Standard Catalog Update #48 : 1972 Partridge Reds

A few weeks ago I mentioned that collectors of vintage Cincinnati Reds cards and memorabilia had a better than average selection of goodies to pursue. I forget to mention how avid they are in that pursuit.

A case in point is the previously unchecklisted 1972 Partridge Meats card of Joe Morgan that sold on eBay Feb. 8.

The '72 Partridges are a smaller (in known checklist) and larger (in format) set than the more commonly encountered 1968-70 set.

The 1972 set is, like the earlier issue, blank-backed, but is 3-3/4" x 5-1/2" size. The black-and-white photo at center is a version of the team-issued player portraits, though the team logo has been removed from the cap. There is a red Partridge ad at bottom.

It is believed the Partridge cards were issued in conjunction with player autograph appearances on behalf of the hot dog company at Kroger stores in the Cincinnati area.

Prior to the discovery of the Joe Morgan card in the 1972 set, that checklist had only recorded: Don Gullett, Lee May, Denis Menke, Jim Merritt, Gary Nolan, Tony Perez and Bob Tolan. The 2010 Standard Catalog carried a NM price of 30.00 for "commons" and 60.00 for Perez. We'll revisit that pricing structure in light of the sale of the Morgan card.

In stained and creased condition, the Morgan sold for just over $450. There were five bidders over the $100 mark.

I'd guess that the number of surviving Partridge cards, in either the 1968-70 format or the 1972, is not equal for all players. The number of cards handed out would likely have been affected by such things as player popularity (that's why Bench and Rose are most often seen), the location/accessibility of the particular store in which the players were signing, and even whether or not they actually showed up at their appointed day and time.

My hat is off, once again, to the Cincinnati collectors, for their devotion to the Big Red Machine.

Vintage Playboys for the football fans

In 1957 Playboy magazine began doing its annual Pigskin Preview articles. The feature was authored by Francis Wallace who had begun the series with the Saturday Evening Post in the 1930s and 1940s, continued it with Collier's in the 1950s, then brought it to Playboy in 1957.

The Pigskin Preview, as a reflection of national football fandom in those decades, was strictly concerned with college football.

In 1971, Playboy introduced the companion Pro Football Preview feature in its August issue. As the college edition had been since 1958, it was authored by Anson Mount. The artwork at the top of this posting is from that debut Pro Football Preview, showing Jethro Pugh bearing down on Johnny Unitas in the 1970 Super Bowl.

For its first pro edition, Playboy picked the Vikings to beat the Bengals in the Super Bowl. While Mount correctly predicted the winners of all three NFC divisions, as shown in the chart at right from the article. He missed the AFC East, won by the Dolphins, and the Central, which was won by the Browns. And, of course, the Cowboys beat Miami in the Super Bowl.

For a couple of years now, I have been buying up those issues of Playboy that featured the college Pigskin Preview. I hoped to find photos of the magazine's All-American teams that would provide fodder for some of my 1955 Topps-style custom cards.

That really hasn't worked out great for me. In most years the photos are just not large enough or formatted properly (lots of group shots, etc.) for me to get a useful image. Though it is still fun to see guys like Ernie Davis, Roman Gabriel, Bob Lily, etc., in their pre-pro days.

Still, I find the $3-5 that I generally pay for these magazines to be a tremendous value. (That's less than the current cover price of a new issue, which is about half the page count of those classic 1960s and 1970s issues.) Not only are the football articles extremely interesting when read in hindsight, but the rest of the magazine provides a contemporary look -- albeit skewed by the magazine's liberal bent -- at the world to which I aspired when those issues were fresh on the newsstand; focused on middle- to upper-class urban males in a time when that wasn't a bad thing.

The issue pictured here, for example, has an in-depth interview with George McGovern, a first-hand account, with surprising insights, of ground-pounding in the closing days of the U.S.'s role as primary combatant in Vietnam, a short-story by Ray Bradbury and some nostalgic summer camp humor by Jean Shepard featuring some characters you might know from his more famous Christmas Story: Flick, Schwartz, Ralphie, the Old Man, etc.

