, and Nelson Cruz (whose year on the Orioles probably won't be recognized in 2015 Topps Heritage)...

...An insert set that didn't seem to hold its value is the mini set in 2014 Topps Heritage. Despite being the case hit and each card being numbered to just 100, eBay prices have fallen in the last few weeks. All of this is good news for me, as I now have 47 of the 100 subjects...

...Is Topps's design for 2015 a subtle homage to 1990's design? It'll be the 25th anniversary of that set, which could mean a possible "no-name" error, right?...

...I promise this is the last Heritage item I'll bring up for now: I've decided that the ultimate card from the Heritage set is the Maury Wills Real One autograph card. For one thing, Wills is shown as a member of the Dodgers. Secondly, he wasn't included in the 1965 Topps set, so—barring custom cards—this is as close as you're going to get to a 1965 Topps Maury Wills card. 

...Are there great card blogs still out there? From what I've read recently, collectors are more interested in posting images of their "hitz" on Twitter than talking about the bigger picture in the hobby. Is that how others see it?

Finally, I almost forgot. Remember my post in November 2013 about the future of price guides? (Read Average Real Pricing: The Future of The Price Guide.) Well, if you subscribe to Beckett's online price guide, it looks like they incorporated something like average real pricing into their tiered offerings. They're calling it the Beckett Online Price Guide Plus (very original). If it's anything like my idea for average real pricing, this is a step in the right direction. Hey Beckett, you're welcome.

1976 Topps Traded: The Missing Cards - #115T Ken Holtzman (part 2)

I'm calling this Missing Card "part two" because Holtzman was traded twice in 1976: in April from the A's to the Orioles as part of the Reggie Jackson trade, and then at the June trade deadline to the Yankees. To see the front of "part one," check out our Facebook page.

(And yes, I plan on creating backs and pairing them with fronts in a permanent gallery page when the "Missing Cards" project is complete.)

1976 Topps Traded: The Missing Cards - #500T Reggie Jackson

Charlie Finley's decision to dismantle his championship-winning A's still stings the heart of the baseball fan. No team should be blown up in so public a way: first Reggie was dealt to the Orioles, then the fire sale at the trade deadline in June... it's enough to make an Oakland fan root for the team across the bay. And then, to add insult to injury, the team actually competed in spite of its owner's wrangling, so the added spare parts towards the end of the season hurt all the more when they didn't work out (Nate Colbert, Willie McCovey, Ron Fairly). Painful stuff.

Had Jackson been traded sometime before Christmas 1975, this "Missing Card" would've been an amazing inclusion in the Traded series of 1976.

Miscuts: Hall of Fame Edition

Today I baked alive at Brimfield Flea Market in Brimfield, Massachusetts. If you've never been there, it's 17 open fields strung along Route 20, which for three weeks of each year are crammed full of leathery-skinned antiques dealers, junk collectors, hoboes, drug addicts, and certified weirdos. And a good time is had by all.

This year I went twice (July and September), each time filling up on weird stuff. July's big score was an uncut sheet of Wacky Packages from 1979. This time around I brought home a safe deposit box from an old bank, which coincidentally is the perfect size for holding baseball cards.

I also scored on miscut cards. On top of the major haul from Scott in New Jersey (more on Scott's Haul in a later post), these cards are helping make miscuts my next big 'thing.' And just my luck, all three of the miscuts I found today feature Hall of Famers.





Truthfully, the Reggie miscut is kind of lame, as it's almost impossible to determine the identity of the player on the other card. It's obvious that Jeff Newman is the other player on the Jenkins card simply because the back is cut so that his name is on there. The other player on the Carlton card (really the best card I found today) is Sudden Sam McDowell (#720). It's interesting to note that McDowell is not in the Hall of Fame, though he was 11 strikeouts away in 1967 from leading the AL in K's for six consecutive seasons (1965-1970), and he was traded practically straight-up for Gaylord Perry in 1971.

Countdown #43: 1976 Topps Traded

If I let my romantic tendencies get the best of me, this set would be in the top twenty. The limited vocabulary newspaper headlines on the back, the unbelievably bad airbrushing on the front, plus the original torn-from-the-headlines look on the front of the card—it all combines for a breathtaking card, a venerable feat of design that accurately captures an era of gap-toothed ballplayers with big glasses, bad unis and even worse hair.

But this is a straight-laced countdown, one where I’m not about to allow a deep-seated love of bad airbrushing let this little set slip by unnoticed. It’s a loser, but only because Topps, still new to the whole ‘traded series’ game, made it so.

