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A follower of my blog recently wrote to inquire about the now six-weeks' absence of new postings; he was concerned about my health.
I appreciate the concern for the fact is my health has played the major part in the lack of new material in this space.
However, I have not totally abandoned the creation of new custom cards. In the coming days I'll share my latest with you.
The first is an addition to my "Donovan's Drive-Ins" series of minor league players in the 1956 Topps format.
Rather than rehash the "back story," I'll give you this link: Donovan's backstory .
With the number of Satchel Paige photos I have in my "futures file," I doubt that I'll ever run out of Paige custom-card ideas.
While the triptych cartoons on the backs of 1956 Topps make creating new cards challenging, the set was one of my favorites, so I'll continue to turn them out.
You can order this card. Unless otherwise noted, all of my custom cards are available to collectors for $9.95 each, postpaid. Complete checklists of all my custom baseball, football and non-sports custom cards were published on this blog in late May (football), July 6 (non-sports) and Sept. 19 (baseball). To order, email me at scbcguy@yahoo.com for directions on paying via check/money order, or to my PayPal account.
Until now, there has been no place where all of my custom cards could be found in checklist form. It is my intention to update this posting as new cards are created. Similar checklists for my other baseball, non-sports and football custom cards will also be posted.
Custom card availability. Unless noted, all of my custom cards are available to collectors for $12.50 each, postpaid for one or two cards; $9.95 each for three or more (mix/match). To order, email me at scbcguy@yahoo.com for directions on paying via check/money order, or to my PayPal account.
1951 Bowman
325 Satchel Paige, Browns
326 Kevin Saucier, Browns
1952 Bowman
253 Satchel Paige, Browns
1952 Topps
408 Satchel Paige, Browns
409 Rogers Hornsby, Browns
410 Duke Markell, Browns
411 Luis Marquez, Braves
412 Nellie Fox, White Sox
413 Jack Daniels, Braves
414 Johnny Logan, Braves
415 Sam Hairston, White Sox
416 Gene Conley, Braves
417 Bill Sharman, Dodgers
418 Bob Hope-Bing Crosby
419 Paul Pettit, Pirates
420 Buzz Clarkson, Braves
1952 Red Man
27 Mickey Mantle, Yankees
1955 Red Man
26 Ernie Banks, Cubs
1953 Bowman black-and-white
65 Jackie Robinson, Dodgers
66 Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Dodgers
1953 Topps
253 Richie Ashburn, Phillies
261 Jim Pisoni, Browns
267 Harry Hanebrink. Braves
268 Stan Musial, Cardinals
271 Quincy Trouppe, Indians
281 Bob Hope, Indians
282 Bing Crosby, Pirates
1953 Johnston Cookies Milwaukee Braves
26 Joey Jay
27 Harry Hanebrink
1954 Bowman
225 Charlie Pride, Memphis Red Sox
226 Hank Aaron, Braves
227 Ernie Banks, Cubs (w/bats)
227 Ernie Banks, Cubs (portrait)
228 Warren Spahn, Braves
1954 Topps
251 Charlie Pride, Memphis Red Sox
252 George Crowe, Braves
253 Jack Faszholz, Cardinals
254 Mickey Mantle, Yakees
255 Bobby Thomson, Braves
256 Ralph Kiner, Cubs
257 Ralph Branca, Tigers
258 Joe Adcock, Braves
1955 Bowman
322 George Crowe, Braves
323 Sandy Koufax, Dodgers (belt to cap)
323 Sandy Koufax, Dodgers (letters to cap)
324 Duke Snider, Dodgers
325 Roberto Clemente, Pirates
326 Warren Spahn, Braves
1955 Topps
123 Sandy Koufax, Dodgers (green)
123 Sandy Koufax, Dodgers (yellow)
175 Richie Ashburn, Phillies
186 Charlie Grimm, Braves
203 Mickey Mantle, Yankees
209 Bob Hazle, Redlegs
211 Bobby Thomson, Braves
212 Johnny Logan, Braves
213 Ralph Kiner, Indians
214 Ralph Branca, Yankees
215 Phillips Paine, Braves
216 Bob Thorpe, Cubs
217 George Crowe, Braves
218 Nino Escalera, Redlegs
219 Luke Easter, Indians
220 Joe Adcock, Braves
1956 Topps
7 Paul Pettit, Hollywood Stars
9 Bill Mazeroski, Hollywood Stars
12 Satchel Paige, Miami Marlins
341 Casey Stengel, Yankees
342 Charley Peete, Cardinals
343 Frank Robinson, Redlegs
344 Tom Gastall, Orioles
345 Charlie Grimm, Braves
346 Tommy Lasorda, Athletics
347 Bill Mazeroski, Pirates
348 Stan Musial, Cardinals
349 Bob Hazle, Braves
350 Stu Locklin, Indians
351 Brooks Robinson, Orioles
352 Rocky Colavito, Indians
It's taken me nearly four years but I've now completed the second of a real fantasy card series.
