Yesterday. I went to a card show for the first time in I can't remember when. Since it has been a while, I had a little more money that I normally would. Plus, I took the 1956 Topps Mickey Mantle I won in a break a while back to trade up with. My main goal was to make progress on finishing my 1970 set (3 cards to go), 1968 set (6 cards to go), and 1965 set (167 cards to go.) By that measure I failed miserably. I managed to find one 1968 card I needed. It was a good one, though.
Still 5 to go, including the Nolan Ryan rookie card.
So, with that I recalibrated and decided to work on my 1960 set, where I was sitting at about 30% completion and my 1955 set, where I was about 75% complete. I did much better here. I managed to snag about 57 cards, mostly commons, from 1960.
This was about as close as I came to a star card with this show.
In a recent post, Night Owl lamented to disappearance of manager cards. I have to say that I agree. These manager cards from 1960 Topps are wonderful. I found four manager cards yesterday. Far and away, these are my favorites from the new cards I added to my set.
I also like these types of cards, which were common in the 1960s sets. While both Rocky Colavito and Tito Francona were good players, this card did not age nearly as well as that 1968 Super Stars card above.
Interestingly enough, this was one of only to Topps cards of Jim Baxes, the other being his rookie card in 1959. 1959 was Jim's only season in the majors. He performed poorly in AAA in 1960 and was out of organized baseball after only 21 games in 1961. Fun fact: Jim Baxes first major league home run was the first HR hit off of Bob Gibson. It was in Gibson's ML debut on April 15, 1959.
As far as 1955, I managed to find 18 cards I needed, which brought me down to only needing 32 more to finish the set. Most were commons from the second, high number series.
That Williams (along with '68 Super Stars above) were the major scores in exchange for the '56 Mantle. I could have gotten more money selling the Mantle on EBay. But, with all the Johnny-Come-Latelys in the hobby, all the reports of buyer fraud scared me off. This Ted is really nice. It is in way better condition than I would have acquired if I didn't have some high end trade material.
So, that is about it, other than this 1966 Curt Flood I found in a dollar box.
I haven't given up on my 1970 card back series of posts. I have just been fairly busy out in the real world and just haven't had the energy to sit down and work on the next installment. It is coming, I just don't know when.
What I am listening to: Follow You Like Smoke by Elizabeth Cook
Collecting trading cards would seem to be a simple, easy to understand hobby. When I first got into it, back in late 2010, with my Paul Blair player collection, I certainly would have thought so. I did not know of such things as relic cards, sticker autos, short prints and serialized cards. I was quite the naïf. In the near decade since, my collecting has taken me in multiple directions: set building, set building for sports I don't even follow, autographed cards, even non-sport tobacco cards.
But, still at the center is that Paul Blair player collection. It has been somewhat stagnant these last few years, but occasionally something gets added. In my COVID19 quarantine, I have spent more time at Net54Baseball and came across a long thread of Orioles and Brooks Robinson collectors and caught a glimpse of some Blair memorabilia. I introduced myself and one thing led to another and a trade deal was closed. In exchange for one of my 1993 Nabisco Blair cards, I got a handful of team issued Paul Blair postcards (which are still in transit) and this:
I didn't get the 1976 Topps card in the trade, I only included it here to give a sense of the size of the item above it. What is it, you are probably asking? It is a 1976 English's Chicken lid. You are probably wondering if that is really a lid to a bucket of chicken? If you are, you would be correct.
My God! What have I done?
If you had told me in 2010 that I would have added a lid to a cardboard bucket of fried chicken to my collection I would have thought you were crazy. But, here we are. I have a 44 year old chicken bucket lid and I am excited beyond belief. I have occasionally searched for one of these; always unsuccessfully. To have it fall into my lap like this is a nice bit of serendipity. I thought I might explain about English's, but I found out that the late, great, Bob Lemke had beat me to the punch. You can read his blog post here. And the collector he got his information from? The same person I traded with! Small world.
Hopefully, the post cards will be here by the weekend, so I can show them off.
What I am listening to: A Tout Le Monde by Megadeth (yes, I probably should have posted "Once in a Lifetime," but I am in the middle of a thrash metal phase, so you get this.
I'm still mostly on the sidelines waiting for COVID-19 to abate and the oil & gas industry to pull out of it's tailspin. But, I did manage to add a couple new things to my Paul Blair player collection.
As you can see this is the O-Pee-Chee version of his 1968 card. With this, I have ten of the eleven OPC Blair cards. The only one I lack now is card number 153 from 1967, which is the World Series Game #3 card - Blair's Homer Defeats L.A. There is another such card he appears on, 1971 Topps/OPC #195, the AL playoffs game 1 card. However, while he appears on the card, he is not the subject, which is Boog Powell. Blair is just congratulating Powell after he hit a home run. So, I'm not going to consider that part of the PC.
This is a team issued photo from 1975. I know have 4 team issued photo cards. In addition to this one, I believe I have 1969, 1971, and 1973. There isn't a lot of good resources out there for these types of issues, but there are a number of Orioles team collectors on net54. I'm hoping they can help me know definitively which years they are.
