Dexter Press Andy Etchebarren.

A year ago I was in the process of pulling things from old binders, especially those that had some ancient PVC-laden 2 & 4 pocket sheets that held many of my postcards and 5x7's. This post from last April documented that only one item had been damaged by those nasty pages, an Andy Etchebarren Dexter Press postcard. I love all the Dexter Press items. I think they are beautiful and unique. So I was determined to find a replacement for my Etchbarren postcard.

I have a saved search on eBay for 'Dexter Etchebarren' forgetting that he also had a 5 x 7 photo issued. Early one morning before I had my coffee I got the email alert that there was an Etchebarren Dexter Press item available so I immediately put in a bid. I won and was pretty happy until the envelope arrived and I realized that I had bid on a signed 5 x 7 rather than the postcard. I already had a 5 x 7.

Oh well, at 6 bucks it was far from being my most costly eBay mistake. And then I saw a Certificate of Authenticity in the envelope and looked again at the pic and saw it was signed.

Now I'm as skeptical as the next guy about COA's but hey, who the hell would bother faking an Andy Etchebarren signature? So there you go. It turned out to be not as bad of a screw-up as I thought it was. But I still need to remember that bidding before I get off the edge of the bed is usually a mistake.  

If you didn't click the first link here is the item I am actually trying to replace:

Spring Leftovers

The big 5x7 Dexter Press photos are among my favorite memorabilia items. I love the clear colorful shots of my Orioles taken during the franchise's glory days of the late 60's. OK...so '67 and '68 were not so good but you get the idea.

Each shot was taken in the exact same spot on their spring diamond in Miami. I've shown most of them but I don't think I ever posted these two. 

Andy Etchebarren played on four Orioles World Series clubs. He won two rings. He was an All Star in 1966 and 1967, the two years he spent as the nearly full time starter. For the rest of his time with the Birds he was a platoon catcher. Etch was a coach and manager, primarily in the minors until he retired a couple of seasons back.

Russ Snyder played seven seasons with the Orioles, mostly as a starting outfielder. He hit .280 during his stint in Charm City. He was no All Star but he was a solid dependable player.

Random Cards, Posted Randomly

OK, I know every blogger has done this. I had nothing new to scan and post. I was just staring at the keyboard. So I figured I'd just pull out a stack of cards from one of the boxes in the card closet and see what I got. The box I grabbed was a Stadium Club box and I thought it would be loaded with just Stadium Club cards but there was some other stuff in there.

First up... Hank Aaron 'Starliner' sticker. Basically an unauthorized (I assume) item that used Dexter Press photos printed on adhesive paper. I have a bunch of these and posted about them here in another Random Crap post. Starliner stickers are about as random as crap can get I suppose. I don't know why the Hammer's sticker was in a box by itself.

I really liked the Stadium Card sets when they first started appearing. Nice pictures on shiny borderless cards with a touch of gold.

Cecil Fielder and Jose Canseco were really hot stuff in 1991.

The box Bipped me!! Of the stack I pulled out of it the only dupes were Bip Roberts. As Mel Allen would say..'How about that!"

Padres Fleer Sticker. I thought the Swinging Friar was a neat team logo. I used to keep all my cards in a big file cabinet in the garage. I decorated it with Fleer stickers. Somehow this one escaped that fate.

1993 Tom Glavine SC Members Choice. Speaking of choices... why did baseball players choose to wear their caps like that? You could land a small helicopter on that baby.

Sam Militello '93 SC. Why post Sam Militello and not one of the other three or four Hall of Famers in my stack? Because his cousin taught 4th grade at my school for about five years. She was infinitely more attractive than her cousin. Infinitely, if you catch my drift.

Stadium Club always seemed to be overloaded with Rickey Henderson cards so I'm not surprised that there were two in the 25ish card stack of stuff I pulled from the box. 

I thought my scanner only hated the current Topps issues. I see that it chopped off some of this 1982 Ken Singleton card just like it does with the shiny white bordered new ones. 

