Hostess Of The Week – 1979 Terry Whitfield: Jerseys, Japan, Johnson City

Terry Whitfield was an outfielder and pinch hitter who played for the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers, with a stint in the Japanese Pacific League sandwiched in the middle.

I’ll be honest, I’d mentioned Johnson City in the header mainly to keep the alliteration going… In 1971 Whitfield was a first-round draft pick (19th overall) of the Yankees, and started his professional career in Johnson City, where he was teammates with Louisiana Lightning himself, Ron Guidry.

Whitfield moved up through the Yankees farm system, but never established himself with the parent club after a couple of “cups of coffee” with the Yanks. He shares his 1975 rookie card with Fred Lynn, Ed Armbrister and Tom Poquette.

During spring training of 1977, Whitfield was traded to the Giants for Marty Perez (known on this blog as the Latin Davy Jones)…

…and much to the dismay of the airbrush artist who did this card for the 1977 O-Pee-Chee set, Perez played in one game for the Yankees before being shipped off to Oakland as part of a package for pitcher Mike Torrez.

Terry Whitfield established himself as a regular outfielder with the Giants with good offensive stats, although maybe not what may have been expected of him.

Whitfield is notable in that he may have been the first American player to spend his peak years playing in Japan; his contract was sold by the Giants to the Seibu Lions for the 1981 season, when Whitfield was 28 years old.

He’d play three years in Japan, helping the Lions win Japan Series titles in 1982 and 1983 while hitting 88 homers over the 3 years.

After Japan, Whitfield was signed to a three-year contract by the Dodgers, who must’ve figured that they signed a guy who’d sorted out his hitting issues while overseas, but it didn’t work out that way. Whitfield ended up as more of a pinch hitter than a regular and would hit just 7 homers in three years with the Dodgers.

OK, I’ve covered Japan and Johnson City… what about the Jersey?

The jersey Whitfield is wearing is fine in and of itself, but I view it as a mistake along the lines of the New York Rangers’ uniform change of the 1970′s…

You’ve already got a classic uniform, why would you change it?

…And the answer to that is, of course, it was the 1970′s.

Oh, My (Black Friday) O-Pee-Chee!

One of my favorite sorta-set-specific blogs is the fairly-recently-concluded “O, My O-Pee-Chee”, which featured every O-Pee-Chee baseball card which differed from the Topps set.  I enjoyed checking out each day’s cards, and I still want to go see what today’s card is, but then I remember that the blog has run through them all.  Doesn’t matter, the blog is still fun to go through and an excellent resource.

I knew going in that 1977 OPC had significant differences, but I wasn’t aware of many of the other different cards. Every time an interesting card was featured, I added it to my wantlist.

While shopping on COMC on Black Friday, I decided that I’d see how many OPC’s I could knock off my wantlist.

I’ll start with the 1977′s… Bob Bailor’s OPC card features the same photo as his Topps card, only he gets the card to himself rather than sharing a rookie card with 3 other guys. It’s a pretty decent airbrushing job, if you overlook the blank jersey front. Bailor was the Blue Jays’ first pick in the expansion draft.

Dock Ellis appears with the Yankees in both the Topps and OPC sets, and yet OPC gave him a different photo. It doesn’t fall under the “1977 OPC as an update set” idea, but who cares. It’s got a different photo, I want it.

I got three cards from the 1971 OPC set, even though two of them don’t really fit into my collection. The uniqueness was just too much for me to handle (and they were cheap).

Claude Raymond had two different cards in 1971 O-Pee-Chee; one that matched his Topps card, and this one.

John Bateman fans also got a double-dip in 1971; this is the “bonus” card for die hard Exponistas.

Ron Hunt was the first Met to start an All-Star game, and he’s a player I collect in or out of at Mets uniform.  This is a different photo and different card # from the Topps version; unlike Claude Raymond & John Bateman, Ron Hunt had just the one card (I think).

1992 wasn’t quite as significant as 1977 in terms of variations, but there were more significantly-different cards than most years. OPC ditched the All-Star cards and replaced them with a very nice Gary Carter tribute (which I featured here) and a number of players who didn’t make it into the Topps set. This is one of those cards. I wasn’t yet an Orioles fan in 1992, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting this…

I’m pretty happy with this specific subset of my Black Friday haul…  As you can imagine, there’s more where this came from (hint:  I got a shipment of 177 cards… no, I won’t subject you to each and every one of them.)

Shut Up ‘N Show Us Yer Cards

Some recent acquisitions…

1973 Topps Sparky Lyle

1975 Topps Mack Herron

1977 O-Pee-Chee Dave Collins

1972 Topps Fritz Peterson In Action

I’m Looking For A Pair Of Red Maracas…

Is it me, or does Marty Perez look sort of like a Latin Davy Jones on this 1977 O-Pee-Chee card?

Quick! Get the man a tambourine!

FYI, this is one of the 1977 O-Pee-Chee cards which has a different photo than the Topps counterpart; that card pictured him with the Giants.

Just for grins, here are 5 Monkees songs which are among my favorites (although not necessarily my top 5):
Gonna Buy Me A Dog
Tapioca Tundra
Look Out, Here Comes Tomorrow
The Girl That I Knew Somewhere
Pleasant Valley Sunday

Without A Cup, Part 7: Another Outfielder

In 1974, Topps didn’t use a cup… That is to say, they didn’t use the golden “All-Star Rookie” cups on the cards which feature members of Topps 1973 All-Star Rookie team. Since Topps didn’t honor those players, I will. Today we’ll be looking at one of the outfielders on that team.

