Hostess Card Of The Week: 1976 Dave Cash

Dave Cash came up through the Pirates system, and took time at second base away from fading Hall Of Famer Bill Mazeroski. Cash put in some good seasons with the Pirates, but also had to contend for playing time with Rennie Stennett. The Pirates also had minor league prospect Willie Randolph coming up, so after the 1973 season, Cash was traded to the Phillies for pitcher Ken Brett.

I guess something about Dave Cash and Philadelphia just clicked, because the three years he spent with the Phillies from 1974 to 1976 were the best of his career.

This is what he accomplished with the Phillies that he didn’t manage elsewhere: Three All-Star game appearances, three years of MVP votes, three years of leading the league in at-bats, leading the league in hits in 1975, leading the league in triples in 1976. In fact, in all his time with the Pirates, Expos and Padres, Dave Cash never lead the league in any sort of significant category.

After 1976, Dave Cash became a free agent and signed a 5 year/$1.5 million contract with the Expos. He had two good seasons in Montreal, but lost the starting job to Rodney Scott and was traded to the Padres where he played one last year before retiring.

Oh, and his 65th birthday is this coming Tuesday! Happy birthday, Dave!

Hostess Card Of The Week: 1976 Willie McCovey

If you have a 2013 Baseball Hall Of Fame desk calendar like I do, you’ve been spending the last couple of days looking at Willie McCovey. This card is also my most recent Hostess acquisition, so I figured that it was kismet.

In 1976, Willie McCovey was 38 years old, and struggled for most of the season. He would eventually lose his starting job to Mike Ivie, and get sold to the A’s on August 30th, where he would serve as a DH for the first and only time of his career. In 82 games that year, he batted .204 with 7 homers and 36 RBI. For those into Wins Above Replacement, McCovey was 0.4 with the Padres and -0.2 with the A’s. I didn’t even know you could have a negative WAR.

After such a lackluster season it seemed like Willie’s career was over. However, he convinced the Giants to give him a spring training invite in 1977, and he would go on to hit .280 with 38 HR’s and 86 RBI, earning him the NL Comeback Player of the Year award and the Hutch Award. I was only generally aware of what the Hutch Award is, so I looked it up, and according to MLB.com, “The award is given to a Major League player who best exemplifies the honor, courage and dedication on and off the field of former baseball great Fred Hutchinson”. The 2012 winner was Barry Zito.

Hostess Card Of The Week: 1976 Jerry Morales

Fun Facts about Julio Ruben (Torres) Morales!

Signed by the Mets as an amateur free agent in 1966 . . . Selected by Padres in the 1968 Expansion Draft . . . Made his M.L. debut in September, 1969 . . . Was an N.L. All-Star in 1977;  was HBP and scored a run in the N.L’s 7-5 victory . . . Aside from Padres and Cubs, also played for the Cardinals, Tigers and Mets.

1976 Hostess Greg Gross: It’s Another Tequila Sunrise…

This card give you a good view of the first version of the infamous Astros uniform of the 1970’s… “Rainbow”, “Tequila Sunrise”, fugly as all get-out, call it what you will.

Some of the “features” which would get eliminated within a year or so were the white circle on the back and the “1970′s Computer-y” uniform numbers on the back and on the right thigh.

I grew up in the 1970’s, I love a lot of the bright colors introduced to baseball in the 70’s… but even I look at this uniform and say “Oh, my God…”

I tend to think of Greg Gross with the Phillies, so it’s odd to see him in orange, especially without the glasses and facial hair. Gross was a starting outfielder for the Astros from 1974 to 1976, and in 1974 he was named to the Topps Rookie All-Star team and was the Sporting News N.L. Rookie Of The Year (Bake McBride was the “official” NL ROY).

Hostess Card Of The Week: 1976 Steve Braun

Steve Braun was primarily an outfielder with the Twins, Card, Mariners, Royals and Jays, but it was as a pinch-hitter that he made  his mark.  As of October, 2011 he ranked 12th all-time in career pinch hits.  Since the players ranked 13 through 20 were not active in 2012, it’s a pretty safe bet that Steve Braun is still #12 on the list.

Other stuff ’bout Steve Braun:

He was the Topps Rookie All-Star 3rd Baseman in 1971, which is pretty impressive given that he got no  higher than A-ball in 1970 and had missed the prior two seasons due to military service.