Back in the 80s I'd buy 500 count boxes of Orioles team set cards of all three cards makers. I'd get 18 or twenty of every card and I'd put the 'stars' in sheets in binders. Which means that I'd have five or six or eight sheets of guys like Singleton, Scott McGregor and Al Bumbry (along with the 'real' stars like Jim Palmer and Eddie Murray) for every year of the junk wax era.

Plus I'd buy up the Orioles in the Traded sets when my LCS owner friends would break down cases. I was able to accumulate about 40 or 50 Cal Ripken rookies and Traded set first year cards at a cost of about a dime a piece. I sold most of them them off at a card show about ten years later when I had gone back to college and they paid for about a years worth of my two year stint at getting my teaching degree.

I still have the other 'stars' though. So if you are in the market for 35 or 40 1983 assorted Mike Boddicker cards, hit me up.

Lucky Me... More Orioles Dexter Press

I managed to extract the last of my Orioles Dexter Press postcards from their binder page today. It was a harrowing experience. But I took it slow and the cards came out fine. The glossy finish has reacted with the vinyl pages over the years it seems because the fronts are somewhat sticky and I had a hard time lifting them off the scanner platen. 

The Mark Belanger card is the only one that features an Oriole in a road uniform. This shot resembles those used in the large 5 x 7 Dexter Press cards that I've posted previously. Palm trees=spring training.

Tom Phoebus had his picture taken a bit closer to game time than most of the others. The crowd looks to be filing into the bleachers.

Here is the back of the Davey Johnson card. Here, from the text on the back, is a trivia question that'll win you a beer next time you're in a bar: Dave Johnson is the last player to get a hit off Sandy Koufax. He singled off Koufax in the sixth inning of Game Two of the 1966 World Series. That was last inning Koufax pitched before he retired.

Johnson has always been one of my favorite baseball people. His firing by by Peter Angelos in 1997 was the final straw leading to my break from baseball. Davey began his association with the game by serving as the Washington Senators' batboy during spring training in 1953. It's kind of neat that he wrapped up his career as manager of the Washington Nationals last year.

More Dave Johnson facts: He received a math degree from Trinity University in San Antonio, was at the forefront of the game's computer revolution, he can speak Japanese, has a pilot's and real estate license and taught scuba diving. He won the Manager of the Year award in each league and 14 of 17 teams he managed with the Mets, Reds, Orioles, Dodgers and Nationals finished either first or second. I think he belongs in the Hall of Fame as a manager but it'll be tough sledding. 

The next four-pocket sheet in the binder contained these postcard sized photocards. These unauthorized 1972 issues were distributed in Canada, or at least were manufactured there by Pro Star Promotions. They have a matte finish and they slid out of the binder page without a problem. Further proof that the gloss on the Dexters is behind the problems I had.

Orioles Dexter Press Postcards.... and a lesson learned.

Lately I've been pulling more and more items from my 'hobby closet'. Lots of stuff I have not touched literally for decades. I had my Dexter Press Orioles near the top of a box because I had scanned and blogged a few some months back.

These are just beautiful items. Rich in color and featuring an easily recognizable Memorial Stadium as a backdrop (at least for most of them). And the set comes from the best days of the Orioles franchise. If you look to the right of Moe Drabowsky you can even see the famous white houses that sat out behind the hedges on 36th. When I went to Baltimore to see the O's my uncle usually got seats in the upper deck behind 3rd but those wooden bleachers in left field was where I sat for the '69 Playoff games and the '83 World Series. Wonderful memories for me.

But back when I stored these in binders the four pocket pages I used contained PVC. They pretty much all did back them. Ultra Pro pages were not widely used until later. While I put most of my cards in quality sheets some things remained in the cheap ones and these postcards were in that group. I have managed to remove the bulk of this set from the crappy four pockets without much more damage than a loss of gloss. But the Andy Etchebarren postcard was a victim of too much PVC and not enough TLC while removing it. That's a nice rip in the upper part of the card as you can see.