This purports to be a 1956 Topps-style regional form the Donovan's Drive-In chain of Southern California.
You can read the back story on my blog posting of May 16, 2012, here: Donovan's '56 Maz.
Some years back in my perusal of microfilms of 1950 back issues of The Sporting News, I read the contemporary accounts of the first $100,000 pitching phenom, Paul Pettit. His story epitomizes the bonus baby phenomenon of that era.
For their $100,000 gamble on a high school kid, the Pittsburgh Pirates got a return of exactly one major-league victory in the 12 games in which Pettit appeared at the big-league level in 1951 and 1953.
My fantasy card looks back to the 12 seasons Pettit played in the minors. Early on he was a pitcher, then, after arm injuries, he hung on as an outfielder and first baseman in the higher minors. He played in five seasons for the Pirates' Pacific Coast League farm club, the Hollywood Stars.
If you're a veteran vintage baseball card collector, you may recognize the background of my new card as that used by Topps for Dale Long's 1956 card.
There are no career-contemporary baseball cards for Pettit. I'd like to make a 1953 Topps-style card, but I have yet to find a suitable photo, though I do have the germ of an idea that piques my interest.
For all the ink that he got as an impossibly handsome high school hero, there really isn't a lot of material on Pettit to be readily found on the internet. Over the years I set aside dozens of notes about his baseball struggles, but I don't want to author a definitive biographical sketch.
I'm just going to share my fantasy card creation of one of baseball's most interesting players of the early 1950s.
As I've mentioned, creating 1956 Topps-style custom cards is a mixed blessing.
The set was one of my childhood favorites, but the nuts and bolts of creating the cards make it one of the most difficult formats in which to work.
I had the good fortune while making a 1956 Rocky Colavito card to be able to repurpose the trio of cartoons that I had already used on my 1956 Bob Hazle, so the work went much easier.
Topps could have chosen to include Colavito in its 1956 set, as he ad made his big-league debut with a bang in late 1955. This custom should help make up for that lapse.
I'd already done a pair of Rocky Colavito customs. I used an original Topps flexichrome to make a 1960 Topps-style multi-player feature card with Harmon Killebrew and I did a 1978-style coach's card.
Colavito has always enjoyed a collector following that rivals many Hall of Famers.
There is a good baseball biography of Colavito on the SABR baseball biography site, written by Joseph Wancho: Rocky Colavito bio .
This does not exhaust the possibilities for future Colavito customs. I've got photos to work with for a 1982 or 1983 Kansas City Royals coach's card, and a good picture of Colavito in his last playing gig with the New York Yankees in 1968.
So Rocky's fans can look forward to seeing those in the future.
I hadn't realized before now, but in my 13 or so years of making custom/fantasy cards I've done more cards in the 1956 Topps baseball format than any other (except for the 170 or so 1955 Topps All-American college football cards). My recently completed '56T Brooks Robinson makes it an even dozen.
On the one hand it's not surprising because the 1956 Topps set was one of my childhood favorites. On the other hand, working in the '56T style is one of the most challenging. Besides needing both a portrait and an action picture for the front of the card, three cartoons are needed for the backs.
The process of rounding up the cartoons is one of the hardest parts of assembling a "new" '56. I generally start by plotting out five or six possible highlights. Then I go through my stack of 100 or so original 1956 cards to try to find cartoons that can be re-purposed. Re-using original cartoons helps give an authentic look to my card backs.
In a pinch, if I can't find anything appropriate among my '56s, I sort through the 1989 Topps "Big" cards, which used a similar style of cartoons on the back.
You might not realize it, but another challenge in recreating the '56 format is getting the autograph for the front. Guys like Brooks Robinson are easy; I prefer to pull them from the old Baseball Register, where they are in clean black-and-white. However, while I used to have complete runs of Registers (and Guides) when I worked at Krause, my current library of those volumes is quite limited.
Among the 1956 customs that I've done, acquisition of three autographs was especially challenging. Charley Peete played only 26 games in the major leagues for the 1956 Cardinals, and died in a plane crash later that year. Similarly, Tom Gastall played just parts of the 1955-56 seasons for the Orioles, also dying in a plane crash in 1956. Stu Locklin had a 25-game big league run with the Indians in 1955-56, but he is still alive and signing today.
One of the next '56s I've got on my to-do list, Paul Cave, played nine seasons in the minors in the Boston/Milwaukee Braves organization without ever making the majors. But as a kid I looked -- in vain -- for a long time for his baseball card because he was shown and named on the 1956 Topps Milwaukee Braves team card.
