Too Cool For Words..and an OPC Update

Thought I'd post a few fun cards from the 1970 Topps set...and these are Topps, not O-Pee-Chees!!

That Lowell Palmer card had been shown on plenty of blogs but it's always worth another look. There have been other players shown wearing shades on baseball cards (my fave is the '59 Topps Ryne Duren) but Palmer's opaque beauties made it look like he had just come from having his eyes dilated.

Palmer, of course, appeared on other cards wearing his sunglasses. The always entertaining Fleer Sticker Project has posted those and many other photos of the righthander. He has to be one of the most discussed career five game winners in history.

Willie McCovey is another guy (like Warren Spahn) who never seemed to have a lousy card. This 1970 is one of his best and IMHO one of the best cards in the set.

Nothing really remarkable about this Rich Morales card other than the great look it gives at one of my favorite uniforms, the White Sox' roadies from 1969/70.

I always get a little twinge of nostalgia when I see a card with the iconic Yankee Stadium scoreboard on it. Fritz Peterson may be the only reason I ever visit Facebook. He posts constantly and always has some fun stories and memories to share.

Finally this George Scott brought a smile to my face almost as big as his. I can imagine Boomer being interrupted by some goofing teammates around the batting cage while the Topps photographer waited for him to turn back to the job at hand.  I really like this one. And it's one of the few that I don't remember from back when this set was fresh.

And I'll wrap up with a word on my set building 'setback'. In my last post I discussed my discovery that some of the cards I purchased in the starter lot that launched this set build turned out to be O-Pee-Chees. The final tally ended up at 47(!!!), all numbered between 460 and 550.

 After a day or two of considering my options I decided that a 'hybrid' set, as several folks referred to it as, would be unacceptable. Just before typing this post I spent an hour on COMC picking up Topps versions of the OPCs. I paid between $0.41 and $1.25 for nearly all of them. The two Mets cards seemed to carry a 'NY tax'. The cheapest acceptable Al Weis card ran me almost $2 which upped my average cost. The only two cards which ran me more than that were Tony Oliva and Bob Gibson. The Topps Gibby I grabbed cost $5 and is actually an upgrade over the OPC one that came in the starter lot.

Bottom line is that I have solved my issue for under $45. Of course that's money I could have used to knock off several more high numbers but I'm considering it a lesson learned. And there's always a chance that I will offset my 'losses' by selling the OPCs and/or working something out with my dealer buddy who sold them to me in the first place. That'll be something that'll be discussed at next Saturday's hotel show. Stay tuned.

A $4 Hockey Hanger Re-pack

From time to time I pick up a hanging 100 card repack at Target. Sometimes I'm pretty happy with the results, thinking that if I had bought a new pack of something with that $4 I'd probably get seven cards I don't want. This isn't one of those times.

I went for the hockey repack the other day. I was suckered in by the Red Sullivan card that was among those showing. This is from something called In The Game with a 2005 copyright date. I love vintage hockey pictures. I wonder if when this was shot back around 1958 they just put up a screen across the ice and set up the photo shoot that way. Sullivan was about done when I was becoming a hockey fan in about 1960 and I have no memories of his playing days but I remember him as Ranger coach in the early '60s. The Rangers were pretty awful in those days, usually battling the Bruins to see which team would finish fifth, miss the playoffs, but relegate the other to sixth. Sullivan coached into the 1970 with Pittsburgh and Washington.

I bought this in the hopes of getting some Rangers and NHL stars knowing full well that they wouldn't be worth the cost of the cardboard they are printed on. I got a few of each. Wide variety of brands and years. When Brian Leetch was starring for the Rangers it wasn't as easy being a long distance fan as it is now. I had to rely on the Hockey News quite a bit.

Lemieux raising the Cup. Whoooopie.

Gretzky as a King.

Like the Gretzky O-Pee-Chee used a crap picture with a floating trophy for this Ray Borque card.

Mike Richter. One of my all time favorites. He was a big part of the Cup winning Rangers of 1995. I doubt I'll see another Cup in my lifetime.

Mike Gartner...

... and Dino Ciccerelli.

Here is an odd bunch of facts tying Gartner and Dino together:

According to Wikipedia...Despite his long impressive career, Gartner never won the Stanley Cup or played in the Cup Finals, never won an NHL award, and was never named to the postseason All-Star Team, being one of the few NHL players with this distinction to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Dino Ciccarelli has likewise never managed any of these accolades, although he made the Cup Finals in 1995.

One time Ranger back-up Corey Hirsch

James Patrick played for the Rangers for a long time. He's one of the best players ever to NOT make an NHL All Star Squad.

I was a goalie once upon a time. I like goalies.

Maaarrrty!! Maaarrty!!

When the Original Six became the Total 12 every kid I knew picked a Western team to root for when they were not playing the Rangers. Mine was the Minnesota North Stars. 

Some of the cards in the pack were nice just because they featured classic NHL team sweaters.

This is easily the ugliest card in the bunch. It hurt my eyes.

THE END

Fuji asked again... (and again!)

...and this time the question that Fuji asked was:

"What are your all-time favorite products to collect in each sport?"

By 'products' I assume that he is looking for a 'card set' so I'll stick to that. That makes a difference because my favorite things to collect are not necessarily cards.

Anyway in baseball my favorite product would be the Topps 1960 set. I have mentioned that and did so just the other day in a comment on Fuji's blog:

I loved that 1960 set. It was very colorful and I really dug the rookie cards and the manager cards. There was something about the backs that drew me in, too. The gold and white color scheme and the 'Season Highlights' were fascinating to me. I'll NEVER forget a kid at school whose parents had bought him a whole box of packs of the 1960s. I couldn't get over how lucky he was.

 In football it would be the 1990 Pro Set. Easy to buy by the pack at my local grocery, cheap so the kids at my school could buy 'em as well. I put together the set a card at a time. Had a lot of fun doing it. Plus, they are nice looking, at least I think so. This set got me back into collecting football.

Hockey? I collect that, too. But I don't have many cards. Most are vintage Rangers I've sniped off eBay here and there. No hockey cards survived my childhood. The only ones I even remember having were late 60's post expansion Topps cards. I do have the 77-78 WHA set. It's pretty crappy but I was a huge Aeros fan back then and the set was fun to put together a few months ago. 

Here is the Frank Mahovlich card from the Topps OPC* 68/69 set. Most gawdawful thing, isn't it? They stuck his head on another player's body and hoped no one would notice. 

edit...Fuji's next question was "What is the ugliest set you've ever seen?"  This is it. The Topps 68/69 Hockey. Poorly cropped posed shots, generic sketched backgrounds. It's worse than the 1990 Topps baseball set (although not by much).

*=thanks for the correction 1967ers