Cards From “The Unholy Mess”, Part 2: Hoping For Hostess

Again, we continue the trip through “The Unholy Mess”:  A cheap box of semi-vintage football and baseball commons in complete and utter disarray.

When it became apparent that the bulk of the collection came from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, I thought “Please, please, please let there be Kellogg’s and Hostess cards in here!”

I struck out on the Kellogg’s, but scattered through the countless cards of Beasley Reece and Bob Babcock…

…I did manage to find two Hostess cards.  The condition was a bit rough, but I certainly can’t complain about the player selection.

1976 Hostess Willie Stargell

It takes a special skill to look menacing while doing a fakey baseball card pose.  1976 wasn’t a particularly “standout” year for Pops, but he was 36 and still had 20 homers and 65 RBI while the Pirates finished 2nd to the Phillies with a 92-70 record.

1978 Hostess Joe Morgan

Joe was an All-Star in 1978, and the Reds finished 2nd to the Dodgers with a 92-69 record.

I got another 1976 Hostess card that I already had, and found no Kellogg’s… but I more than made up on that with all the 3-D cards I got from COMC on Black Friday (tease, tease).

The Funny Hats Of ’76!!!!

Yesterday’s post was about America’s bicentennial in 1976.  Something else that happened in 1976 was the National League’s Centennial.  Several teams observed the Centennial in ways which people confused for observing the Bicentennial.

Of course, everybody knows the Pirates wore funny hats…

The Cardinals wore funny hats almost as much as the Pirates…

…and did the Pirates one better by wearing funny helmets to match their funny hats…

…The National League All-Stars wore funny hats (but not during the game)…

…The Mets wore funny hats (but not much, and the only image I could find in my collection was this shot from 1976’s Old Timers’ Day: This is Don Cardwell and Sal Maglie)…

The Reds and Phillies and NL umpires also wore funny hats, but I couldn’t find any decent images of them.

…and every team, funny hat or no funny hat, wore a “National League Centennial” patch like Manny Mota has.

Everybody but the Pirates would abandon the funny hats after the season.  The following year the Pirates would add funny uniforms to go with the funny hats, and would continue to wear those up through the mid-1980’s.

1990 Topps Magazine Cards And A Familiar-Looking Image

Earlier this week I was idly sorting through a box of oversized “I don’t know how to properly store this” stuff, and I ran across my Topps Magazine cards, still in sheet form but long since divorced from the magazines they came in.

I think I subscribed to the first 4 issues of Topps Magazine, but decided that it wasn’t exciting enough for me to re-up… Despite the inclusion of special cards which manage the difficult feat of being uglier than the 1990 Topps design.

While I was looking at this particular set of cards, I couldn’t help but notice that the Jim Palmer photo looked familiar…

…and that’s when I realized it might be from the same photo shoot as this past Sunday’s Hostess Card Of The Week:

Although the Topps Magazine card is a bit washed out, both photos were taken in Yankee Stadium on a partly sunny day, both have the Brut cologne ad on the left, and in both photos Jim Palmer’s hair has an unintended flip on his right.

I don’t have a real point to this, other than “Heyyyyyyyy, lookathis!”  Having two similar Jim Palmer photos in the same week was nothing I’d planned, I’m nowhere near that organized… it’s just a serendipitous occurrence (and 25 cents goes in the “Big Word” jar).

Getting back to the 1990 Topps Magazine cards, these are pretty much what you’d expect from 1990 baseball cards.  On the first half of the sheet, we’ve got four ubiquitous-for-1990 faces in Bo (Overhyped 2-sport player) Jackson, Nolan Ryan (who had just reached 5000 K’s), Will “The Thrill” Clark and Robin Yount, the AL MVP of the previous season.

The second half of the sheet features the two 1990 Hall Of Fame inductees in Joe Morgan and Jim Palmer, as well as two players who’d been drafted in 1989 and made their Major League debuts that September.  Ben McDonald was the first overall draft pick, and went on to have a decent career with the Orioles and Brewers.

John Olerud played for 17 years for a number of teams and had a couple of exceptional seasons where he batted .363 and .354.  He’s also notable in that he’s one of those players who went straight to the Major Leagues without making any minor league stops.  In fact, he didn’t play in the minors until he did a brief stint with AAA Pawtucket at the end of his career, in what seems to have been an audition for the Red Sox.

Olerud’s card is interesting in that it lists him as both a first baseman and a pitcher, even though I can’t find any evidence of him having pitched in the pros… although he did pitch in college

National Show & Tell: They’re Not ‘Lesser Grade’, They’re Well-Loved

A lot of my bigger “gets” from the show were vintage star cards which were somewhat lacking in… shall we say “Gradeability”?  No pristine pieces of cardboard entombed in the grading service shells of death, just well-loved cardboard which you know were handled, perused, examined, memorized and, in one case, somewhat abused.

…Like this 1966 Jim Hunter, his second-year card.  It looks like someone made a big yellow highlighter “L” on the card (it looks worse in the scan than it does in person).  I saw this card in a box, it was obviously damaged, but how else are you going to get a 46-year-old card of a Hall Of Famer for $1?  It’s not even a card I would normally collect, but I had something of a “Charlie Brown Christmas” moment with this card… I looked at it, and I thought “I think it needs me”.

So, what else did I get?  Say hey, everybody!  Take a look at these!

One of my somewhat last-minute goals of the show was to try to get some well-loved stars from the 1972 set, and Willie Mays certainly falls into that category.  If I also decide to go forward with completing the first two series of 1972 (something I’ve all but committed to doing), then I was going to need these two.  I would also need Mr. Joe Morgan…

…but Willie McCovey falls into the third series, so buying him is either a case of being proactive regarding possible future goals, or just me saying “WTF”.

And finally, so you don’t think I was fixated too  much on 1972, here’s a lovely Brooks Robinson All-Star from 1970.

The total damage for these cards?  $16.  For less than the price of a blaster, I got 6 vintage cards featuring Hall-Of-Famers.  I ask you, how can you beat that?

1976 Hostess Joe Morgan; Weigh-in #16

A lot of people seem to have violent reactions when Joe Morgan appears on TV.  All I know is that in Wiffleball games my friends and I used to imitate the way he’d flap his back arm while waiting for a pitch.

Interesting Joe Morgan fact:  He finished second in 1965 NL Rookie Of the Year voting to Jim Lefebvre.  Lefebvre did make the 1966 All-Star team and played 8 years for the Dodgers, but I think it’s safe to say that Joe Morgan had the better career.

As with many National League baseball cards of the 1970’s, this photo was taken at Shea Stadium.  I still kinda miss Shea, even though I hadn’t been there since the late 1990’s.  It’s kinda sad in a way that I’ve been to 8 different major league stadiums and only 3 of them are still standing:  Camden Yards, Skydome (OK, fine, “Rogers Center”) & Nationals Park.

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I thought I’d have improved numbers this week because I’ve been going through my 1990’s hockey cards and I’m nearly ready to remove most of them from my collection and into my “out box”, but I’m not quite there yet.  Next week’s numbers should reflect phase 1 of the Great Hockey Purge.

Numbers for this week:

Cards coming into the house:  108 (Bought a rack pack and hanger pack of 2012 Topps)

Cards leaving the house:  2 (2 Golden Giveaway code cards went into the recycling)

Cards entering the collection:  0 (My 2012 cards are in limbo while I try to get my card-tracking Access database into “production”).

Cards leaving the collection:  0

Cards moving from inbound to outbound without entering the collection:  35

To date:

Net change in the collection: -161

Net change to the # of cards in the house:  -3514