Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

A common error on vintage football cards was spelling a player’s name Charlie when he spelled it Charley, or spelling it Charley when he spelled it Charlie. I don’t know how the guys named Charles chose which spelling to use, but it appears that the card companies just flipped a coin. And as you can see on the back of the 1966 Philadelphia Charley Taylor card shown here, sometimes they used both!

My Beckett catalog identifies most cards with errors, including Charlie/Charley errors. Unfortunately, it appears that Beckett got some wrong, too. (My catalog is from 2005, but I’ll bet this hasn’t changed.) Charley Johnson’s name, it says, is spelled Charlie, and Charlie King’s name, it says, is spelled Charley. The players’ own signatures, though, show that my Beckett is wrong. Shown here is Charley Johnson’s autograph on a 1967 Philadelphia card and Charlie King’s fascimile signature on his 1969 Tresler Comet Bengals card.

With my Beckett proving unreliable, I turned instead to pro-football-reference.com to help with the Charlie/Charley discrepancies. That site had both Johnson and King correct, and I have found it reliable for all other information, as well.

Following are links to the Charlie/Charley misspellings I have identified in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. It is possible that I missed some, so if you find another, leave a comment or drop me a line.

• Charlies misspelled Charley
• Charleys (and a Charle) misspelled Charlie

A couple of months ago I wrote about the white footballs you sometimes see on old Bowman cards. Naturally, after writing that post, I started noticing more and more white footballs. Here are a few that I came across while adding 1950′s cards to my sales site the last couple of days: 1953 Bowman Emlen Tunnell, 1954 Bowman Emlen Tunnell (apparently from the same photo session as 1953), 1955 Bowman Tom Fears, 1956 Topps Adrian Burk, and 1957 Lenny Moore.

The 1954 Tunnell card is the corrected version, with two L’s in his last name. The second L looks as if it’s been penciled in: it’s a bit fainter and wider than the first L, and the spacing isn’t quite right. I don’t know anything about printing, but it looks like someone improvised to fix the spelling error.

It appears that Adrian Burk was another jumping quarterback, or at least he’s up on his tip-toes.

In 1960, card companies started inserting little extras into packs of football cards: stickers, posters, tattoos, decals, punch-outs, and so on. The wrappers for the packs showed what insert was inside, as you can see on the wrapper page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Not surprisingly, card collectors collect the inserts as well as the cards. (We collect the wrappers, too, of course–no part of the pack is wasted!) Most of the inserts, because they invited licking and sticking and pinning up and punching out, are harder to find than the regular cards. Some of them, such as 1968 Topps Stand Ups and 1970 Super Glossies, in my opinion are nicer than the regular cards.

Some of the inserts I know nothing about, except for their mention on the wrappers. The 1963 Fleer wrapper says there’s a Goofy Gag Card inside, and the 1964-1966 Philadelphia wrappers say the packs include comic tattoos. If anyone has pictures of those inserts, I would like to see them.

I know at least a little about the rest of the inserts from 1960 to 1971. Following is a short description of each.

1960 Fleer AFL Decals and 1960 Fleer College Pennant Decals

Fleer’s first football cards included a decal insert in each pack, either an AFL team logo or two college pennants. The two types of decals are considered two different sets, though to my knowledge they were distributed as if they were a single set. The 1960 Fleer football set was issued in a single series (in fact, all of them were printed on one sheet), and I believe both types of decals were included in packs of that series. The Vintage Football Card Gallery has scans of all of the decals in both the AFL Team set and the College Pennant set.

1960 Topps Metallic Stickers

In 1960, perhaps reacting to Fleer’s innovation, Topps included their first inserts in football card packs. The Topps inserts were metallic stickers representing both college and pro teams. Topps had the rights to print cards of NFL players in 1960, so the pro teams they put on their stickers were the NFL teams. Unlike the Fleer decals, the 1960 Topps college and pro stickers are considered part of a single set.

Pictured here are two of the stickers, Notre Dame and the St. Louis Cardinals. (1960, incidentally, was year the Cardinals moved to St. Louis.) The stickers don’t scan well, unfortunately, and any wear on the metallic finish appears in the scan as gray. If you imagine that the mottled gray is shiny, like chrome, you’ll get the picture. See the Vintage Football Card Gallery for the entire set of 1960 Topps Metallic Stickers.

