robneyer

All Action All the Time

My time as a rabid collector lasted for approximately three years, 1986 through ’88. During those years, I blew nearly all my disposable income — mind you, I was a college student without a real job — on packs of baseball cards. Topps, Donruss, Score, Fleer, Sportflics… didn’t really matter. I was addicted, and spent an inordinate amount of time sorting my way to complete (or nearly complete) sets. I also had binders full of players like Cory Snyder and Tony Fernández. But that hoary old story is for another day!

This story’s about what I missed, by not starting earlier. No, not the outstanding 1984 Fleer set, which I’ve just recently come to love. That same year, Donruss produced their second Action All Stars set: 60 player cards + 1 checklist card; five cards per cello pack, plus a card consisting of three Ted Williams puzzle pieces.

Of course all the players were depicted in “action” photos, but what really distinguished these cards was their size. I like big cards. I mean, why would anyone not like big cards? The only downsides are a) you can’t stuff ’em in your pockets, and b) good luck finding the correct binder pages! But if the point of a baseball card is the image of the player, bigger is nearly always better (he said, overconfidently).

And these cards are 3.5 inches by 5 inches — essentially notecard size, or exactly the size of two lesser baseball cards.

I discovered the existence of this set just a few weeks ago, when searching eBay for “Topps big” or something (did I mention that I like big cards? I think I mentioned that). I really just wanted to hold one Action All Star, just to get a sense of the thing. But there was a good deal and … well, I wound up with eight five-card cello packs.

Look, I’m not stupid. I know I could have learned most of what I wanted to know by looking at images and reading stuff on the web. But not all.

All means holding a card in your hand, feeling its thickness and texture and turning it over and seeing what’s on the back. All means up close and personal.

Anyway, I opened all the packs. In retrospect, this was … okay, I am sorta stupid. For the money I spent on the packs, I could have picked up the complete set. With money left over. So buying the packs would have made sense only if I’d then sent some packs as gifts, or rationed the opening thrills for myself. But instead I did the other, stupider thing!

Oh well. Hardly the first time.

Anyway, the “action” images are really nice: well composed and framed, with a clean accompanying design (unlike too many cards in those pre-Stadium Club days). My research reveals that in both 1983 and ’85 (see below), Donruss went with two images on the front of their Action All Stars: action, and portrait … which only serves to detract from both.

Your mileage might well vary, but for my (not much) money the 1984 set is the only one of the three sets with real curb appeal.

Not that they’re perfect. In way too many of the images, the background is just sorta dark, or murky. Or murkily dark. Often the player is backlit. The overall effect is just … darkness. Which could be easily corrected today. On your cell phone.

Back then, though, they just went with the images they had, and we liked it. But among the 25 players I got, only a few — most notably, Dale Murphy — really pop the way you want them to. Just too many guys doing their actions in the shadows.

The backs of the cards could have been great, but are just passable. Using the top half for a head shot was a good idea, albeit still with too many shadows. The bottom half includes full name, biographical data, and a complete MLB statistical record. So far, so good. But then there are career highlights, with the combination of tiny black letters and dark red background almost impossible to read without a magnifying glass…

…which you could almost understand for the veterans with huge stat sections like Steve Carlton and Reggie Jackson. But Tony Peña’s got five stat lines, five lines of highlights … and a bunch of empty red space. Instead of using a bigger, actually readable font for the highlights, they just used the same teeny letters for everybody. Which I can barely read. Oh and by the way get off my damn lawn you meddling kids.

Overall, this is a good set that could have been great, with better lighting and some measure of design flexibility on the back. Well worth whatever they’re asking on eBay.

Elegance, thy name is … Circle K?

So this was originally going to be a super-short post about an old set – well, nearly a set – that was just sort of laying around, and that I’ve never quite been able to get out of my mind. But then I toddled off for just a tiny bit of research and now this won’t be super-short, probably not even short at all.

You’re welcome!

1985ck-11d At some point back in the 1980s, I guess, I picked up a set of cards, (probably) sight-unseen because they were inside a box. As I remembered the set, they came from K-Mart and depicted the top 34 home-run hitters of all time.

At the time. Which meant the set included Lee May.

Lee May? Yeah, Lee May. When the set was released in 1985, Lee May’s 354 career clouts ranked 34^th on the all-time list.

Now? Poor Lee May’s fallen well more than 100 percent on the all-time list, tied for 88^th with Luis Gonzalez. But I remember enjoying the fact that one relatively small set of baseball cards included Hank Aaron and Lee May. Along with other non-immortals like Norm Cash, Frank Howard, and Dave Kingman.

But what I really liked about those cards, even 30-some years ago, was the simple elegance of their design. They did have a border – in those years, it seems that nobody could even imagine designing a baseball card without a border – but otherwise the card was pure image, with the player’s name in tiny print in the bottom-left corner of the border. (So I suppose this is becoming a running theme, as my previous post was about another simply elegant set. At some point early on, that apparently became my design preference, at least with baseball cards.)
41imymdgfcl Now, about my research… This set was produced by Topps (as I correctly remembered) but not sold by K-Mart. It was actually Circle K, which surprised me mostly because we didn’t have Circle K stores where I lived.

This should have been obvious, since the back of the cards carry the Circle K logo. But I didn’t recognize the logo because – have I mentioned this already? – we didn’t have Circle K stores where I lived!

