Newest custom card was co-operative project

My most recent custom card creation was more of a co-operative effort than any of my previous projects.


It all started when a long-time hobby colleague, Fred McKie of East-central Pennsylvania, contacted me after he had won a Topps Archives' auction for an original "flexichrome" that Topps had evidently created for use on a 1955 Richie Ashburn card that was never printed, perhaps originally having been intended as one of the four "missing" cards in the '55T high-number series. Cards #175, 186, 203 and 209 were never printed. It is usually believed that these were to have been cards for players that were zealousy protected by Bowman, which exercised exclusive rights to their cards. Ashburn certainly could have fit into that scenario. Ashburn made his "rookie card" debut in 1949 Bowman, and appeared in every Bowman set through their finale in 1955. Along the way he also appeared in 1951 Topps (Blue Backs), 1952, and 1954 Topps.


We know Topps had intended to use Ashburn in its 1953 set, because artwork was created, though it was never made into a card until 50 years later when I used that artwork to create my own 1953-style Ashburn card.


Fred McKie is a die-hard Phillies fan and collector, and for many years was a frequent contributor of Philadelphis regionally issued cards and player memorabilia to the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards. When he saw my '53-style Ashburn, he inquired about availability and I sent him one.

When he purchased the 1955 flexichrome, Fred inquired about I'd be interested in doing a 1955 Topps-style card for him. A flexichriome, by the way, is how Topps colorized most of its 1952-1956) baseball card issues. It is a thin black-and-white photographic print to which color was painstaking hand painted. The finished artwork could then be made into the necessary color printing negatives. It's too bad that internet images are so small and low-res. Up close and personal, the Ashburn portrait is stunning, right down to blazing hazel eyes.

Because I had not yet made the decision to cut back on my blogging in favor of putting more time into my custom cards, I quoted Fred a price for the commission that would have made it hard for me refuse.


He demurred, but dang it, he had his hooks in me. for the next severak weeks I kept having flashed about how that portrait would look on the fading blue background that Topps used for virtually all of its 1955 Phillies. I was also somewhat rankled that my first attempt at a 1955 Topps baseball card creation had not turned out so well. In fact, I don't think it has ever been publically viewed . . . and likely never will be. About the same time, I decided that I wanted to do a 1955 Charlie Grimm manager's card, since I found a great portrait photo on the internet. I figured it would greatly ease the workload if I had a temple for the 1955 cards, so I proposed to Fred that we go ahead and do the Ashburn.


I had him send me the portrait scan, and asked him to work up the biography for the back. He accomplished that in short order, and even did the math to fill the stats boxes.


Fred chose #175 for the card number, since not only is it one of the missing 1955s, it was also the number of hits Ashburn had in 1954.


He also sent along a color image of Ashburn at bat. At first glance I thought it would work fine for the smaller "action" picture on the front, but it turned out the wide stance in the photo created some composition problems. If you study original 1955 fronts, you'll notice that with only two or three exceptions, the action photos are cap-to-toe images, filling the horizontal space to one side of the portrait or other.



The problem with the batting photo was that if we used it cap-to-toe, it was too wide, with the vertical bat obscuring too much of the team logo. A few of the "real" '55s have a small piece of the action photo either in front of or behind the logo, but in most cases the two elements do not intersect. If I moved the action picture towards the portrait in order to get the bat mostly off of the Phillies logo, too much of it intruded on the portrait, which was also something that was rarely seen in the originals.


I slept on the design for a couple of nights, and when I returned to it, I found I could live with it. I e-mailed Fred and told him of my quandry, and he responded with a trio of alternatives that were much more vertically oriented. He offered batting, throwing and leaping/fielding poses. I colorized the batting and leaping poses, plugged them into the front design and sent them to Fred for review. It turned out that we were in synch, both favoring the fielding pose as an homage to a Hall of Famer whose fielding skills were largely overlooked in the era because of a trio of New York centerfielders (Willie, Mickey and the Duke).