I don't have many regrets concerning the hobby and how I have collected stuff but not heeding the warnings about cheap vinyl sheets is one of them.

1968 Dexter Press 'Postcards'

I am a huge fan of these Dexter Press postcards which were issued in 1968. I have a dozen different Orioles in my collection. I believe those 12 comprise the complete team set. According to the checklist on the Trading Card Database there were 77 cards issued representing 12 different teams. Some teams, like the Orioles and Giants had 12 different players included. Others have as few as one e.g. Bill Freehan is the only Tiger in the group. Some of the backs of the cards contained less detailed write-ups than those of the Orioles' cards. Many of the cards feature Spring Training photos.

There are cards issued for other years credited to Dexter Press featuring backs in a couple of different formats but most I've seen use the style of this Don Buford back as posted below. EDIT: I just re-read the Buford data. It states that Buford worked in the Sears management training program the previous winter. Hard to envision that happening today.

One thing I like about these is the great views of old Memorial Stadium in the backgrounds. Those old wooden bench seats upstairs? Oh, how I remember those!

The Brooks Robinson card is signed but the autograph stayed in the binder pocket unfortunately. I've had these stored in the old PVC laden pre-Ultra Pro plastic pages for many years and they took some work getting out without damage.

These are in standard postcard size but Dexter Press also did large 5x7 pictures which were seen previously on this blog. The photos from those were apparently pirated for what were called Starline stickers. I have no evidence of whether these Starlines were authorized or not but the lack of any photo credits, etc. make he think they are not. The photos on those larger formatted pictures, at least those of the Orioles, show up on Atlantic gas station contest cards. I posted some of those here.

Out of curiosity I did a little research into the Dexter Press name and came across this interesting thread on a World's Fair nostalgia forum of all places. It seems that Dexter Press did a lot more than baseball products and it also seems the company folded and sold off it's name and files to a company in Missouri that, among other things, published church bulletins.

Random 80's Crap from my Hobby Closet, Pt.1

Recently I pulled a random box out of my 'hobby closet' and opened it just for the hell of it. I have about a dozen of these boxes, most are the document storage-type things and I haven't looked at them in years. Inside the one I chose I found all sorts of junk I had picked up in the 80's. There is no logic to any of it. I bought whatever struck my fancy back in those days and I saved everything.

I found small boxed sets that I had pulled the Orioles out of, commercially produced and team issued postcards, odd ball TCMA trash, unlicensed photo cards, pocket schedules, ticket stubs and much more. While I'm off visiting New York (just like I pictured it) I thought I'd put up a few posts showing the 'stuff' I once valued so highly.

So here we go.....

I found a small stash of these stickers. The photos are the same as the 1967 Dexter Press issue Coca Cola premiums, spring training shots, but these are smaller, on very thin paper, and instead of a short bio the back can be peeled off. I'm not a Joe Morgan fan at all but I love the 'Shooting Star' uni the Astros wore in that era. It was what they were wearing when I first moved to Houston in '67.

Each of the ones I have and every Dexter Press card I own is a portrait shot very similar to these. Here is The Rock. Now he's a player I really liked back in the day. And that Indians vest jersey with the red sleeved undershirts? Dyn-o-mite!

And Yaz...

Here is a shot of the back.

 I really didn't think much of them until I pulled out an actual Brooks Robinson Dexter Press. First the Brooks Robinson 'sticker'....

And then the 5x7 Dexter Press...

Side by side the quality of the image is much better, much clearer on the original, and all-in-all it's a much higher quality piece. These 'stickers' turned out to be something called 'Starliner stickers' and they were put out in 1983. I tend to think they were not a legit product and were made by someone who merely ripped off the pictures used by Dexter Press. The name comes from the Starliner adhesive paper that they are printed on. At least that's how I have understood it.

If you are interested the Fleer Sticker Project blog has a great in depth article that will tell you more than you could possibly want to know.

btw... these were the days when players used Spring Training to get into shape. From the fit of that jersey it looks like my man Brooksie had some work to do!!