1965 Topps Combo Card: Dynamic Duo

One more custom combo card to round out the week. Perhaps a few more next week...

1965 Topps Combo Card: Athletic Aarons

"Big League Buddies" strikes again, this time with Hank and Tommie Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves.

1965 Topps Custom Combo Cards

I love combo cards, those goofy-titled cards of more than one player. As I've moved toward downsizing my collection, combo cards have become a major focus.

I also love 1965 Topps. It's one of my favorite sets, yet it's the only Topps set from the 1960s without combo cards. Go figure.

Therefore, I've decided to remedy the situation with a few custom combo cards for 1965 Topps. Here's the first.

The Lost Awkwardness of the Combo Card

1964 Topps "Bill's Got It"

The combo card just ain't what it used to be. Used to be, a group of players would stand around on the sidelines either before a game (most often the All-Star Game or during spring training) or during practice, and awkwardly pose with members of their own or another team. Included in every Topps set from 1957 through 1969 (with the exception of 1965), nearly every Fleer set from 1982 on, Upper Deck sets from 1990 to 1993, and random other sets (including 1960 Leaf), combo cards were exciting to receive in a pack, pushing collectors to further idolize players on their favorite teams. The photos were posed, and the titles were usually clumsy alliterations or hackneyed exposition — to entice the collector to flip the card and read the description on the back (see "Bill's Got It," 1964 Topps). The writing was usually terrible, and the connection between the players weak or nonexistent (many writers have highlighted this with great success, including Mike Kenny, our talented and hilarious contributor here at The Baseball Card Blog).

Still, it was something to get a combo card. It showed the manufacturer — and the players themselves — had a playful side, that baseball wasn't all business. We wanted our heroes to take the game as seriously as we did, but we also wanted to know they knew how to joke around. It's this idea — separation of business and pleasure — that made the combo card important to their respective sets.

2007 Topps "Classic Combo"

For Topps, the sets that included combo cards were mostly endless oceans of faces. And once the regular player photo moved off the sidelines and the action shot became de rigueur (around 1970–1972), the posed-combo-card playfulness disappeared. What makes this interesting is that when Topps re-introduced the combo card in its flagship sets beginning in 2006, the manufacturer brought it back as another vehicle for its action photography. The new Topps "Classic Combos" lack the very essence of what made those earlier examples so exciting: the inherent awkwardness of posing for a photograph as a couple or a group.

Collectors' brains are now tuned to action shots—action is all we see on sports cards. But awkwardly posed groups of players, often together for only that one photograph? You rarely see that these days. It seems like everything's scripted; that when not playing, players are ushered from one place to another by people with clipboards and headsets.

1963 Topps (left); 2012 Topps Heritage (right)

This last bit is important for how the combo-card concept has been approached in Topps Heritage sets. The Heritage brand emulates the original vintage Topps sets of the 1950s and 1960s. For combo cards, that means the awkwardness of the posed sideline group. Because of tight schedules or whatever other reason, however, players are hardly ever photographed together for Heritage sets. Instead, their images are layered over each other during production to create the illusion that they posed together. Or—and here it is again—an in-game action shot is used.

2007 Topps Heritage "World Series Batting Foes" - layered images

So to celebrate the lost awkwardness of the combo card, see below for some of my favorites. And make sure to check out The Baseball Card Blog's Facebook page for another combo card I'd like to see.

Custom Cardwork: 1967 Topps Twin Terrors

1967 Topps Twin Terrors

From 1961 to 1969, the two guys in the Minnesota Twins's logo represented the Twin Cities—Minneapolis and St. Paul—though they could have just as easily represented Bob Allison and Harmon Killebrew.

I found the logo at SportsLogos.net, Chris Creamer's sports-logo database is incredible. If you haven't browsed the site, I definitely recommend it.

1959 Topps Fence Busters (Malone–Ness)

What can I say? It's a card that should exist—Elliot Ness and Jim Malone: professional fence busters. And for a dollar? Cheap!

Keeper: 1960 Leaf "Baseball's Two Hal Smiths"

Consolidation has never felt so good. Big trade with Blake Meyer of Twinscards.com, not to mention selling off stacks and stacks of cards on eBay have left me focused. More is going up later this week, including vintage basketball cards.

Over the past week I've received a lot of recommendations for Keepers, so I thought I'd kick things off by talking about one of my favorite cards: 1960 Leaf "Baseball's Two Hal Smiths". It's on my Keeper List, and is a card I don't own.

It's a Keeper because it isn't clear what the two Hal Smiths are doing in their photo. Are they negotiating over the bill? Are they diapering a baby? Because the background has been removed, context is missing (and desperately, desperately needed). These guys could be anywhere – a bus stop... a locker room...

It's no secret, my love for 1960 Leaf (read my set review here). The photos are mug-shot bad, the cards themselves came packaged with marbles, and the design has a style aesthetic with as much pizzazz as checkerboard kitchen linoleum. But what it's lacking in visual appeal, it more than makes up for in awkwardness. Awkward halos behind each head. Awkward checklist including immortal baseball gods Stover McIlwain (out of the league since 1958), Marshall Renfroe (career = 1 game in 1959), and baseball's two Hal Smiths (one a journeyman, the other an All Star). And did I mention that the cards were awkwardly packaged with marbles? I understand that Topps had cornered the market on the cards and gum thing, but seriously, who came up with marbles?

There's something about Hal Smith... both of him. I can't think of another time when two players shared the same name. (Wait a minute... Steve Ontiveros? Weren't there two of that guy?) I've mentioned this already, but one Hal was a journeyman and the other Hal was an All Star. The All Star had a knack for showing up on his baseball cards in full catcher regalia; that is, toothily smiling through his mask in a creepy crouching position. I can think of at least two cards (1958 Topps and 1960 Topps) of him photographed like that. The journeyman was just ugly: pursed lips, narrowed eyes... it was as if he was a street-corner criminal scouting for the next fence.

This one is also a Keeper for me because it's a combo card. But instead of Hal and Hal hamming it up under a corny line like "Backstop Buddies" or something, as Topps was wont to do throughout the Sixties, Sports Novelties kept it obvious, in a Ripley's Believe-it-or-Not informative kind of way. It's "Baseball's Two Hal Smiths" because that's who they are. In the end it matters not what they're doing, just that they appear together. 

That's why this one's a Keeper.