With that decision made, the card was quickly wrapped up. I decided that a 1955-style card should have a shiny front, so I printed the fronts on glossy photo paper. My first attempt to pair that in a sandwich with the matte back and a cardstock center proved too thick and I ruined the first sheet trying to cut it. I opted for a thinner center stock and got the look and feel I wanted.


As per our agreement, I sent Fred half of my six-card production, and he is now able to fill that hole in Richie Ashburn's Topps baseball card legacy. I got an addition to my custom card opus that I am very proud of. Now it's on to the 1955 Charlie Grimm!

More silly stuff from my 1955 Topps-style set

By the time I was 20 or 25 cards into my custom set of 1955 Topps-style college football cards, I was looking to shake things up a bit.

The result was a "card that never was" of a "player that never was."

Until he got so stridently liberal (or maybe since I got more conservative) I was a fan of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip. He was making a name for himself as a cartoonist in the pages of the Yale Daily News at the same time I was growing my hair, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, killing brain cells and generally wasting my college years.

I think I was reading one of the coffee table books of his early strips when it hit me that one of his best-loved characters, Zonker, had played college football for Walden. One thing led to another and the card presented here was the result. Yes, my original is in black-and-white.

I spent nearly an entire afternoon in the library paging through various Doonesbury compendiums (compendia?) to find not only the images for my card, but the "biographical" details for the write-up on back.

If you're familiar with the original 1955 Topps All-American card set, you know that the college logo used on Notre Dame players' cards is a "skyline" drawing of one of the campus's landmark buildings. From the moment I decided to do a Zonker Harris card, I knew I wanted to parody that logo. Finding a picture of Zonker in uniform wasn't nearly as difficult as finding the proper image of Walden College's skyline.

While it is decidedly different in both intent and execution from the other 125+ cards in my '55-style set, the Zonker Harris card remains among my personal top-10 favorites.

My favorite player on a favorite format

As a kid my favorite player was Milwaukee Braves' back-up first baseman George Crowe.

As is often the case, pinning down why he was my favorite is largely conjectural. It may have stemmed from seeing Crowe up close and personal at my first big league game, when we got to use my uncle's box tickets at County Stadium that were just a few rows behind the Braves' dugout on the first base side.

It may be that Crowe wore glasses, one of the few major leaguers to do so at a time when I was struggling to come to terms with being the first "four eyes" in my kindergarten class.

In any event, as an adult collector I have always been a sucker for Crowe's cards. And, since I've begun making my own custom cards, I'm now able to fill in some of the gaps in Crowe's baseball card legacy.

Crowe never appeared on a Bowman card. He was in 1952 Topps (an expensive high-number series card) and 1953 Topps, but not 1954 or 1955. He was back with Topps for a final year as a Brave in 1956, before showing up in 1957 with the Reds.

Crowe's only 1955 baseball card was in the Johnson Cookies regional issue shown here. Truth be told, the '55 Johnston card of Crowe is one of my all-time favorite baseball cards, so it's no wonder I stole that image to use when I made this 1955 Bowman "Color TV" card.

The background for the front of my 1955 Bowman-style card was taken from Jim Wilson's card in that set. I'm not sure why, but I always felt that Wilson's photo in the 1955 Bowman set was a photo that had been taken at night; it may be the dark stands in the background or the strange green color of the grass. I think Jim Brosnan's card in the same set has a similar feel.

In any event, my first effort at recreating a 1955 Bowman-style card was very satisfying for me. I don't really have any plans to do another at this point, but there were a lot of big stars in '55 that didn't get onto a Bowman card, so someday I may try another. Stan Musial? Roberto Clemente rookie?

Newest card creation: 1954 Topps-style Charley Pride

You might have noticed that I haven't been posting as frequently to the blog in the last few weeks. I've recently decided that I much prefer to spend my limited hobby time working on my custom card creations.