1961 Fleer Magic Message Blue Inserts

I don’t know what the 1961 Fleer Magic Message Blue Inserts look like, but judging by the 1961 Fleer wrappers (see the Vintage Football Card Gallery’s wrapper page), the inserts were included in both series. Each insert contains a question about pro or college football, such as “Has the Rose Bowl always been played in California?” PSA’s set registry shows the complete set of questions in the set.

1961 Nu-Card Pennant Stickers

Each 1961 Nu-Card football pack included an insert that held two college pennant stickers. Two of the inserts are pictured here. You can find more pictures on eBay, and you can see the full list of pennant inserts in the PSA Set Registry. A lot of the colleges represented aren’t known for their football programs–e.g., Colby, Coker, and Kings Point–and these stickers might be the only place to see those colleges on anything resembling a football card.

Amazingly, there are only 80 cards in the 1961 Nu-Card football set, but there are 269 different sticker inserts! Many of the colleges are repeated, but they’re paired up differently to make different inserts.

1961 Topps Cloth Emblems (a.k.a. Flocked Stickers)

I have just one 1961 Topps Cloth Emblem sticker insert, the one pictured here. Bleah. It says Green Bay Packers, but it doesn’t picture a Packer, it doesn’t have a Packers logo, and it’s not even in Packers colors. The sticker is perforated so you can separate the “A” from the team emblem. I learned from an entry in the Topps Archives blog that this was so a kid could pull the letters off and use them to spell his name.

The full set of emblems–comprised of AFL, NFL, and college teams–is listed on the PSA registry site. The emblems for the NFL teams, NFL insignia, and most of the college teams came in 1961 Topps first series packs, which contained cards of NFL players. In PSA’s list, the first series emblems are the ones that were always paired with the same letter, e.g., “AIR FORCE FALCONS V.”

The emblems for the AFL teams, AFL insignia, and three more college teams came in second series packs, which contained cards of AFL players. Each second series emblem could be found paired with either of two letters. PSA’s list shows the two possible letters separated by a slash, e.g., “OREGON DUCKS C/N.” The letters that appeared on the stickers most often were the ones most commonly found in boys’ names. I don’t see Q and X at all, so Quincy and Xavier had to improvise with O’s and I’s.

A list of the first series emblems also appears on the back of the second 1961 Topps checklist, card #122. (Thanks to Pastor Scott for pointing this out in his comment below.) The second series emblems, oddly, do not appear on a checklist. Also see the discussion in C is for Checklists. For additional pictures of the emblems, see eBay.

1962 Topps Football Bucks

1962 Topps Bucks are play money that pictures players instead of presidents. The bills were folded once to fit into the pack, but fortunately they were not folded across the players’ faces. Until I add the Bucks to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, you can see more pictures on eBay and the set composition in the PSA set registry.

1965 Topps Magic Rub-Offs

1965 Topps Magic Rub-Offs are magic, and you can rub them off. Sorry, but I don’t have any, and that’s all I know about them. For these, also, you can find pictures on eBay and see the set composition in the PSA set registry.

1966 Topps Funny Rings

Pictured here is the “Head with One Eye” 1966 Topps Funny Ring. As the diagram shows, you can punch the ring out from the card and adjust it to fit your finger, The Funny Rings don’t have anything to do with football; Topps apparently just thought they would appeal to the 10-year-old boys buying the cards. Strangely and unfortunately, the checklist for the Funny Rings is card number 15 in the 1966 Topps football card set, and it is considered necessary to complete the set. See the discussion in C is for Checklists. Also see eBay for more pictures of Funny Rings and the SGC set registry for the full list of rings.

1967 Topps Krazy Pennant Stickers

1967 Topps Krazy Pennant Stickers are also inserts that have little to do with football. Most of the team names on the pennants are Wacky Packages-style wordplays on real college and pro team names: Navel Academy, Michigan State Pen, and so on. A few are made up, such as Confused State and Diskotech. Fortunately, this time the checklist didn’t end up in the football card set. See eBay for more krazy pictures, and see the PSA set registry for the full krazy list.

1968 Topps Stand Ups

Packs of one of the two series of 1968 Topps football cards included “Stand Up” insert cards. This is my second-favorite insert set, with nice head-and-shoulders shots of the players. The cards are perforated such that you can punch them out and stand them up. As I wrote in D is for Defensive Players, Alex Karras is the only defensive player in the 22-card set, and the other 21 are offensive players. One of my previous posts provides more details on the set, and you can see the entire set of 1968 Topps Stand Ups in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

1969 Topps Stamps and Albums

1969 Topps Stamps came four to a card, and they were inserted with stamp albums in 1969 Topps packs. Nowadays we call the cards 4-in-1′s, because if a card still has its stamps intact, we wouldn’t think of pulling it apart. One of my previous blog entries, 1969 Topps 4-in-1 Oddities, has a description of the stamps and albums. The Vintage Football Card Gallery has pictures of the whole set of 1969 Topps stamps.

