1961 Topps Stamps (Revisited)

In late October I posted my 1961 Topps Sticker Album, You can check it out at this link. I've been chipping away at these for a while. I hate the fact that I have to pay over a buck for some of them. Even a dollar seems high but whatcha gonna do?

I'm not bringing this up again to show off new stamps but rather to add some info to what I had previously written. It turns out that not all teams were created equal in the Topps Stamp world in 1961. I was wrong in that previous post when I noted that each team had twelve stamps issued. That is the case in the NL...8 teams, 12 stamps per team to fill ten album slots. So there were 96 NL stamps to fill the 80 spots on the NL pages.

But the Junior Circuit, with two clubs debuting in '61, gummed up the works. Over there 5 clubs got 12 player stamps...the Red Sox, White Sox, Tigers, Indians and the Twins who had just slid in from Washington. My Orioles got 11 stamps. More on that in a bit. The Yankees (no surprise) and the Athletics (big surprise!) had 13 stamps each. The two expansion clubs, the Angels and Senators (who replaced the departed for Minnesota version) got 7 stamps each. That's 111 stamps (or 112 if you count Al Kaline twice as he got a stamp in both colors).

The other aspect of the stamps that I hadn't given much thought to was the color. Obviously, there were brown and green stamps and it's easy to see that the league designation had nothing to do with which player was done in which color.

           But the two colors actually give us the notion that there were two 'series' of these. The Twins stamps can be used to show this. The green Twins have the team listed as Minn.-St Paul. The Twins with brown stamps carry the whole new name, Minnesota Twins. According to Wikipedia, the Twins' name was announced late in November of 1960. Too soon for the first series of stamps to carry it.

The 'green early/brown late' also tells us why the Orioles got jobbed by having only 11 and the perennial doormat and unofficial Yankee farm club Athletics had 13. In January of 1961, those two clubs pulled off an eight-player trade. Whitey Herzog, already a green A's stamp guy, went as part of the deal to the Orioles. Heading the other way was outfielder Bob Boyd who appears on a brown stamp as an Athletic. It would make sense that the deal was too late for Topps to change Herzog's stamp but they were able to show Boyd as a member of the A's. Boyd was supposed to be the Orioles 12th stamp.

Here they are in my album with future A's manager (and twice-an-Oriole) Dick Williams in between.

I figure the Yankees got an extra stamp because there was a slot to fill to complete the printing sheet and they are, after all, the Yankees.

I've 'completed' three team pages. And others are getting close. Below are a few of them. I have a brown Kaline stamp. Likely he replaced a player scheduled for the later series but was removed and so he has stamps in both colors.

The Athletics' page is full, all 10 slots covered. I actually have 11 different A's players but Bud Daley came too late to make the album. I haven't decided what to do with the 'latecomers'. I don't want to squeeze them onto the team pages. I may do what I figure I would have done as a kid, stick them on the inside front cover pages where there is some open area. We'll see.

The Braves were the first team to have a full complement of 10 stamps. I have Henry Aaron, Spahnie and Ed Mathews on the page. I would have held open a slot for any of those three had I needed to.

Over on the right side of the blog, I have added a page link for my 1961 Stamp build. Much of the info I typed here can be found there along with a checklist/needs list and more. I will not link to the Oldcardboard.com site which characterized these as 'bland' and praised to 1962 stamp set. That one was full of murky, out-of-focus pictures. Not even the fun team logo stamps that were included could make it as sweet as the 1961 bunch. Some folks just don't appreciate classic beauty.

1961 Topps Stamps...an Orioles panel!

When I found this on eBay I grabbed it right away. I'm a huge fan of the 1961 stamp inserts. I like them so much more than the color stamps Topps went to the next year or anything in the 'stamp' category that Topps came up with later.

I think I've linked this thread from Net54Baseball previously but it's a nice resource and look at the history of Topps' use of stamps as inserts and incentives. Of course the author describes these '61s as 'somewhat drab' and that's true but I love the detail of the frame, the use of the picture background and just the overall 'feel' of them.

The Gentile/Estrada panel instantly became my 'top of the line' example of these. Two Orioles on a sigle panel is something I've never owned until now. I'm still in the market for a nice '61 Album but they don't become available very often. One of these days I'll come across one.