In the eight months or so that I've been blogging, my card output has really suffered and my to-do list of custom projects has been growing.

So . . . I'm going to be cutting back on the blogging and devoting more time to my card making.
I'll be sure to post all of my new cards here, so check back once in awhile if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Shown here is my first attempt to recreate the look of one of my all-time favorite Fifties card sets, the 1954 Topps issue.

I chose Charley Pride as the subject, but since there aren't a lot of pictures out there of Pride in his playing days, I had to recycle the photo I colorized for my earlier 1954 Bowman-style card. And, as you can see, the portrait is a close-up from the full-length pose.

The back was the really challenging part. Because Pride played for such low-level minor league teams in 1953, there were few official stats to report. I tried to channel what the Topps creators would have done in such a case, and the results are what they are.

I did have fun doing the cartoons. I scoured the backs of the 50-60 or so original 1954s that I have to find cartoons that could be converted to tell Pride's story. I'm pleased with the result.

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.

Standard Catalog Update #46 : Pinkerton postcards

Thanks to a question from a reader, we have made a pair of additions to the blank-back checklist of the 1913-1915 Pinkerton Score/Photo/Post Cards checklists. They are card #252 shown at right, Fred Merkle, and #205 Heinie Zimmerman, not shown. Both Merkle and Zimmerman had previously been cataloged among the scorecard-back Pinkertons, but had not been seen as blank- or postcard backs.

These approximately 3-1/2" x 5-1/2" cards take their name from the fact that they are printed versions of some of the photographs that appear as the central portions of the 1911 T5 Pinkerton cabinets. It's unknown whether these latter-day cardboard versions have any connection to the "real" Pinkertons, and the checklist for this type is considerably shorter, with fewer than two dozen known players, compared to more than 300 known T5 cabinets.

These cards can be found with score cards printed on back, with postcard backs, or with blank backs. The score card versions are considerably scarcer than the others, and valued at about 2X.

The 2010 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards lists blank/postcard backs at $150 in NM, $75 in EX and $45 in VG, with typical Hall of Famers at $250, $125 and $75. Superstars like Matty, Wagner and Cobb currently carry values of $350-1,500.

Newest custom card: T202 Triplefolder Honus Wagner

As promised several days ago, here is my latest custom card creation.

It's done in the style of the 1912 Hassan Triplefolders that have been known to generations of collectors as T202, the set's number in the pioneering American Card Catalog by Jefferson Burdick.

There were 132 different cards in the original T202 set, comprised of 110-120 or so black-and-white center panels with various combinations of color end panels featuring teammates or rivals. For the most part the end panels were cropped versions of the players' cards from the previous year's T205 Gold Borders set.

My T202 homage features a couple of Pittsburg (that's how it was spelled at the time) Pirates who did not appear in the original T202s. Max Carey was only in his first full major league season in 1911 when the T205s were issued. His "rookie card" appeared in 1912 in the T207 Brown Background set. The portrait I used for this card is that used on his T207, though I tweaked the color a bit and "flopped" it to have him facing the center panel.

Wagner, of course, had made his displeasure at being pictured on a cigarette card known to the tobacco company in 1909, when his card was pulled from the T206 set. The picture I used on my T202 is one that appeared on a circa 1910 celluloid pinback.

The central action photo is something I stumbled across on the internet. It is so close to the one used on the classic T202 card, "Ty Cobb Steals Third," that when I first saw it, I knew a T202 creation was in my future.

Despite having collected baseball cards for decades, I've never owned an original T202, so I had to solicit a lot of help from the experts to broaden my card-making into this format. Most instrumental was T202 guru Lee Behrens who provided some original scans and some valuable critique as the project developed. Thanks, Lee!

Another collector, on viewing my T205 versions of the Carey and Wagner cards, told me something I never knew about T205s (and, by extension, T202). The National Leaguers in those sets feature the first use of a facsimile autograph on a baseball card. At least I always thought about it as a facsimile signature. It turns out that the signatures on the cards made no attempt to replicate the players' actual autographs; they were just identification applied by some long-gone commercial artists working on the T205/T202 issues.