Added in edit: I am told by a long time Orioles collector that the photo was actually issued by the team in 1973-1974.
What I am listening to: Rock Me Baby by B.B. King, Susan Tedeschi, and Derek Trucks
Okay, I really need to get back to this. I laid out the skeleton of this post about two weeks ago, but have been putting off doin the research and write-up. So, without much further ado, here is part 2 of my examination of random, interesting card back cartoons from 1970 Topps.
David Nelson (#112) - Dave's hobby is saving clippings of his favorite athletes
I really didn't find much else about this other than Nelson was born at Fort Sill, Oklahoma (about an hour and a half drive from my home here) and his favorite athletes growing up were Oscar Robertson and Jackie Robinson.
Sparky Lyle (#116) - Sparky once struck out 31 men in a 17 inning game
This feat was accomplished in American Legion ball in his hometown of DuBois, PA and it was the thing that caught the attention of a major league scout, George Staller of the Baltimore Orioles, who signed him to a contract. It should be noted that Sparky only pitched in 14 of those 17 innings and manned frist base the other three, There wasn't much primary source information I could find. The local newspaper, The Courier Express, is indexed at newspapers.com, but there is a complete gap in the records between 1946 and 1969. By 1969, he was on his third major leagues season with the Red Sox.
Joe Coleman (#127) - Joe has particular success vs. the White Sox
This was a hard one. Not because of a lack of information, but because of too much information. I had a hard time deciding how to test this one. It is probably the sole reason that it has been over two weeks since my previous post on this topic. Finally, I just had to fish or cut bait. I have a good idea why this was the cartoon caption. Prior to 1970, Coleman had a 3-1 record in in 8 starts and one relief appearance against the White Sox, with all three wins being complete games. However, that is where it breaks down.
So, I downloaded his entire career from Baseball Reference and did some analysis of his pre-1970 statistics. Using the traditional pitching statistic of ERA, I calculated Coleman's results for each team and overall, then sorted.
So, you can see that Coleman's ERA is particularly poor against Chicago; worse even than his overall performance. Now, I know that ERA can be affected by factors outside the players control, so I thought I would look at the modern Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP). However, FIP is adjusted by a yearly league factor and I quickly decided I didn't want to put *that* much effort into this, so I backed off to using WHIP (Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched.)
As you can see, Coleman was better against the White Sox than his overall average against the league. However, it was only marginally better than average and certainly worse than his performance against a number of other teams. So, my last effort to understand this was to look at Win Percentage Added (WPA.) I understand WPA conceptually, though I don't know how it is calculated. In general it looks at an individual players contribution to a game. A positive number means they contributed towards a win (even though the game result may not have been a win.)A negative number means they were a negative influence on the game outcome. In order to control for the fact that the amount of playing time versus each team. I looked at average WPA per appearance.
So, my impression is that, overall, Coleman was a neutral contributor to the Senators. Interestingly, based on this metric, he wasn't particularly successful against the White Sox. In fact, it was probably more accurate to say (accounting for all three above metrics) that he has particular success against the Angels, Athletics, and Tigers.
Richie Scheinblum (#161) - Richie's 1st homer in pro ball was a grand slam in the 13th inning
Scheinblum first pro homerun was with the Burlington Indians of the A level Carolina League in 1964. The homerun referenced was in a game on June 14 against the Greensboro Yankees. It was hit off of pitcher Joe Riccardo. Riccardo never made it out of A ball, with the 1965 season being his last.
What I am Listening to: Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohn
In my last post, I featured the 1976 Topps Record Breaker subset, I was surprised (not surprised) to find that Night Owl also had featured them in the past. His particular focus was on the great information on the back of the cards. That got me to thinking. I have to admit that I don't pay enough attention to the card backs as I should. At least partially due to the fact that they are often very hard to read, combining small print and colors that don't necessarily contrast well.
1970 Topps is different, though. My old eyes can actually read it well with the high contrast colors. So, a couple Saturdays ago, while waiting for the sun come out and the ambition to get outside and do yard work to strike me, I paged through my 1970 binder backwards. As I did so, I tossed around ideas for posts around the card backs. My genius (not genius) idea was to identify cards backs with interesting or odd cartoons and see if I can find any information on the internet that supports the cartoon.
So, without further ado, here is the first 4:
Tito Fuentes (#42) - Tito's hobby is playing ping-pong
I've not had much luck finding anything about Fuentes table tennis hobby. It seems as if the only relevant link goes to a post about this card on the defunct "Stats on the Back" blog from May of 2009.
I'm not off to an auspicious start here, am I?
Paul Casanova (#84) - In 1961, Paul played for the Indianapolis Clowns
After a short, and unspectacular, 1960 in the Indians chain that saw Casanova appear in 10 games and rack up 9 plate appearances for Class C Minot, he was released. He did spend 1961 with the erstwhile Negro League Indianapolis Clowns, by then a barnstorming team. While he did come to the attention of some MLB scouts, he left baseball behind at the end of the season to pursue a more remunerative career in construction. However, a couple years later, a scout for the Washington Senators brought Casanova into training camp. In 1965, after two years in the minors, Casanova was called up and embarked on a 10 year career as a catcher for Washington and, later, the Atlanta Braves.