1962 (and 1961) Topps Stamps

Nothing here is a new pick-up for me. In fact I've posted some of these before but I came across several panels of the '62 Topps Stamps 'hiding' in an envelope while I was searching for something else.

The stamps Topps included in their 1961 card packs were the first inserts I ever saw. I collected cards by the pack in 1960 but I don't think there were any 'bonuses' involved. Besides, most of the cards I bought in 1960 came from cello packs.

The ones issued in 1962 were a lot more colorful to be sure.

But the from 1961 are my favorites. I honestly don't recall anything about the '62s but I can remember putting the '61s in the album and showing them off on the bus on the way home from school.

I keep reading that the '61 stamps are coded by league and that's jut the case. Both AL an NL players can be found among the green and brown tints. Al Kaline's stamp was issued in both tints.

I've thought about putting the '61 set together and the cost wouldn't be very high but I just don't think I want to tackle another insert issue right now. I've bid on several of the albums, both empty and partly full of stamps through the years but my 'willing to pay' has never been high enough to grab one. Which may all be for the best.

Big E gifts from Mark Hoyle (and a bonus)

Friend of the everyone's blog Mark Hoyle sent along a couple of Elvin Hayes cards from the 1975/76 Topps hoops set. I don't think I had ever encountered cards from this year. Poking around eBay and other sites I found that Topps used color combos for each team that didn't match the teams colors which was pretty much their modus operandi for decades across all their sports issues.

Simple fronts with a pic, plain sans serif block fonts and the two piece stripe adornment. The backs with that green and purple/blue coloring are hard to read. 

That is Elvin's regular card and he shows up on the Bullets Team Leaders card as well. 

Interestingly the backs of the leaders cards list the Bullets' yearly leaders in four categories going back nine seasons to 1966/67.

As I looked at the cards from this set online I was struck by how many of the players were very familiar to me. I probably couldn't name more than 5 current NBA guys and I have no idea who won the championship last year but I remember Kevin Porter and Mike Newlin.

With the addition of these two Big E cards and the handful I've picked up in recent months I guess I am officially making Hayes a PC to chase. I have seven 'career era' cards in my cart at COMC and when I finish checklisting what I have I'll add a few more.

One other thing I found online was the set's team cards. They have the usual photos of the teams sitting and standing on benches. All except the Lakers. Have a look:

Yup, it's a 'floating heads' team card!!

That's Connie Hawkins on the upper left. And some guy named Abdul-Jabbar second from the right on the bottom row. I've heard of him, too.

He is the added gift I mentioned. It's a 1974 Topps Don Baylor stamp! I love oddball O's stuff like this. I have one or two of these from the Orioles team set but the Don Baylor is new to me. Thanks so much, Mark. You make the blogosphere a better place, even without a blog!

Topps Stamps from 1961 and 1962

  

The Topps Stamps were my favorite 'insert during my youthful collecting days. But nobody used that term in 1961. It was just 'things Topps put in packs'. Every time I see a '61 stamp like the Bob Boyd I associate it with riding home on the New Jersey Transit #13 Broad and getting off a block early to get a pack of cards. I liked the cards, but I was a couple of years from being a set collector and the stamps were my motivation for buying packs of the series they were included with.

The '61 stamps were much cooler than the '62s, at least to me. They were done in tones of green or brown and the '62s were in color but that was irrelevant. The scrolling design, the portrait designed to look like a real old timey postage stamp, that was the thing.

I posted the '59 Bob Boyd card on my other blog earlier this year but today I learned something new about him. He was the first African-American player to play alongside white player on any Houston sports team. It was 1954 and Boyd joined the Houston Buffs, a Cardinal farm club. He faced the struggles you'd expect in a southern city in that era. There is an interesting article right here about Boyd and the Buffs.

As I look at the '61 Boyd and the '62 panels below I think I know why I preferred the '61s. They were not chopped and cropped pics stuck on a colored background. Topps was so sloppy at that sort of thing.  Check out the Moon/Brooks Robinson panel as an example. The portraits on the '61s showed the player and the ballpark background generally. Much better.