1970 Topps Super Glossies

1970 Topps Super Glossies came in second series 1970 Topps packs, and they are easily my favorite insert set. Depending on the day, they might even be my favorite of all football card sets. They are unlike any football cards printed before them, with bright colors, a glassy, almost wet-looking finish, and a hint of a 3-D effect. They are easy to find, but they are often off-center or have nicks on the back from the printing or packing machinery. The gloss is also susceptible to scuffing and scratches. You can see the whole 1970 Topps Super Glossy set in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

1971 Topps Game Cards

One series of 1971 Topps cards included small cards to be used for a game. Each game card pictures a player and indicates a number of yards gained or lost. The packs also included a piece of paper that unfolded into a diagram of a football field, and one of the possible game cards was a field marker. (There are way more field markers around than any of the player cards, so evidently Topps wanted to make sure you got one.)

Pulling the next card off your stack, you would move the field marker the distance indicated on the card. I don’t remember if any of us ever made it to the endzone, but I do remember that the game moved slowly and was kind of boring. We preferred the electric football games, where you set up all your players, flipped the switch, and watched all the players run to the corner of the field.

The game cards are often off-center, so it is a challenge to assemble a centered set. You can see all of the 1971 Game Cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

1968, 1970, and 1971 Topps Posters

Finally, Topps included posters in one series of cards in 1968, 1970, and 1971. (Topps issued two series of cards in each of those years, and in the non-poster series Topps inserted the Stand Ups, Super Glossies, and Game Cards discussed above.) I don’t collect posters, and since they’re not cards–or even card-sized–I haven’t tried to obtain them to put in the gallery. Check out eBay for examples of 1968 posters. You can see full sheets of 1970 and 1971 posters on the Topps Vault web site. PSA grades the 1968 and 1971 posters (they’re 5×7 inches), so the PSA site has checklists for 1968 and 1971.

• Previous: H is for Hall of Famers
• Next: J is for Joe Namath–and the 1965 Topps Tall Boys
• All of the ABCs

Randy Johnson, the first quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, died on September 16. Along with Tommy Nobis, Johnson was a first round draft choice for the Falcons in 1966. Johnson played for five years with the Falcons, then went on to play for the Giants, Hawaiians (of the World Football League), Redskins, and Packers. In his last professional game, Johnson started for the Packers and led them to a win over his first team, the Falcons.

Pictured here is Johnson’s rookie card, a 1967 Philadelphia. You can see all of his cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

I read an article a long time ago–perhaps in Sports Collectors Digest?–written by someone who collected players’ last cards. A player’s last card has advantages over his rookie card, the collector said: It describes the highlights of the player’s nearly finished career, and it includes his nearly complete lifetime stats. It is likely to be from the player’s actual last year, whereas his rookie card is probably not from his rookie year at all. And, of course, it’s probably much cheaper than the player’s rookie card. Cool idea, I thought, and it stuck with me until now.

Here’s a nice example: a 1971 Topps Bart Starr card. Starr played in only four games in 1971, his last year, so the stats on the back of the card are close to his lifetime stats. The text lists the numerous Packer records he set in his career. And the price is 5-10% of what you’d pay for his rookie card.

Not all last cards are as nice as Starr’s, of course. Some don’t list all of the player’s stats, just his previous year and lifetime stats. Some, like John Unitas’s 1974 Topps card, show the player with an unfamiliar team. And some, like Joe Namath’s 1973 Topps card, are from well before the player’s last year. (Namath played until 1977.) But you can have all of these problems with rookie cards, as well.

All this considered, I still think it’s a cool idea.

• Buy Bart Starr cards from: Nearmint’s Cards, eBay

Jay Cutler wasn’t mad at the coach. He just didn’t want to wear these socks! (Here’s another view.)

The Broncos are wearing their 1960 uniforms twice this year–complete with striped socks–on October 11 and 19. You can see a the full uniform on the Broncos web site. Unfortunately, I don’t have a card to show you: I looked through all of my early Broncos cards, and none of them show the striped socks. Oh well, at least I have an idea now for Halloween.