Let’s put all design issues temporarily aside and focus instead on checklist because it’s here where I think Topps really screwed up (plus I’m a fan of the overall 1976 design, and think it was on the strong side of the 1970s). Topps’ policy, if I have this correctly, was to include only those players who were traded during a brief span of the 1975 off-season, as it was assumed that the company wouldn’t have time to get a new card of the player into the regular 1976 set. But even this idea is problematic, as it kept Topps at least a step behind actual, real-time baseball personnel moves.

The classic example is Reggie Jackson. Jackson’s 1975 card has him on the A’s (correct), 1976 also has him on the A’s (incorrect), for some reason he’s not the main attraction of the 1976 Traded series, and then in 1977 he’s on the Yankees. So what happened to his year with Baltimore?

It was brief, but it did happen, and Topps had not one but two opportunities to show him in an Orioles uniform. Instead, there’s a ridiculous gap. What Topps should have been doing was extending production time until late June, keeping the presses out in Pennsylvania open at least a little while in the summer, and then releasing a true Traded series in late September. That way they would have players in the series who’d been traded anywhere from just before the season began to up to two months into the season. Sure, it’s a tall order to fill, but they owned their own press, so even if you factor in all the other jobs over the course of the year, from the other sports to non-sports to regionals to other small sets, I’m sure there was a couple days when they could’ve found the time.

Anyway, with all that backstory, here’s a list of players traded that would’ve made the 1976 Traded series a helluva lot more collectible. Those that are bolded were included in the real Traded series [team on actual Traded card]:

Willie McCovey, A’s
Nate Colbert, A’s
Don Baylor, A’s
Mike Torrez, A’s
Reggie Jackson, Orioles
Ken Holtzman, Orioles
Tommy Harper, Orioles
Rick Dempsey, Orioles
Rudy May, Orioles
Scott McGregor, Orioles
Tippy Martinez, Orioles
Darrell Evans, Giants
Gary Sutherland, Brewers
Bernie Carbo, Brewers
Bobby Darwin, Red Sox
Don Kessinger, Cardinals
Steve Renko, Cubs
Larry Biittner, Cubs
Larry Gura, Royals
Bill Sudakis, Royals
Tommy Davis, Royals
Fritz Peterson, Rangers
Bert Blyleven, Rangers
Terry Humphrey, Angels
Mike Easler, Angels*
Reggie Smith, Dodgers
Lee Lacy, Dodgers [Braves]
Andy Messersmith, Braves
Mike Marshall, Braves
Jim Dwyer, Mets
Andre Thornton, Expos
Del Unser, Expos
Cardell Camper, Indians
Rudy Meoli, Reds
Diego Segui, Padres
Pedro Garcia, Tigers
Roy Smalley, Twins
Blue Moon Odom, White Sox
Cleon Jones, White Sox
Ken Brett, White Sox [Yankees]
Carlos May, Yankees
Doyle Alexander, Yankees
Cesar Tovar, Yankees

*Easler’s first Topps card was in the 1978 set, featuring him on the Pirates. This would’ve been his rookie card.

Now, let’s get back to the design. I touched briefly on the idea of airbrushing, or more appropriately, bad airbrushing, and I don’t think I can stress this enough. There were sets put out at various times over Topps’ long and distinguished record with examples of bad airbrushing. Jose Cardenal comes to mind more than once. I think Eddie Mathews’ ear got lopped off on a managerial card. But this Traded series takes bad airbrushing to another level.

Let me put it this way: if you got into a drunken argument at a bachelor party where you were for some reason forced to equate baseball cards with their rightful mythological legend counterparts, you could win easily by saying that any twelve cards and Oscar Gamble would be the equivalent of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, simply on bad airbrushing alone. That’s not a claim—it’s a fact. There is simply no set that features more—and a higher degree of—badly airbrushed cards. Even those cards featuring players without hats are bad: Ken Brett’s pinstripes have been painted on.

I got an email from a reader that I reprinted on the blog not too long ago stating that because the 1982 Fleer was so bad, it was therefore great. It seems that the case could be made for this set as well, so to pre-empt this idea, I think that in this instance checklist and formulation of checklist greatly outweighs the unintentional comedy of the design and photography (and the fact that the Topps’ poor sap headline writer managed a minor victory by working ‘Le Grande Orange’ onto the Rusty Staub card). Especially for a 44-card set.

Why was it released at all? To scare the bejesus out of SSPC (or was it TCMA by now?)? The reasons behind releasing the set (besides selling more cards of a by-now stale set) are missing, and the cards included boil down to nothing more than Willie Randolph, Ferguson Jenkins, Rusty Staub, 41 others who could pass for commons and an unnumbered checklist.

I like this set as much as the next guy, but you could find more searching through Oscar Gamble’s hair.