By the time I fould that out, I'd already become attached to the actual signatures of Carey and Wagner, so I decided to go with those for my cards.

You'll notice that the signature on the Wagner reads, "John H Wagner." In reality, his name (as shown on my card back) was John Peter Wagner. My best guess is that by the 1910s, Wagner had capitulated to popular demand and that the "H" on this version of his signature was intended to represent his universally-known nickname of Honus. In fact, I've seen later Wagner autographs that are signed, "J. Honus Wagner."

I have one more T202-style card on my immediate to-do list of custom card projects. Be sure to watch this space for it.

Standard Catalog Update #45 : Pogue's Department Store

As promised yesterday, we present here a newly reported regional issue courtesy of Cincinnati Reds collector Patrick Smith.

What we have here is a photocard along the lines of other contemporary issues that appear to have been produced in conjunction with autograph appearances by Reds players at area stores.
It is 3-1/2" x 5-1/2" with a semi-glossy surface and blank back.

In this case, Smith speculates we're looking at a 1973 issue, as the photo of Joe Morgan on this card is identical to that on the team-issued postcard of that year.

For those not familiar with Cincinnati's retail scene, Pogue's was founded in 1863 and was a typical big city downtown department store, famed for its elaborate Christmas displays. It was merged with L.S. Ayres in 1983.

We'll list this Pogue's card in the next (2011) Standard Catalog. Perhaps in time other players in the series will turn up.

Standard Catalog Update #44 : 1970 Dayton Daily News All-Stars

I suppose it's all relative, but I've always felt that collectors of Cincinnati Reds cards and memorabilia had more than their share of regional collectibles in the post-war era. From the Harry Hartman team issues of 1939-1940 to the Kahn's hot dogs issues from 1955 through the Sixties, to Burger Beer photos, to team-issued postcard sets most years since the mid-Fifties. (I know, I know . . . we Milwaukee Braves collectors had a pretty nice selection of regionals through the 1950s. As I said, it's all relative).

I'm sure that wealth of goodies is what inspires what seems to be an extraordinary number of very dedicated, very competitive collectors. Fortunately for us, most of the these collectors are extremely generous in sharing their discoveries and their knowledge with the rest of the hobby.

One such collector, Patrick Smith, recently forwarded information about a couple of Reds items that are worth adding to the Standard Catalog.

The first is a pair of variations of the 1970 "Bubble-gumless Cards" issued as newspaper cutouts by the Dayton Daily News. This is one of the largest of that eras's newspaper "card" sets, at least among sets that were baseball-only.

For many years the checklist for that set stood at 160 players from what looks to be all major league teams in both leagues. The pictures were printed in black-and-white in a size of about 3-1/2" x 4".

Smith has sent scans of two previously uncataloged paper cards that have to be considered variations of the basic set. They are All-Star cards of Tony Perez and Johnny Bench, the two Reds that had been selected to the N.L. squad in fan balloting. The All-Star versions are very similar to the regular cards except that they are printed with red background decor to complement the black type and b/w photo. Instead of a card number in the panel below the picture, there is the designation "All-Star".

The existence of these two special cards leads a cataloger to wonder if that was the extent of the All-Star series. The 1970 All-Star Game was played at Riverfront Stadium on July 14. The Nationals won their eighth consecutive A-S contest and the game is famous for Pete Rose's slide into home plate that broke the left shoulder of Indians catcher Ray Fosse.

Smith is unsure of when the All-Star cards were printed in the Dayton paper. They might have been printed when the team rosters were announced, or they might have been printed on July 14.

Were the other A-S starters included in the series? Were the other Reds who were chosen for the team (Pete Rose and pitchers Jim Merritt and Wayne Simpson)?