Juan Rios (#89) - Juan has amazing speed
There isn't any metric that I am aware of that objectively measures speed, though I am not, by any means, a sabermetric guru. So, I made my own up: stolen bases divided by total bases. It's not perfect, but I also didn't want to spend any more time on it. I also didn't do exhaustive research on modern era performance, but did look at the career stolen base leaders, under the assumption that they, at some level, set a benchmark for speed. Among those, I found Vince Coleman at 40.3% (752 SB and 1863 TB), Rickey Henderson at 30.6%, Maury Wills at 23.3%, Lou Brock at 22.1%, and Tim Raines at 21.4%. So, let's set 20% as the benchmark.
So, how did Rios do? Difficult to say. By the time this card came out, he had played his last MLB game. In a major league career spanning 87 games and 208 plate appearances, he had a total of 1 stolen base and 54 total bases, for a miserly 1.8%. In 8 minor league seasons, he swiped 49 bases and tallied 706 total bases, for a 6.9%. So, Rios may have had blazing speed, but it didn't translate on the base paths.
George Culver (#92) - George likes to wear "Mod" style clothes
I didn't manage to locate any pictures of Culver in his finest, but I did find some wonderful text from an article written by Bob Broeg in the St.Louis Post Dispatch about him:
“Culver is a good-looking, green-eyed guy who resembles his idol, golf’s dashing Doug Sanders, in physical appearance and sartorial splendor,” Bob Broeg of the Post-Dispatch observed."
On the day they met, Broeg reported, Culver was wearing “white shoes, cream-colored trousers and a brilliant orange sweater.”
Culver told Broeg he liked to wear purple or pink. “I know those colors aren’t very manly,” Culver said, “but they’re beautiful.”
According to the Bakersfield newspaper, Culver had a “purple Edwardian-style suit,” but he said, “I don’t wear that purple outfit anymore. I favor all-white suits now.”
Culver said he had 150 pairs of slacks and 50 Banlon shirts. “I’d rather spend 50 bucks on clothes than on a date,” he told Broeg.
Good stuff.
Anyways, that is it for now. It was fun researching this, so hopefully I'll keep the series going on the regular.
What I am listening to: Here and Now by Letters to Cleo
I don't know about you, but I'm struggling right now. It isn't so much the working from home. I did that for years on a previous job. I think it is the non-stop grim news. I know logically that things are going to get worse before they get better. But, there is something about the situation that makes it hard to not live in the moment.
Though I hate the term, I am trying to exercise some level of self-care. I've stopped drinking alcohol as it degrades the quality of my sleep and, consequently, I tend to be distracted and more susceptible to negativity the next day. I'm still not eating as healthy as I should, but I am trying. The convenience store/gas station/bait shop across the street added a kitchen, so it is hard to not get junk for lunch a couple days a week. Though, to be fair, their Friday fried catfish special lunch is quite excellent.
Since I've cut out hobby spending, I am going to try to spend more time appreciating what is already in my collection. The other day, I just pulled a random binder off my shelf. It was 1976 Topps and the first 6 cards of the set memorialized the record breakers from the previous season. It made me wonder how many of these records still stand. Someone else may have done this, but I am not going to look. I need something to do and this is as good as anything.
Hank Aaron is still the all-time career RBI leader, though he tacked another 35 on to the total in 1976, his final season. I actually am surprised by this. I would have though Barry Bonds would have passed him, but he is actually 301 behind Hammerin' Hank. Speaking of the Bonds family...
It is hard to find statistics on lead off home runs. I am sure there is a way to figure it out in Baseball Reference, but I haven't figured it out. All I can determine is that the all time leadoff homer hitter is Rickey Henderson with 81, followed by Alfonso Soriano with 54 and Craig Biggio with 53. Ian Kinsler is 4th with 48. As near as I can tell, Bonds ended his career with 34. Whether there is anyone between him and Kinsler is unknown to me.
Bobby Bonds is the all-time 30-30 Club co-champion, retiring with 5 such seasons. Who also has five 30-30 seasons? His son Barry Bonds. Keeping it in the family!
Mickey Lolich, currently 20th on the all-time strikeout leaders list, is now only 4th in that category amongst lefthanders. He has been surpassed by Randy Johnson (4875), Steve Carlton (4136), and the recently retired CC Sabathia (3093.)
Lopes no long holds this record. Vince Coleman had 50 in the 1988 and 1989 seasons, Ichiro had 45 between 2006 and 2007, Tim Raines swiped 40 in a row successfully over a three season span (1993-1995), and Jimmy Rollins had 39 successful steals in a row between 2007 and 2008.
Tom Terrific still holds this record. He even managed to extend it to 9 seasons and came 4 strikeouts short of a tenth. Even Nolan Ryan, who had fifteen 200+ K seasons in his career, never managed to string together more than 5 in a row, though he did it twice including once between his age 40 and 44 seasons.
Stennett still holds this record, though he really is tied for it with Wilbert Robinson who did it on June 10, 1892.
What I am listening to: Dig a Hole by Marcel Botempi
