Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Bob Lemke, editor of the vintage card sections of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, makes a hobby of creating custom vintage sports cards. Pictured is one of his latest creations, a 1968 Topps Brian Piccolo card. Though Piccolo started with the Bears in 1965, the card companies did not print a card of him until 1969, when Topps issued his rookie card and included him on a 4-in-1 stamp card. (Unfortunately, on both cards Topps misspelled Piccolo’s name “Bryon.”)

I like the image Bob chose for this card; it’s the helmet-in-hands pose I described earlier this week. Bob has also created a 1966 Philadelphia Piccolo card using a different image.

For more of Bob’s creations, all in the style of 1955 Topps All-Americans, check out his PhotoBucket gallery. There’s even one of Bluto Blutarsky!

Today I put together another “virtual uncut sheet” page, this time for 1961 Fleer second series sheets. The 1961 Fleer second series contains cards from the eight AFL teams of the time, including rookie cards of Jim Otto and Don Maynard. It also includes one card with a mistaken identity.

While the price guides do not designate any 1961 Fleer cards as short prints, it is clear that some cards are much scarcer than others in high grade. Uncut sheets can show why some cards are tougher than others.

Head-and-shoulder portraits, fake action shots, and sideline photos are all great, but my favorite pose on a football card is where the player is holding his helmet with both hands, as if he is going to put it on. I like seeing helmets on vintage cards, but if the player is wearing his helmet, it usually makes for a poor photo.

The helmet-in-hands pose appears to have been used mostly in the 1960′s. That was after facemasks got substantial enough to obscure the players’ faces, but it was before Topps started airbrushing logos away in the 1970′s. The photographers for some teams in particular favored the pose: it is used for several of the 1963 Topps Packers cards, for instance, and for most of their 1969 Topps cards.

Below are a few examples: 1968 Topps Jerry Logan, 1966 Philadelphia Irv Cross, 1964 Philadelphia Guy Reese, 1969 Topps Alex Karras, 1963 Topps Lou Michaels, and 1967 Philadelphia Bob Hayes. For more, see a thread on the topic that I started on the Collector’s Universe message boards. I posted a bunch of pictures there before the discussion, um, went south.

Earlier this week, via the Remember the Rams blog, I came across the Eddie Meador Hall of Fame Nomination site. The site is well-done and thorough–did you know that he worked in an Arkansas pickle plant during college?–and it’s clear that his friends and family are very devoted to him.

Meador played mostly before my time, and until I read his Awards and Statistics page, I didn’t know how good he had been. Meador’s rookie card, a 1963 Topps, is relatively easy to find, and it is inexpensive for a rookie card of a hall-of-fame candidate. Meador also had three cards issued before his rookie card: 1959 Bell Brand, 1960 Bell Brand, and 1962 Post Cereal, all of which are challenging to find. I can’t think of another other player with three “pre-rookie” cards, so if he does make the hall-of-fame, I’ll have to add a new section to my pre-rookie card page.

Altogether, Meador appeared on at least eleven cards, a large number for a defensive player in the 1960′s. The card pictured here is his 1960 Bell Brand Potato Chips card.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Ed Meador cards, 1960 Bell Brand Rams
• Search eBay for: Ed Meador cards, 1960 Bell Brand Rams

Yesterday’s project was to create a page on Facebook for Nearmint’s Football Cards. If you’re a Facebook member, become a fan!

So far the page has links to familiar places. Facebook is designed to be interactive, though, so if you have interesting links or pictures or videos related to the hobby, please post them.

In previous posts and in some of my uncut sheet pages, I’ve noted bits of conventional wisdom that the price guides employ that don’t hold up in practice. For example, the price guides assign a premium to the first and last cards in a set, because presumably those cards got more wear and tear from being on the top and bottom of kids’ stacks. In practice, I don’t find the first and last cards of a set to be scarcer in high grade than the rest, unless they happened to be on the corner of the sheet before it was cut into individual cards. See my 1959 virtual uncut sheet page for some discussion on this.