Okay, so going through my set, I discovered I was missing a couple of cards. And by looking at that 1985 list of home-run leaders, I realized the missing cards were Ted Williams (#9) and Joe DiMaggio (#31). Cards that (I figured) I had probably misplaced, used as bookmarks, or gave away.

I found about Circle K by Googling K-Mart baseball cards … ‘cause it turns out K-Mart did have their own baseball cards, also in the 1980s. Actually, it turns out pretty much everybody had their own baseball cards in the ‘80s. You might recall the glut. Here’s the description of my set from a Sports Collectors Daily article about all those ‘80s boxed sets:

In a departure from the busy designs that would mar just about every other boxed set during the 1980s, each card in the Topps “Baseball All Time Home Run Kings” set featured a full-color photo surrounded by thin colored piping inside a thicker white border. As the name implies, the cards depicted the top 33 sluggers on baseball’s career home run list at the time and were distributed at Circle K convenience stores.

A mystery, though. Only 33 cards in the set? Lee May is #34. Then again, scan_pic0036 34 is a strange number for a set. Just in terms of printing, don’t you want a number that’s divisible by 3 or 4? In fact, all the other sets discussed in the SCD story were either 33 or 44 cards. So why 34 in this one? And what in hell did I do with my Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio cards?

My answer took a few days. A partial answer, anyway. I was so annoyed by those two missing cards that I purchased a full set on eBay – don’t worry; it was cheap! – and this one arrived today with the original box. And on the back of the box, a checklist.

Or what looks like a checklist. It’s not a checklist. It’s a list of the top 34 home-run hitters, Aaron through May. But right next to the number 31 and Joe DiMaggio, an asterisk. And below the list, in even smaller type, an asterisk with this note:

Picture card not included in series.

We can probably guess why. DiMaggio’s people probably wanted more money than Circle K was willing to spend. DiMaggio’s people were well-known for that sorta thing. So the (self-described) Greatest Living Ballplayer and his 361 career homers are on the box, but not in the box. Oh well. At least now I do have the greatest (then) living hitter.

41qcb3psenl One more thing about the box… Below the list and the DiMaggio footnote, we’re told that the set is (for some reason) DISTRIBUTED by TOPPS IRELAND LTD. and PRINTED IN REP. OF IRELAND. Which I’ll leave here as a tidbit for the archivists among you.

Before letting you go, I do want to revisit a note from that SCD snippet. If you’ve got the stomach for it, check out those other boxed sets from the ‘80s, from places like K-Mart and Woolworth’s and Eckerd Drugs and Revco. The designs of those sets were all busy. And that’s putting it nicely. I would argue that the 1985 Circle K set is the only boxed set from the ’80s that’s not esthetically revolting.

One of the great things about collecting cards is that there is not really a premium for attractiveness. If you want to build a collection that simply looks good, you don’t have to spend much at all. And you could do a lot worse than 1985 Topps Baseball All Time Home Run Kings Exclusively From Circle K (33 Super Gloss Photo Cards).

Yeah, Topps Supers really are

clemente Except for a fairly brief period in my life, when it comes to baseball cards I’ve always been little more than an interested observer. Oh, I’ve purchased a pack (or two or three) of cards in most years since the early 1980s, I guess. But my “collection” is mundane and I spent only three or four years somewhat insanely buying box after box of cards (with money I didn’t really have) in the pursuit of a complete Topps set. Or Donruss or Fleer or even Score set (which should give you a pretty good idea of when I was in the grips of this particular mania).

But that’s a story for another day (if ever). The above is just a long-winded way of saying there’s a great deal about baseball/bubble-gum cards I’ve never learned, because I’ve never really invested much time or money in the pursuit. And so, somehow I didn’t discover until almost just this moment the splendid delights of Topps’s 1971 Supers.

Now, there are a couple of obvious reasons why I’d never even heard of the Supers, which were actually produced in 1971 and ’70. The first is that I wasn’t even in kindergarten yet; I don’t remember seeing any cards until a few years later. The second is that the Supers just weren’t popular (as you’d expect, considering their short run in the marketplace). Maybe more to the point, they’ve never become popular. There was never anyone saying, “Rob, you should covet these bits of cardboard.”

And yet, now I do covet them, and recently picked up a dozen or so on eBay (for cheap).

gibson The cards are massive: 16.4 square inches, compared to 8.75 square inches for a standard card of that (and today’s) era. But even that understates the difference. The Supers are all image, zero border. Meanwhile, the oft-beloved ’71 regular set, with its black borders, winds up with an image of just 6.2 square inches, meaning the Supers actually give you 264 percent more player per card.

How do you turn down 264 percent more major leaguer?

Well, I can guess why the kids in 1971 turned it down. For one thing, there were only 63 Super cards, compared to a whopping 752 in the regular Topps set. For another, a regular pack cost you a dime and got you eight cards; your same 10 cents got you only two Supers. And finally … kids in 1971 had small hands! Those regular cards probably seemed plenty big enough!

Come to think of it, kids today probably still have small hands. Baseball cards were designed for baseball fans with small hands and sharp eyes. But my hands are big and my eyes … well, I’m getting fitted for bifocals this week.

mccovey I can’t be eight years old again. What I am is fifty years old with a few of the enthusiasms, or at least the capacity for enthusiasm, of an eight-year-old. And I gotta tell you, right now there are few things that bring me more joy than holding 16.4 square inches of rigidly thick, vividly colored cardboard featuring Willie McCovey’s young, smiling, handsome, BIG face.