Johnny Grubb batted .311 with 8 homers and 37 RBI in 1973, got a Rookie Of The Year vote and was also named to the Baseball Digest team. He’d play for the Padres, Rangers, Tigers and Indians from 1972 to 1987, and was an All-Star in 1974. He was 7-for-12 as a pinch-hitter in 1973.

Grubb hit 36 doubles in 1975, which was a Padres team record at the time.  Tony Gwynn holds the current record after hitting 49 doubles in 1997.

This is the less-common variation of Grubb’s rookie card (the common version being the Padres version, of course). Another variation (of sorts) involving Johnny Grubb was when O-Pee-Chee airbrushed him into a Cleveland Indians uniform in 1977… Here’s the Topps version of that card…

1977 Topps #286 – Johnny Grubb – Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com

…and here’s the O-Pee-Chee version which reflects his late 1976 trade to the Indians (along with Fred Kendall and Hector Torres) for George Hendrick.

1977 O-Pee-Chee #165 – Johnny Grubb – Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com

Next time, on an all-new “Without A Cup”:  SCANDAL!!!

National Wantlist, Part 6: Seventy-Seven? Oh, Peachy.

Another thing I’ve been working on lately is 1977 O-Pee-Chee baseball.  For those of you who don’t know (and who don’t follow the very informative “O, My O-Pee-Chee” blog), the 1977 OPC baseball set is based on 1977 Topps, but featured a number of differences to make things interesting.  It’s the one year they made a significant number of changes which go beyond text lines telling you that a player was “TRADED TO YANKEES”.  Not coincidentally, 1977 was the first year for the Toronto Blue Jays.

I’m not collecting the entire 1977 OPC set, but I am picking up any cards which have different photos, are airbrushed differently or just don’t exist in the Topps set to begin with (i.e. “Expos Coaches”).  That’s still a fair number of cards.

Here are some OPC Expos I picked up at a show in March, along with the Topps equivalents:

More recently-acquired 1977 O-Pee-Chee Baseball

As mentioned before in these pages, I’m on a quest to collect 1977 O-Pee-Chee cards which differ significantly from the Topps counterpart. Here are three more, along with their Topps equivalents.

Unlike the Blue Jays cards I’d featured a while ago, none of these went from airbrushed to Spring Training photo, and how much of an improvement the OPC versions are is open to debate.

Bobby Grich had signed with the Angels as a free agent (he had been with the Orioles).  The OPC photo is somewhat less scary than the Topps photo.

Pete Falcone was acquired by the Cardinals in December, 1975.  I  have no idea why OPC switched from an actual photo in the proper uniform to an airbrushed portrait.

Tommy Smith was taken from the Indians with the 58th overall pick in the Expansion Draft.  I think the Topps airbrushing is slightly better, but neither one is going to fool anybody.

Blah

As long as I’ve inadvertently created an “O-Pee-Chee Baseball Week”…

…I may as well share another card.

Here’s the first 1977 O-Pee-Chee I ever bought… I got this as a show a few years ago, and I meant to get more at the time, but the opportunity didn’t present itself (You don’t see many O-Pee-Chee cards at shows… well, not at the shows I go to, anyway).

I can only imagine what kids thought when they pulled this card out of a pack.  I’m guessing it was subjected to many a Canadian bicycle spoke.  I think Billy Gardner knows this, judging from his expression.  “Goddamn kids, sticking my cards into their bicycle spokes…  I bet you don’t do this to your Guy Lafleur cards, do ya, you little punks?”

All four had played in the majors:  Jim Brewer was an All-Star in 1973;  Billy Gardner lead the AL in doubles in 1957 and managed the Twins and Royals;  Mickey Vernon was a 7-time All-Star and lead the league in batting twice;  Ozzie Virgil was the first player from the Dominican Republic to play in the majors and his son Ozzie Jr. was a catcher with the Phillies, Braves and Blue Jays.

I somehow scanned this card with extra white space on the left;  I didn’t realize this until I’d uploaded the image to the website and I decided it wasn’t worth fixing at that point.  Sorry.

A couple of 1977 O-Pee-Chee Blue Jays

I’ve mentioned before (I believe) that I’m collecting those 1977 O-Pee-Chee Baseball cards which are significantly different from their Topps counterparts… here are a couple I’d bought recently.  These cards would’ve blown my mind in 1977;  For a young baseball fan, 1977 was the first expansion I’d witnessed first hand, but all the Blue Jays and Mariners in the 1977 set were airbrushed into their new unis.  Looking back, it would’ve been a nice opportunity for Topps to have done something like the Traded set they’d done just the year before.  But you know what they say about hindsight…

As it worked out, 1977 OPC is like a traded set because they went to press later than Topps and – unlike the previous years – dared to make significant changes to a number of cards, especially for the Expos and Blue Jays.

Both of these cards were instances where an airbrushed Topps photo was replaced with a Spring Training photo.  Here are the Topps counterparts:

Jim Mason was drafted 30th overall from the Yankees, and Dave Lemanczyk was drafted 43rd from the Tigers.

If you want to know more about 1977 O-Pee-Chee and other O-Pee-Chee cards which differed from their Topps counterparts, go check out Oh, My O-Pee-Chee.