Yes, this time around I am buying the vintage Playboys for the articles. But the girls are still gorgeous . . . if you can forget that they are now pushing 60 years of age.

Finished my T202 Red Sox Triplefolder

As I promised last week, here are the images of my completed homage to the 1912 Hassan Triplefolders. My custom card features what would come to be known as the Million Dollar Outfield. I would have liked to give my card that title, but I wanted to make it appear "period," and that nickname had not yet been applied to the Red Sox trio when the real T202s were current.

In doing my research for the write-ups on the back, I found out something I didn't know about Harry Hooper. I knew that he was a Hall of Famer, having been selected by the Veterans Committee in 1971, three years before he died. What I was unaware of, is how little support Hooper had received from the baseball writers in his years of eligibility. In his first year on the ballot he received only 3% of the voters' support. In subsequent years he never got as many as 2% of the votes. This must have been one of those cases that are rumored to have been the result of Ted Williams' twisting of Veterans Committeemen's arms to get former Red Sox into the Hall.

I'm glad Hooper received the honor while he was alive, but a quick look at his stats indicate he was probably not among the elite players of his era.

This card will probably be the last of my custom T202s; I'm going to shift gears to work on some other card projects for a while.

Tales of T212 #28 : Howard Murphy

(Sorry, no card photo.)

Back in the early 1980s I thought I'd combine my interests in minor league baseball and vintage baseball cards by assembling a collection of the Obak cigarette cards that were distributed on the West Coast in 1909, 1910 and 1911.I didn't realize it then, but those cards are so much rarer than most of the contemporary T206 cards from "Back East" that putting together complete sets of the Obak could take decades to accomplish -- and that's if a guy had more money than God to buy the cards when they became available.At about the time I started my Obak collection I also started researching the players who appeared in the sets. Over the course of several long Wisconsin winters I pored over microfilms of The Sporting News and The Sporting Life from the period several years before to several years after the Obak cards circulated, making prodigious notes on 3x5 file cards for each player in the set.I gave up trying to collect the T212s (that's the catalog number Jefferson Burdick assigned the three sets in the pioneering American Card Catalog in 1939), long ago, and have since sold off all my Obaks, one-by-one, first on eBay, then on the Net 54 baseball card forum. As I was selling each card, I included interesting tidbits about each player from my notes. The bidders seemed to like learning a little bit about these guys on the cards, so I thought I'd now begin sharing their stories here. Please excuse the lo-res nature of the card pictures; they were scanned for my auctions many years ago.

I don't have an Obak card photo of Howard Murphy because he only appeared in the scarcer 1909 set. (The Murphy that appears with Los Angeles in 1910 Obaks in Frank Murphy.) That was his only year in the Pacific Coast League, when he was an outfielder with the Oakland Oaks. I tell a lie . . . Murphy was also with the Oaks in 1908, for one game, as an unsuccessful pinch-hitter.

Murphy played with four Class A minor league teams in 1908, each in a different league. He was with Memphis (Southern), Lincoln (Western), Kansas City (American Assn.) and Oakland (PCL).

His stop with Memphis in 1908 was his second stint with the team then known as the Egyptians. He had begun his pro career with them in 1901 at the age of 19.

Murphy was botn on Jan. 1, 1882, in Birmingham, Ala. He tried hios hand at pitching in his early minor league days, with Class D clubs in Sherman-Denison/Texarkana (Texas Lea.) and Baton Rouge (Cotton States Lea.) in 1902-1903, and Pine Bluff (Cotton States) in 1904.

Having hit .343 with Pine Bluff, he moved to the outfield and split 1905 with two American Association teams, Kansas City and Louisville in 1905. He started 1906 with Louisville, then dropped down a class to Decatur in the Three-I League. That may have been due to an injury, as he does not appear to have played in Organized Baseball in 1907.

After his four-team sojourn in 1908, he was back with the Oaks to begin 1909, then was sold to the St. Louis Cardinals in mid-season, taking over in center field for Al Shaw, but hitting only .200 fore the rest of the season.