Getting back to my '56 Brooks Robby, I spent considerable time putting the card front together. The background comes from a circa 1963-65 premium picture taken in spring training. I no longer remember where the action photo came from; it's been in my files for quite a while. It was also a spring training photo, and I cropped out a sliding Cleveland Indian and colorized the Robinson figure.
My original plan for the portrait photo was to use the picture that Topps used on his 1957 rookie card, but in a last minute google search I found a different early portrait that would give my card a more original look. I had to colorize that photo, as well as adding a new oriole image to his cap.
There's really nothing I can tell you about Brooks Robinson that you don't already know, so I'll just give you the first look at my newest 1956 custom.
If this blog unexpectedly goes dark, you can assume I'm locked up in a secret CIA prison somewhere, being waterboarded for the sake of my "art."
I fear the google-searching I did to gather data for the back of my latest non-sports custom card may have piqued the interest of Homeland Security.
Other than a potential Isis recruit, who else would be trying to find out how many air miles separate New York and Al-Raqqah and photos of Isis fighters?
Just me, I guess, trying to make my "update" to the 1956 Topps Flags of the World set as accurate as possible.
The Flags set was a childhood favorite. Besides the bold colors of the banners, the background art had a lot of appeal to a kid. There were Commie soldiers, Vikings, an octopus, a Canadian Mountie, an erupting volcano and sports action such as soccer, bobsledding and skiing. What's not to like?
The 80 cards in the 1956 set (one of the last from Topps in the 2-5/8" x 3-3/4" format) covered much of the world, but there were some countries omitted, from Kenya and Uganda in darkest Africa to Bermuda and the Bahamas in our part of the world.
I looked at the feasibility of creating some Flags customs a year or so ago, but was discouraged because my lack of true artistic ability would have required me to work with background art that appeared on existing cards and because my Photoshop skills are not advanced enough to convert a flat picture of a flag to a flapping banner as shown on the cards.
A recent image search for the Isis flag unexpectedly turned up a suitably waving version of the terrorists' dreaded ensign. (There are some funny vulgar parodies of the flag to be found, as well.)
It then occurred to me that Topps' FOTW card for Syria was perfectly suited for conversion to an Isis card. The Topps card already featured a sword-waving Arab and a Mideastern backdrop.
I merely had to swap out the flags and convert the figure's burnoose to the preferred Isis basic black, adding a face cloth. I did take the liberty of keeping a bit of bling on the lungi and the colored sash. Covering them over would have given the figure a pretty flat look.
Providing the translations on the back of the card was much more of a challenge than I anticipated. There are no -- at least I couldn't find them -- web sites that offer a simple phonetic translation from English to Arabic. My solution was to use a site that gave an aural translation of English words. I had to use my imagination to come up with written versions of the spoken form, and even though I listened to them half a dozen times or more, I'm sure my interpretations horribly butcher the actual words.
On a more technical note, I could not find a font that very closely replicated that used by Topps for the word balloons on the backs in 1956. I cam close enough that I don't think many will notice.
On that topic, fortunately for me I was able to cut and paste the front font to make "ISIS" out of "SYRIA". Finding a close match to the country-name font would have entailed a long search.
Some of the stats on backs had to be my interpretation of estimates by international news sources for the amount of territory under Isis control and the population. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the "official" monetary unit of Isis and its nominal conversion rate were easily available.
For reasons already spelled out, I'm pretty sure this will be my one and only FOTW custom card. You never know, though, the right piece of art may drop into my lap someday.
Along the western shore of Lake Winnebago in east central Wisconsin there is a metroplex known as the Fox Cities. Four cities and half a dozen each of villages and towns follow the Fox River as it flows north from the lake to Green Bay. The total population is around 250,000.
My home in Iola is about 45 minutes west of the Fox Cities. In past years I used to drive over for Saturday baseball card shows and to catch a Class A Midwest League ballgame. Alex Rodriguez played for the Appleton Foxes when he began his pro career in 1994.
There have been eight or ten major leaguers who were born in the Fox Cities. Some you may have heard of are 1950s Giants and Braves pitcher Dave Koslo, 1970s-80s Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Jerry Augustine and Eric Hinske, who played for the Blue Jays, Red Sox, Rays, Pirates, Yankees and Braves between 2002 and 2013, and last season coached for the Cubs.
All of those guys had plenty of baseball cards to mark their major league careers, and several of the other Fox Cities native ballplayers also had cards issued during their playing days.
One who did not is Stu Locklin. It's not surprising . . . he played in only 25 games for the 1955 and 1956 Cleveland Indians.
Locklin was born in Appleton, Wis., in 1928. At age 86, he's working his way up the list of oldest living former major leaguers.
He graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he had starred in baseball, football and basketball. He led the Badgers in hitting in 1947 and 1948, then signed with the Cleveland Indians (technically with their Baltimore Orioles farm team) in 1949. It is reported that in one Big Ten game against Michigan State, Locklin was 4-for-5 at the plate against future Hall of Famer Robin Roberts.
Locklin was bigger than the average ballplayer of his era; 6' 1-1/2" and 190 pounds, throwing the batting left handed. He generally played in the outfield and at first base.
Skipping the lower minors, Locklin started his pro career at Class A Dayton in 1949, where he led the Central League with 169 hits and was second with 39 doubles.
Moving up to AA Oklahoma City in 1950, Locklin led the Texas League with 43 doubles. He followed his .311 batting average of the previous year with a .298 mark.
In 1951 Locklin was promoted to San Diego in the Pacific Coast League. In the faster company at the AAA level, Locklin's playing time diminished as a reserve outfielder and his average dropped to .267 with his power numbers also decreasing.
Locklin lost three prime years at age 23-25, serving in the Air Force during the Korean War, 1952-54.
When he returned from the service in 1955, he went right to the big club, playing in 16 games with Cleveland, nine of them as a pinch-hitter or pinch-runner. He hit just .167.
The Indians kept him on the roster to start the 1956 season. He appeared in just nine games; the first eight as a PH or PR. In his only start, on May 30, he got his only hit of the season and was farmed out to Indianapolis with a lifetime .167 average.
Locklin never returned to the majors. He played five more years, all at the AAA level with Indy (1956), Miami (1957), Minneapolis (1958-60) and San Diego (1957-59).
After his playing days, Locklin returned to Appleton where he was a junior high school teacher, counselor and coach, and supervised the city's youth baseball program.
Locklin never had a baseball card contemporary with his playing days. He does appear in the 1974 Ed Broder collectors' issue set of Pacific Coast League "popcorn" cards picturing Coast League players of 1957-58.
Production notes
Initially I worked with the 1956 Topps card of Larry Doby to provide the background for my '56 Locklin. To make the colorized player portrait match the overall look of the night-game background, it would have been too dark.
I decided to work with the 1956 Art Houtteman background, which better matched the portrait in brightness. I had to move some things around, including flipping the entire background horizontally, and make other adjustments to erase the Houtteman portrait and action pictures.
There aren't many pictures of Locklin available on the internet, and no full-length shots. So I used the batting pose from Doby's card, lightening the skin, taking some weight off of the face and changing a few uniform details. As with most action pictures on original '56 Topps cards, you can't really make out who the player is, anyway.
On back, I repurposed two of the cartoons that I previously used on my Tom Gastall custom card (see my blog for May 1, 2011) and added a cartoon from the 1958 Red Schoendienst card.
Because of the cartoons on back, creating custom cards in the format of 1956 Topps is more difficult than most, but since that is one of all-time favorite Topps sets, I enjoy the challenge.
On July 4, I presented the reworked version of my custom 1955 Topps-style card of Hazle with the Cincinnati Redlegs.
Two days ago I explained why I have now created three different "cards that never were" of 1957 Milwaukee Braves phenom Bob Hazle.
Yesterday I showed you my custom of Bob Hazle as a Detroit Tiger on a 1959 Topps-style custom card.
Today I'm bringing you my latest, and possibly my last, Bob Hazle custom card, in the format of 1956 Topps.
You can't fault Topps for not including Hazle in its '56 set. A week before the opening of the season he'd been traded from Cincinnati to Milwaukee for first baseman George Crowe. At that point, his entire major league career had consisted of six games with the Redlegs in 1955.
Hazle actually spent the entire 1956 season with the Braves' AAA farm club at Wichita in the American Association, where he'd batted .285 with 13 home runs.
Though Topps didn't produce a Bob Hazle card until 1958, I came up with this example of what a 1956 card might have looked like.
Also as promised, here's an edited version of a column I penned in the Dec. 2, 2005, issue of Sports Collectors Digest . . .
Meeting Bob Hazle
I had the please of meeting Bob Hazle once at a late 1980s' card show in Chicago where he was making a rare autograph appearance.
He'd walked away from baseball completely after spending the 1959-1960 seasons in the Detroit Tigers' minor league system and was working as a liquor salesman out of Newberry, S.C.
As he handed me back my autographed J.D. McCarthy postcard, I commented on how bright and sharp his World's Championship ring looked. He pulled the ring off and handed it to me for closer inspection.
He said the ring looked so fresh because it was a replacement he'd had made several years earlier.
Hazle said he'd lost his original 1957 Braves ring some years ago when he was throwing a beer can out the window of his pickup truck and the ring flew off with it.
Is it any wonder Milwaukee loved this guy?
Bob Hazle died of a heart attack in Columbia, S.C., in 1992, at the age of 61.