Yesterday eBay removed most of the subcategories under sports cards, leaving only the major category for each sport: football cards, baseball cards, etc. Previously they had subcategories under each sport for decades, grading companies, minor leagues, lots and sets, etc., but now 2009 baseball card lots get lumped into the same category as SGC-graded 1940′s single cards. This has caused consternation among buyers who based their searches on the subcategories.

For those who searched for cards by subcategory, my eBay Sports Card Finder might help. It has built-in search criteria for most football and baseball sets, and I could add built-in searches for the other sports, as well. It does wildcarding (e.g., for 1968 O-Pee-Chee CFL cards it will find all auctions containing 1968 and O-Pee-Chee, OPC, or CFL), and it filters out unwanted cards such as reprints. For vintage baseball cards it searches for sets by either set name (e.g., 1929 Kashin) or catalog number (e.g., R316).

Here are a few example searches:

• 1950 Topps Felt Back football cards
• SGC-graded 1940′s baseball cards
• 1960 Topps Jim Brown football cards with Buy-it-Now option

Even if you didn’t search by subcategory, the tool might help you find the auctions you want, so give it a whirl. As always, comments and bug reports are welcome.

Today’s article in the Uni Watch blog bemoans the disappearance of “shoulder loops” on NFL jerseys. (Scroll down to Getting Loopy On You.) The article prompted me to look through my old cards to find which teams’ uniforms had the loops. As I did that, I realized that my favorite uniforms were the ones with the loops, and the loops were the reason I liked them. Here they are, both on 1964 Topps cards: the Patriots uniform, modeled by Ron Burton, and the Chargers uniform, modeled by Earl Faison.

I believe these 1964 cards show the players in their 1963 uniforms, so these are also the uniforms that the Patriots and Chargers are using as throwbacks this year. The eight original AFL teams are wearing throwback uniforms in several games in 2009 to commemorate their 50th year of play. The Patriots chose their 1963 uniform because they won the AFL East Division that year, and the Chargers chose 1963 because it was the year they won the AFL championship.

Bob Kowalkowski, who played guard for the Lions for 11 years, died on September 17. Kowalkowski joined the Lions in 1966, and he started every game for the team from 1972 to 1976. He ended his career with the Packers in 1977.

Pictured here is Kowalkowski’s rookie card, a 1974 Topps, issued in his ninth season. (Rookie card is a misnomer, and this is a good example. Many players, especially offensive linemen and defensive players, didn’t appear on cards until well into their careers.) Kowalkowski also appeared on Topps cards in 1975, 1976, and 1977.

In any vintage set, the cards of players and coaches who have been elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame tend to be more popular–and hence more valuable–than the other cards in the set. Other factors come into play, of course: the relative scarcity of the cards, the positions of the players, the players’ teams, and whether a player was a star or a superstar. But if all else is equal, a Hall of Famer’s card will generally sell for more than a non-Hall of Famer’s. Recognizing this, hobby publications and web sites often use the abbreviation HOF to indicate that a player is in the Hall of Fame.

You can find the full list of Hall of Famers, naturally, on the Pro Football Hall of Fame web site. I referred to that site often as I built my own web sites, since most vintage cards were printed before my time, and I didn’t know all of the players who had been inducted. The biographies of the inductees added to my appreciation of the cards, and I recommend browsing through them on the Hall of Fame site.

A popular–and challenging–endeavor is to collect the rookie cards of Hall of Fame players. As I am writing this, 96 collectors have registered their sets in PSA’s Pro Football Hall of Fame Rookie Players set registry. One of the registered sets, JasP24′s NFL Rookie HOFers, includes images for nearly all of the cards in the set, and it is definitely worth a look. If you have the time, there is also a long discussion about the set and potential new inductees on the Collectors Universe Message Board. Each year, the Hall of Fame’s Senior Committee nominates two senior candidates for induction into the Hall, and there is always a lot of speculation as to who the nominees will be. (As I wrote in another post, this year’s nominees are Chris Hanburger and Les Richter.)

Because the rookie cards of Hall of Famers command a high premium, the rookie cards of potential Hall of Famers command a premium, as well. Another set in the PSA Set Registry, the Future HOF Rookie Players – Senior set, holds the rookie cards of the senior players who have the best chance of being elected to the Hall of Fame. Other people have their ideas, too: see my earlier post called More Pro Football Hall of Fame Candidate Web Sites. If you like to speculate, you can invest in the cards of these Hall of Fame hopefuls and wait to see if your players get elected. Don’t rely on the price guides to tell you how much to pay, though: the actual prices paid for high-grade Hall of Fame rookies and potential Hall of Fame rookies are often multiple times what the price guides say.