Let us know if you can shed any light. Tomorrow we'll present Smith's other Reds "find."

Standard Catalog Update #43 : 1955 Topps Jim Robertson variations

I'm still working through my holiday vacation backlog and I came upon a report from Cliff Bowman about an heretofore uncataloged variation among the 1955 Topps high numbers.

Bowman sent a scan of the back card #177, Jim Robertson, on which the red lines that complete the stat boxes for lifetime batting average and putouts are incomplete.

I checked the various '55T Robertsons for sale on eBay, and ALL of the cards that had back images available were like this (incomplete boxes).

When I posted an inquiry on the post-war section of the Net 54 baseball card forum, however, I was surprised to find the several of those who responded were able to provide scans of Robertson cards with complete boxes in that area.

I'm not sure which version was printed first, and so far the relative numbers of the two variations seem about equal, so that initially there doesn't seem to be any value differential warranted.

Back on Sept. 20 we published a similar discovery concerning the 1956 Topps Willard Schmidt card. Two days later we had an update that showed the Schmidt card was really a progressive problem that occured during the course of printing, rather than a pre-press variation. For that reason we decided not to list it as a variation in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.

That makes it hard to specify why I'm leaning towards listing this card as a variation. If, after publication of this report, and a suitable time for reader response, we don't hear of any "transitional" variations between the "full boxes" and "partial boxes" versions. You'll likely see this listed in the 2011 edition.

Michael Oher -- I'll jump on the bandwagon

No, I haven't seen the movie yet. I haven't been to a movie since 2006 (The Longest Yard) when I was totally turned off by the entire theater-going experience.

But I have been an Ole Miss fan since the 1980s. So when I noticed that there were a lot of great color pictures of Oher available on the 'net, I figured I'd knock out a 1955-style card over the holidays.

Now that the Packers didn't advance in the playoffs, and since the Giants (Eli) aren't in it, I guess I'll pull for the Ravens to make it in the AFC. In the NFC I'm hoping to see the Vikings in the Super Bowl. I'm not all caught up in the love Brett/hate Brett thing that we have going here in Wisconsin, but how can you not root for a 40-year-old quarterback to win the big one? Though if he does, I'll have to revise my Brett Favre custom card. I made that right after he "retired" the first time and it really should be updated.

My T205 Honus Wagner, Max Carey

I've been expanding my repertoire of custom card creations. In recent weeks I've been working on replicating the classic 1911 T205 Gold Borders with a Honus Wagner card "that never was."

Because he said he didn't want children buying cigarettes in an attempt to get a card with his picture, Wagner refused to cede the rights to issue a card of him to the cigarette companies during the heyday of the tobacco-card era circa 1909-1919. That's what makes his T206 card the "King" of baseball cards and worth six figures in even the most deplorable condition.

It was therefore quite natural that I chose "The Flying Dutchman" as the subject for my first T205 project. I'm still fine tuning the images, but shown above are the back and two possible fronts I'm considering when I finally get the cards into print.

The green-background card uses a portrait identical to the famed T206 Wagner, but has more of an artwork look as the result of its having been used on a contemporary American Caramel Co. issue. The blue-background card uses a portrait that originally appeared on a pin-back celluloid button.

At right is the semi-final version of a T205 Max Carey "rookie card." Actually, Carey's real rookie card came in 1912, in the T207 Brown Background set, but he could have appeared in T205 if the tobacco/card magnates had recognized the future Hall of Famer's potential earlier.

The portrait on my T205 is a "flopped" version of that which appeared on his T207.

I haven't produced a back for my T205 Carey, and I may never do so, because the fact is that both of these T205s are just stepping stones to a more ambitious project I've got underway.

I'm currently at work on a pair of 1911 T202 Triplefolders. Like the original T202s, the end panels of my cards will be adaptations of the players' T205s. I've got a great action photo of Honus Wagner to use as the card's center panel, and have completed the back write-ups in a style that I'm confident pays proper tribute to those unsung writers who did the work on the original T205s and T202s.