He was an original Mariner, having been taken with the 38th overall pick in the expansion draft.

He spent five years with the Cardinals, mostly as a pinch-hitter, and played in both the 1982 and 1985 World Series.

As long as I’m featuring a Twins card, I’ll mention that I’ve liked this particular Twins cap since I was a kid…  Simple, elegant, attractive and I like the fact that the two letters are different colors.  One thing that was lost on me until much later was why their hats had “TC” on them.  The phrase “Twin Cities” meant nothing to this kid from Long Island.

1976 Hostess Steve Busby – Name That Ballpark!

Who’s good at identifying ballparks?  The one in the background here looked “wrong” to me, but I’m one of those people who is not very good at spotting ballparks, not unless there’s something completely obvious in the photo.

Busby’s in his home uniform, but it doesn’t look like Kauffman Stadium to me.  It’s too big to be a Spring Training stadium.

Could it be Milwaukee County Stadium?  The 1975 All-Star Game was in Milwaukee, Busby pitched in the game and since Milwaukee was an American League city at the time, Busby would’ve been wearing his home whites…

Steve Busby was a very good pitcher for a very short time.  He pitched 8 seasons for the Royals, but missed 1977 with injuries and only had 3 seasons where he had more than 12 starts.  But from 1973 to 1975 he threw two no-hitters, was on two All-Star teams, won 16, 22 and 18 games, and struck out 532 over the span of those three years.

1976 Hostess Buzz Capra – A Variation I Learned About From My Black Friday Purchases

I bought 35 Hostess cards through COMC on Black Friday;  unfortunately, 3 of those turned out to be upgrades rather than new cards.  I had a number of very cheap 1970′s cards which got misplaced and forgotten for a year or two;  the cards had been kept separate because they absolutely REEKED of musty basement, and I’m a bit sensitive to that.

When I got all my various Hostess acquisitions together, I realized that I had two Buzz Capra cards, but I also realized that on one the back was printed in the usual black ink, but the other was printed in brown ink….

After some decidedly non-exhaustive research, it looks like certain cards in the 1976 set have the brown backs, and it’s been said that the brown ones came on boxes of King Dons, which – if that’s true – would probably make it a regional variation:  the same cake was called either Ding Dongs, King Dons or Big Wheels in different parts of the country.

Again, this is far from definitive.  I couldn’t even find anything conclusive about why the same snack cake had different names (although I tend to believe the Wikipedia entry which says it was to avoid copyright infringement on Drake’s Ring Dings).

If anybody knows more than I do, feel free to add your two cents in the comments.

Wait, wait, I can’t NOT say anything about Buzz Capra…   Buzz played 3 years with the Mets and 4 years with the Braves;  in 1974 (his first year in Atlanta), he went 16-8, was an All-Star and lead the NL with a 2.28 ERA.  Unfortunately, arm problems stopped him from duplicating those numbers, and  those 16 wins represented slightly more than half of his career wins.

An Overview of 1975 – 1979 Hostess Cards

In light of the apparent demise of Hostess as a entity – and don’t worry, Twinkies and Ho-Ho’s and the like will resurface, it’s just a matter of who purchases the brands and when they gear up production – I thought this might be as good a time as any to give you a run-through of the 5 years of Hostess baseball cards.

Hostess cards were printed on the bottom of “family sized” boxes of Hostess snack cakes from 1975 to 1979.  Each year’s set consists of either 150 cards (if you’re me) or 50 3-card panels (if you’re looking for a greater challenge and have a greater budget).

Certain cards/panels are somewhat rarer if they were printed on the box for a less-popular snack cake (i.e. Chocodiles).

Topps provided the images, and did the airbrushing as needed, like on the above 1975 Joe Torre.

The 1976 set had bold red, white and blue stripes, because it was THE BICENTENNIAL and you couldn’t not do something to commemorate the fact that the country was 200 years old.  I think there was a federal mandate or something.

Business as usual for 1977;  I find this set the least appealing, but that’s a matter of relativity;  none of the sets are what you’d call beautiful in and of themselves, but the card design is not why I collect these.

1978 was more subdued than the previous two years, but not bad looking in a minimalist sort of way.

1979 just took the footer and moved it to the header.