The guides sometimes also price short prints much higher than they should. See the 1963 Fleer uncut sheet page for examples of this. They even get entire series wrong. For example, the guides price 1961 Fleer and 1961 Topps second series football cards higher than first series cards, but the second series cards in both sets are actually more plentiful.

On the other hand, we can see that a card’s position on a sheet often affects its availability in high grade. Apparently, cards on the corners and edges of the uncut sheets were often damaged in printing and processing. The price guides don’t appear to acknowledge this, even when the guide has an accompanying population report showing that some cards are much scarcer than others.

What other factors affect a card’s value that the price guides don’t consider? The player’s team comes to mind. I find that Packers, Raiders, and Cowboys cards in general will fetch more than vintage cards from the other teams. I assume that this is because these teams have more of a national following: the Packers’ long tradition, the Raiders’ bad-boy image, and the Cowboys’ “America’s Team” label have made them popular outside their regions. Their success in the 1960′s and 1970′s, when a lot of vintage cards were printed, made their players more recognizable, as well.

Conversely, vintage cards from some teams sell poorly compared to others, and thus do not command as high a price. Cards of Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals, for example, don’t sell as well as cards from other teams. Except for the Oilers’ early AFL days, these teams had limited success in the 60′s and 70′s, and both teams have moved since their vintage cards were printed.

The price guides assign these cards the same value. I’ll take the Jeter.

A lot of people treat their price guide as Gospel, as if the guide should dictate card values, rather than the other way around. In reality, the price guides are very rough: they assign value to factors they shouldn’t, they don’t acknowledge factors they should, and they don’t keep up with the market–even after years. Sure, consult your price guide when buying, but don’t use it as your only source when determining value.

eBay is one place to consult when estimating a card’s current value. You need to look at completed auctions, though, not current ones. See my page on sports card values for instructions on finding completed eBay auctions for your cards.

On the topic of uncut sheets, I never realized that there were multiple 1962 Post football cards on each cereal box. Yesterday I came across a full back panel on the Vintage Classics page of TheCowboysGuide.com. It makes sense that each box had several cards on it: with 200 cards in the set, one card per box would have required a kid to eat an awful lot of cereal!

Steve Liskey, the owner of the site, points out that some cards could be less common because they were on unpopular cereal. That makes sense: maybe the short prints, like Jim Johnson’s pre-rookie card, were on the back of Grape Nuts boxes?

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1962 Post Cereal
• Search eBay for: 1962 Post Cereal

Today I put together another “virtual uncut sheet” page, this time for 1963 Fleer cards. More reasons to be skeptical of your price guide!

A while back, a visitor to the Vintage Football Card Gallery emailed to say that Bill Wade’s photo on his 1960 Topps card is reversed. I hadn’t noticed, but it appears he was right. In his words:

1. He is gripping the football strings with the fingers of his left hand – but Wade threw right-handed. …….. and 2. the top of Wade’s Ram jersey number, 9, is ‘flipped’.

If you compare this card to the rest of Wade’s cards, it’s easy to see that the image is backward.

Wade played thirteen years with the Rams and Bears, from 1954 to 1966. His rookie card is actually from his college days: a 1951 Topps Magic card printed while he was still at Vanderbilt.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Bill Wade, 1960 Topps, 1951 Topps Magic
• Search eBay for: Bill Wade, 1960 Topps, 1951 Topps Magic

I spotted an uncut sheet of 1970 Topps Super cards on eBay this week, so I thought I’d create a virtual uncut sheet for that set. My previous virtual uncut sheets have been 1959 Topps and 1960 Fleer.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the cards in this set have attractive fronts and ugly backs. In addition to the photo, each card features the player’s name in script that looks like a signature. It’s not a signature, though: the script is the same on all of the cards. While 1970 Topps Super baseball cards have facsimiles of the players’ actual signatures, the football cards got short shrift.