Kepp your eye on this space in coming days for the debut of my T202 custom card, titled "Wagner Safe at Third."

Watch out for Mantle program reprints

If there was a Hall of Fame for unsung baseball historians, the minor league wing should be named for John G. Hall of Columbia, Mo.

For the past 16 years, Hall has been chronicling the Kansas- Oklahoma-Missouri League, a Class D circuit that existed for only half that long, from 1946-1952.

Hall publishes a quarterly (or so) newsletter called The KOM League Remembered, and in recent years has been supplementing the print presentation with what he calls KOM League Flash Reports on the internet.

Hall seems to know virtually every alumnus of that minor league or their surviving relatives. His newsletter and Flash Reports are full of great stories of the ballplayer veterans of the K-O-M League and of virtually everything else related to the circuit. His writings bring to life many of the faces that card collectors are familiar with from their Bowman and Topps cards of the late 1940s and 1950s.

These reports are not only historically important, but they are written in an entertaining style that makes them great reading for any baseball fan. You can get a sense of the author's style from the copyright notice on each issue, which concludes, "All rights reserved until the day I die. Within a month afterward no one will remember ths publication ever existed. And, justifiably so." Elsewhere he states, "Some of the news in this publication isn't fit to print, but is."

Besides his work in detailing and preserving the history of the K-O-M, Hall was in the past involved in setting up reunions for its players. In conjunction with the 1998 reunion, he created reprints of a pair of scorecards for games in which Mickey Mantle had played with the 1949 Independence Yankees and the 1950 Joplin Miners.

Mantle is unarguably the most famous alumnus of the K-O-M League. Hall wrote a 2005 book titled, Mickey Mantle: Before the Glory, that has long since sold out at its cover price of $29.95 and now sells on used-book sites for as much as $100+. He's also the author of a K-O-M League photo book, Images of Baseball, published in 2004.

In exchanging e-mails with Hall in recent months, since he contacted me following our recent posts on Ponca City Dodgers cards of 1952, the subject of his scorecard reprints came up and we agreed that it would be a good idea to publicize their existence so that collectors are less likely to be fooled into buying them as valuable original artifacts of Mantle's minor league days.

And that IS a concern, because the reprints are extremely well done and are not overtly identified as reproductions. There was a total of 500 of each of the scorecards made in 1998, and besides distributing them to the players at the reunion, some have been dispersed to fans and collectors over the years.

The cover and that portion of each of the scorecards that lists Mantle are shown here.

At top is a 1949 scorecard of a game between Mantle's I-Yankees and the Iola Indians. Like the original, it is a four-pager printed in 7"x 11-1/4" format, printed in red and black. The Mick, wearing number 16 and playing shortstop, batted seventh in that game and was hitting .315 at the time. I can't decipher the scorer's (Hall said the original from which this was reprinted was scored by a friend of Iola right fielder Dick Getter) system, but it looks like the Yankees were 6-0 winners over Iola, though I can't tell what Mantle's contributions might have been. Obviously this neatly detailed scoring would immediately identify any example of a 1949 Independence-Iola scorecard that might be offered in the collector market as a reprint. So would the unique "Lucky Number" 10016 on the cover.

Some years ago I got into a bidding war on eBay for a similar Independence-Iola scorecard. It wasn't one of Hall's reprints, since it was unscored and had a different lucky number on the cover. I lost out to another collector, but can't today recall what the winning bid was. I wanted the card because of its Iola connection, rather than its ties to Mantle, so I wasn't willing to seriously compete with the Mantle fanatics.

The other Hall reprint is for a 1950 Western Association game with the St. Joseph Cardinals visiting Mantle's Joplin Miners. This was an eight-page affair, in 7" x 9-3/4" size, printed in red and black. The scorecard portion is unmarked, but the reprint would be readily identified by the Lucky Number 5307 on the third page, under a photo of Joplin infielder Carl Lombardi. (I wonder if other printings of the scorecard might have a photo of Mantle?). For the Miners, Mantle was at shortstop, batting clean-up and wearing number 12.