Not everyone in the Hall of Fame appears on a vintage card, unfortunately. After National Chicle released the first major football card set in 1935, there were no more major issues until Bowman and Leaf released cards in 1948. Many Hall of Fame players, coaches, and owners from the early days of the NFL were thus left out. The 1955 Topps All-American set, which includes players and coaches from years past (see A is for All-American), made up for some of the omissions, and that is one reason for its popularity.

The old-time Hall of Famers who went card-less in their league days finally appeared in some more recent Hall of Fame issues, such as the 1963 Stancraft playing cards and the 1974 and 1975 Immortal Roll sets issued by Fleer. Dave Witmer, author of the 1st and Goal blog, features some of the recent issues in his Hall of Fame Spotlight. The Immortal Roll cards are also easy to find on eBay. (Because these Hall of Fame sets were not major issues, a card from one of the sets is never considered a rookie card, even if it is the person’s first card. See R is for Rookie Cards for further explanation.)

While the Pro Football Hall of Fame is most significant to collectors, some individual teams also have halls of fame, and some collectors base their collections on those. The PSA Set Registry includes a Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame set, for example, and in it are the rookie cards of the members of the Packers team hall of fame. If your favorite football team has a hall or a wall or a ring of fame, you could choose that to be the focus of your collection.

On a closely related topic, H is also for Heisman Trophy Winners. Like cards of Hall of Fame players, cards of Heisman winners command a premium over cards of other players. And, as you might expect, PSA’s set registry includes a set for the rookie cards of Heisman Winners.

Whether you collect Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, rookie cards, members of your favorite team, or some combination, the Advanced Search page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery provides a way to search for them. It doesn’t include quite all of the old sets yet, but hopefully I’ll get there soon.

For details on any of the Hall of Fame rookie cards shown here, just pick the card to go to its gallery page.

• Previous: G is for Grading
• Next: I is for Inserts
• All of the ABCs

Steve Romanik, who quarterbacked for the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals from 1950 to 1954, died on September 16. He was the Bears’ leading passer in 1952, sharing duties with George Blanda and Bob Williams.

Pictured here is Romanik’s 1952 Bowman Large card, one of the divisible-by-9 short prints. (See B is for Bowman.) He also appeared on a 1952 Bowman Small card, identical except for its size.

According to the Oldest Living Pro Football Players web site, Ralph Kerchival is the oldest living pro player, at nearly 98 years old. He was a back and kicker with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the NFL from 1934 to 1940. In a 1993 interview, Kercheval said that he played on both offense and defense for the Dodgers, and in his rookie year he played for all but five minutes of the entire season. (Don’t miss the cartoon clipping from the Additional Photos section of the interview page.)

Pictured here is Kercheval’s 1935 National Chicle rookie card. He also appeared on a 1955 Topps All-American card.

• Search eBay for Ralph Kercheval cards.

In 1956, Topps held a logo lookalike contest, and Norm Willey won it with this pose. No, not really, but he does look like he’s doing an eagle imitation, doesn’t he? I have always loved this card for the pose.

I tried to think of other players who resemble the logos on their cards, but I didn’t come up with any. There must be players who look like mean bears or lions. Can anyone think of more?

• Search for Norm Willey cards on: Nearmint’s Cards, eBay

If you are going to collect cards, you need to learn to grade them. To the untrained eye there is little difference between a mint card and a near mint card, but there can be a tremendous difference in value between the two. Some sellers, not surprisingly, tend to overgrade their cards, and you need to be able to judge a card’s grade for yourself to ensure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.

Third-party grading companies can help in this regard: for a fee they will assign a grade to a card and encapsulate it in plastic. If you buy a card that has been graded by one of the major companies–Beckett Vintage Grading (BVG), Sportscard Guarantee Company (SGC), or Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA)–you can be reasonably assured that the card is accurately graded, authentic, and unaltered. There are other grading companies, as well, but be cautious if you stray from the big three.

