El Doble Apellido

A month ago I picked up a box of ~800 late-1970s cards. I didn’t have many of these as a kid so as I started sorting through the box I found myself taking the time to really look and get used to the cards. One of the first things that jumped out at me was how the 1975 cards included not only the full player names but the latino players’ double last names. This is something which, even with the increasing numbers of latinos in the US, confuses a lot of people today so I was a bit surprised to see it in the 1970s cards.

I appreciated that it was in parentheses too. While that typesetting isn’t the way the double name is used in Spanish, it’s a nice visual way of including it while also marking it as optional.

Anyway I figured I’d take a quick look through the rest of my Topps cards and check to see how they managed the issue. This ended up being a quick tally of which years Topps used the players’ complete names on the back and which years they didn’t. But in each year Topps used the complete names, most of the latinos’ cards had the double last name on it.

While 1975 was the last of a three-year run of full names beginning in 1973. Topps had previously used full names in 1970. Then I have to go back to 1955 to find the next example.

1970 and the pre-1956 cards are why I said “most” have the double last name. I didn’t do an exhaustive check of the 1970 cards but I did see enough to come across a few examples (like Juan Marichal) which should’ve had the double last name but didn’t.

In the 1950s only about half of the few latino players had their maternal names included. Some of them use parentheses, others have an “y” (and) between the two names. It’s even more interesting to me that the Topps’s 1950s cards are this aware of the double name. It’s just a shame that Minnie Miñoso’s cards fall don’t include “(Arrieta)” since he’s the most-important latino player from this era.*

*At least they do say that his first name is Orestes.

I also looked forward from 1975 to see if I could find any more-recent examples. I was unsuccessful with Topps—none of my cards have full names for anyone. But I looked at other brands too. When I was a kid in the 1980s Donruss was notable for always having the full names on the backs but they don’t have the double last names (well except for José Uribe who, as the “ultimate player to be named later” is somewhat of a special case.)*

*Note. Speaking of Uribe and Donruss I did notice that his 1990 Donruss has the accent on “José,” a detail I never saw when I was a kid.

And I had to take a look at how Topps behaved when it reused designs which originally had full names. Topps hasn’t used a lot of these very often but I did find a 2005 Archives Fan Favorites which uses the 1973 design including the double last name.

By 2014 though it seems Topps had given up on maintaining that level of authenticity in its design reuse. 2014 Topps Archives used the 1973 design again but this time there were no more middle names or maternal names. Which is kind of a shame since that kind of information is both good to have in general and is a way of learning about different naming customs around the world.

I’m hoping that with all the Ponle Acento movement going on, by the time Topps Heritage gets around to the 1970 design in 2019 we’ll have complete names for all the latino players. Maybe we’ll have accents and won’t even need the parentheses either. And bonus points if they list the Japanese players’ names last name first on the backs.

Author: Nick Vossbrink

Blogging about Photography, Museums, Printing, and Baseball Cards from both Princeton New Jersey and the San Francisco Bay Area. On Twitter as @vossbrink, WordPress at njwv.wordpress.com, and the web at vossbrink.net View all posts by Nick Vossbrink