You’ll see references to Hostess Twinkies cards…  There’s not a huge difference between Hostess cards and Twinkies cards.  Hostess cards were sold on the box itself, Twinkies cards were inserted into the individually-sold Twinkies packages (and they often have Twinkie stains on them).

Twinkies can be distinguished by the black stripe on the back, and the fact that they come in single panels rather than panels of three.

Hostess cards don’t have the black stripe, but every year’s card looks pretty much like this:

If you collect individual cards, there’s almost no reason to distinguish between Hostess and Twinkies, and not everybody does. I don’t, and I’ve noticed that COMC.com doesn’t.

Not every card has a Twinkie counterpart; In 1975 and 1976, there were only 60 cards which were Twinkified, and there aren’t any Twinkies cards from 1978 or 1979.

If you really want to go crazy, or have a larger collecting budget than I do, negatives used for Hostess sets have turned up in Topps Vault auctions.

The mid-to-late 1970′s were my peak collecting years as a kid, but I long ago completed the Topps sets from 1974 to 1978.  Collecting Hostess cards allows me to keep collecting the players of my youth without getting into some of the more arcane sets of the era.

Hostess Of The Week (1976 George Brett) And A Follow-Up On Halloween

I believe you’re all familiar with George Brett?
George, Readers. Readers, George.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I thought I’d share how Halloween went with us. We didn’t seem to have quite as many kids as usual, but many of the kids that did show up were excited about the cards, and a few children told us that they remembered us from prior years, which is always a good feeling (We don’t have kids of our own, so many of the kids in the neighborhood don’t know us from a hole in the wall).  One girl admitted that she didn’t want the cards themselves, but last year she was able to trade them for some good candy.  I laughed, and told her that was fine.

In the process, I managed to purge approximately 714 cards from the house: 570 baseball, 100 football, 14 basketball and 24 hockey.  Not bad for an evening’s work.

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As long as I’m going over numbers, I’m way overdue for Weigh-In #42.

Numbers for this week month:

Cards coming into the house: 182 (mostly Topps Update)

Cards leaving the house: 717 (Halloween, plus three junk wax cards tossed into the recycling)

Cards entering the collection: 15

Cards leaving the collection: 50 (Removed some unwanted oddballs and hockey cards)

Cards moving from inbound to outbound without entering the collection: 89

To date:

Net change in the collection: 0 (I’ve been doing this for nearly a year, and the best I can do is zero-growth.  Eh, I’ll take it).

Net change to the # of cards in the house: -9,624

Total # of cards which have left the house: 13,535

Number of cards tracked in my Access database: 1,795

1976 Hostess Earl Williams

Earl Williams was won the 1971 NL Rookie of the Year, appearing in about half of his games as a catcher; what’s most interesting about this is that he had never caught a single game in the minors (although he did catch in instructional leagues and winter leagues). He hit 33 homers that year, which would be the most he’d have in the majors.

Orioles manager Earl Weaver made it clear that he wanted Williams on his team, and late in 1972 Williams and Taylor Duncan, a prospect and former 1st round draft pick, were traded to the Orioles for Pat Dobson, Roric Harrison, Davey Johnson and Johnny Oates… A pretty nice haul for the Braves. Although Williams had some good seasons for the O’s, it wasn’t the revelation that Weaver had expected, and Williams’ time in Baltimore did not go well. In April of 1975, Williams was traded back to the Orioles for Jimmy Freeman, a minor league pitcher with some MLB experience.

Halfway through 1976, Williams would be sold to the Expos. He’d play for the Expos until being released in Spring Training of 1978; after a brief stint with the A’s, he found no interest in his abilities, even going as far as taking out an ad in the New York Times: “Employment Wanted By Baseball Player”.  It didn’t help, and other than two seasons in Mexico, Earl Williams’ career was over.
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It’s Sunday, and time for my “weigh-in”… This is #38, although I was sneaky and didn’t put it into the heading.  Not a lot going on this week, other than weeding some unwanted cards out of my collection…

Numbers for this week:

Cards coming into the house: 0

Cards leaving the house: 0

Cards entering the collection: 4

Cards leaving the collection: 214 (Racing & soccer cards from the early 1990′s)

Cards moving from inbound to outbound without entering the collection: 5

To date:

Net change in the collection:  -160

Net change to the # of cards in the house: -9,293

Total # of cards which have left the house: 12,810