The 1910 season found him back in the Southern League in his native Alabama, with Mobile. He headed out West in 1911-1913, playing with Great Falls (Mont.) and Salt Lake City of the Union Assn., batting a cumulative .374, including 240 hits in 1912.

There is another gap in Murphy's record for 1914. In 1915, at age 33, he appeared with Shreveport (Texas Lea.), before wrapping up his professional ballplaying days with Tulsa and Sherman of the Western Assn. in 1916.

After his playing days, Murphy was baseball coach at Decatur (Tex.) Baptist College. Decatur Baptist College, established in 1898, was the forerunner of Dallas Baptist University. It had the distinction of being the first two-year institution of higher education in Texas.

Murphy died in Ft. Worth, Tex., Oct. 5, 1926.

T205 style Harry Hooper, Duffy Lewis "rookies"

As I've mentioned earlier, I'm in the process of creating a second T202-style "Triplefolder" custom card.

This one will feature the Boston Red Sox.

As part of the process, I've created T205 "Gold Borders" for Duffy Lewis and Harry Hooper. If such cards had actually been created in 1911, they would have been the "rookie cards" for the pair.

As you may know, when Hassan cigarettes created the T202 Triplefolders in 1912, most of the player panels that flanked the black-and-white "action" photo at center were close-up versions of the previous year's T205s. Unlike most of my custom card creations, I won't be producing T205 backs for these two cards, or actually printing them as singles. But since I needed them for the end panels of my Red Sox T202, I thought it was worthwhile to "complete" the fronts.

Keep watching this space for the completed T202 Red Sox card.

Standard Catalog Update #47 : 1963 Jim Davenport variations

It looks as if, after nearly 47 years, we have a new variation to list for the 1963 Topps set, brought to our attention by collector Tony Gordon.

Card No. 388, Jim Davenport, can be found with photo cropping differences on both the large color portrait photo and the black-and-white inset action pose.

Some cards are found on which the shadow of the jacket collar touches the red box at bottom. On other cards, the shadow is significantly above the red box.

On the shadow-touches-box cards, the glove in the inset photo touches the edge of the green background circle and there is a larger area of Davenport's right wrist visible beneath his dark sleeve. On the shadow-above-box cards, the glove is well inside the green circle and there is only a sliver of skin showing on the right wrist.

Without seeing an original press sheet for verification, it is my theory that the variations occurred because Davenport's card was in the double-print row that was common with Topps cards in the 1960s. If that's the case, there are 10 other double-printed cards from that row that may or may not show similar cropping variations.

A check of '63T Davenport cards being offered on eBay recently does not indicate that either variation is significantly scarcer than the other.

A 1989 Fleer-Topps hybrid

There's no easy way to effectively show it in a single picture, so you'll have to take my word for it that the images above are the front and back of the same card.

After close examination I cannot conclude other than this is a true hybrid between a 1989 Fleer World Series subset card and a 1989 Topps.

The 12-card Fleer World Series subset was a factory set-only insert, chronicling the 1988 Fall Classic between the Dodgers and the A's. The cards were not included in wax packs, etc.

It is only logical to assume that this mash-up resulted when at least one sheet of 1989 Topps backs was mistakenly fed into the press when the World Series highlights cards were being printed.

This would have had to occur at a contract printing facility that did work for both Topps and Fleer at about the same time. Whether or not somebody in the press room was screwing around to create the error is open to speculation. In theory, there should have been a minimum of 131 other examples of this type of Fleer/Topps hybrid printed . . . and that's if only one Topps sheet was involved. Whether any or all of them made it into factory sets is unknown.

This card's owner, George Sands of California, said a friend of his gave him the card about 20 years ago. The friend had purchased a number of 1989 Fleer factory sets, presumably to look for Billy Ripken variations. It is unknown whether the friend's set contained other examples of this error type.

Because this is a printing error, it doesn't qualify for inclusion in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, but it is certainly worth sharing with you.