The first step in learning to grade is to read the standards. Each of the big grading companies has a published set of standards, and they are all similar. Each has its quirks, though. PSA uses “qualifiers” to note exceptional problems on cards, such as a mark on an otherwise high-grade card, instead of just giving the card a lower grade. SGC uses a 100-point scale, but they actually use only a few values on the scale (10, 20, 30, etc.), and they map their 100-point scale to the more standard 10-point scale. (Strangely, 98 maps to 10, but 100 doesn’t map to anything!) SGC and Beckett distinguish between Mint, Gem Mint, and Pristine, but I don’t believe a grader could ever consistently apply these various degrees of “mint.”

Note that in the grading standards, many of the flaws a card can have are introduced in production: poor centering, print lines, wax stains, and so on. To a collector, these problems are as serious as wear and tear. Beware of eBay auctions that proclaim that the cards are from “vending,” because even if the cards were taken directly from a pack, it is likely that they have some factory flaws. “Vending,” “nice,” “L@@K,” and “Wow!” are useless terms in auction titles: a good seller will attempt to grade the cards, and put the grade in the title instead.

After you have gotten familiar with the grading standards, look at scans of graded cards online–on eBay, for example, or on my sales site–to see if you can tell why they are graded as they are. (This is easier to do with cards in lower grades. Cards in higher grades have smaller flaws, and the flaws are often hard to see in scans.) After looking at scans online, find some to examine in person: look at a friend’s, find some at a card show or dealer, or make some small purchases online. Start slow, to get the hang of it.

When looking at graded cards, you’ll find that the 1-to-10 grading scale is not linear. While you can probably tell a 2 from a 5 from across the room, you might need a magnifying glass to see the difference between a 7 and a 10. You will also find that sometimes a lower-grade card will look nicer than a higher-grade card. This could be because the grading company goofed–it happens–or, more likely, it could be because the grading standards don’t jibe with what your appeals to your eye. A card that is perfect except for a hairline crease on the back will most likely be graded a 5, while a card that is faded or out of focus could get an 8 or 9. A crease is a crease, but fading or poor focus is more of a judgment call, particularly if the grader doesn’t have similar cards to compare with the card he is grading.

Because your tastes might differ from the standards, and because grading to the standards is somewhat subjective, you will sometimes hear the mantra “Buy the card, not the holder.” All this means is that you shouldn’t base your decision to buy a card solely on the grade a grading company has assigned to it. Make sure that the card also appeals to your eye, and that you think it’s worth the price you are paying for it.

So now you’re thinking, hmm, if there can be such a small difference between a 7 and a 10, and if lower-grade cards can actually look better than higher-grade cards, and if the card grading companies sometimes make mistakes, why is a PSA 10 worth so much more than a PSA 7? Well, that’s a good question. The answer: card collectors (and collectors in general, I’m guessing) are an extremely fussy bunch, we’re continually trying to upgrade our collections, and the grading companies are usually accurate in their grading. We’ll often pay dearly to get a card with four sharp corners, rather than one with a fuzzy corner or two. Some collectors also participate in set registries, where you can show off your collections and compete with other collectors for the highest-graded sets. PSA, SGC, and Beckett all have set registries, and the competition between collectors can touch off amazing bidding wars in auctions for cards that are scarce in high grades. For the grading companies, the set registries were a stroke of marketing genius.

To sum it up, yes, grading is somewhat subjective, but a card’s grade is nonetheless key to determining its value. If you plan to spend much money on cards, you should learn to grade so that you don’t have to rely on sellers’ opinions. For expensive or high-grade cards, third-party grading companies can offer assurance that the cards meet their grading standards. But consider your own tastes, too. Do you prefer good centering or sharp corners? Does a tiny crease bother you if the card is otherwise flawless? How important is the back to you? Collect the cards that appeal to you, but learn to grade so you can determine what to pay for them.

(More on pricing later. For now see my pricing page.)

• Previous: F is for Fleer
• Next: H is for Hall of Famers
• All of the ABCs

Talk of senior Hall of Fame candidates made me think of Alex Karras, who went from an almost-Hall-of-Fame football career to a successful acting career. According to The Internet Movie Database, he was even nominated for a Golden Apple Award. (No, I hadn’t heard of it, either.) Karras’s IMDB page has a long list of the films and TV shows in which he appeared. He is best known for playing George Papadapolis on TV’s Webster, and for playing Mongo in the movie Blazing Saddles.

Pictured here is Karras’s rookie card, a 1959 Topps. Below is a clip of Mongo.

• Search for Alex Karras cards on: Nearmint’s Cards, eBay