The historic value of scorecards like these would be significant even without the Mantle name. Significant at least to true fans of minor league baseball back in the day.

Just off the top of his head, Hall made these comments about some of the players listed in the line-ups on the Joplin-St. Joseph card.

"The guy in the St. Joseph lineup, playing first base, was "Smokey" Joe Cunningham who was with the Cardinals four years later. Hal Olt was at Springfield, Mo. in 1941 with Stan Musial. The Barth playing left field was Eugene Barth whose greatest fame came as an official in the National Football League. The right fielder that night for St. Joseph was Ace Adamcewicz. He was killed during the Korean War. He died November 21, 1952 in Ft. Devens, Mass. Both catchers at Joplin that year had major league affiliations. Cal Neeman eventually made it to the Chicago Cubs et. al. and the other catcher was the late Lyle Westrum. He was the younger brother of long-time major league catcher, Wes Westrum. Lyle died at an earlyage while duck hunting. I got to know his family a few years ago when I had the reunion of the Joplin Miners at the kickoff of my "book tour" for Mickey Mantle: Before the Glory.

Hopefully, publication of this information on the scorecard reprints will help prevent any fraudulent misrepresentation while at the same time engendering some appreciation for Hall's enthusiasm for K-O-M baseball.

If you have any interest in minor league ball in the immediate post-war era, I can't urge you strongly enough to contact John Hall and support his efforts at historic preservation. Check him out at http://komleaguebaseball.blogspot.com. Hall has also offered to make the few remaining pairs of his reprints available to collectors at $25 per pair, postpaid. The chances of an original of one of these Mantle-related scorecards turning up in the hobby market are slim to none, so this is a rare chance to get the next best thing. The revenue raised will be put towards the printing and mailing of his newsletter. You can order by sending check or money order to John Hall, 1709 Rainwood Place, Columbia, MO 65203.

Tales of T212 #27 : Ted Easterly

(Sorry, no T212 Obak card photo; this is his 1909 T206.)

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.

Ted Easterly appeared only in the 1909 Obak set, but by then he was in the major leagues. He had been born in 1885 in Lincoln, Neb.

A note in my files indicates he had played with Charleston of the Class D Eastern Illinois League in 1907, from whom he was purchased by Los Angeles of the Pacific Coast League, at the age of 22. Presumably that was late in the season, as he played in only 11 games that year, as a catcher. No stats are available for the EIL.

Easterly was the Angel's full-time backstop in 1908, and hit .309. He was drafted after the season by the Cleveland Naps. Easterly played for Cleveland from 1909-1912, both catching and in the outfield, batting .297. In August of 1912, he was purchased by the White Sox, playing with them through the 1913 season, when his batting dropped off to .237. With Chicago he led the American League with 13 pinch-hits in 1912.

When the Federal League was formed as the third major league in 1914, Easterly jumped to the K.C. Packers, and hit for a .336 average. When the Federal League folded after the 1915 season, the 30-year-old Easterly was unable to catch on with another major league team and he returned to the Pacific Coast League in 1916 with Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, but played only 33 games. He appeared in only two games in 1917, with L.A. In 1918 he joined Sacramento, also in the PCL, as a back-up catcher, hitting .259.

Easterly was out of Organized Baseball in 1919, but reappeared in the Texas League in 1920, where he batted .310 for Beaumont into July, when he was released, "for the good of the game." It was his last professional engagement.

Somewhere in my files I have a folder with notes on Easterly that indicate he was involved in some sort of funny business, probably gambling. Someday I'll probably work up a more thorough presentation, but that would be beyond the scope of this Tales of T212 series.

Easterly died July 6, 1951 (just five days before I was born) in Clearlake Heights, Calif.