Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

To all my customers, readers, and gallery browsers: Happy New Year! To help us ring it in, here’s the Vintage Football Card All-Party Team. Did I miss anyone?

If you’re going out tonight, be careful out there. See you all in 2010!

Yesterday I put together more virtual uncut sheets, this time for 1968 Topps football cards. Again you can see that cards on the corners and edges of the sheets are the toughest to find in high grade.

(Click on the image to see the sheets.)

One problem with collecting rookie cards is that it locks you in to the cards that you will include in your collection. Whether you collect rookie cards of Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, or players from your favorite college or team, there’s not much wiggle room: if you want to complete your collection, you’ll probably have to purchase some cards that aren’t very attractive. Check out Bobby Mitchell’s rookie card, for example. He looks like he’s ordering a five dollar footlong while falling over backward.

One way to avoid this is to choose your own “best card” for each player you want in your collection. A great example of such a personalized collection is RustyWilly’s HOF Portrait Gallery. Rather than collecting whatever happens to be the rookie card of each Hall of Famer, RustyWilly chose a nice head shot of each player. He didn’t limit himself to major sets, either, so he has cards from Kelloggs, Swell, Stop N Go, 7 Eleven, and Wonder Bread. Not only did this give him a wider selection of images to choose from, it allowed him to include Hall of Famers who didn’t appear on cards in major issues, and hence didn’t have rookie cards. (See R is for Rookie Cards for the definition of “rookie card.”)

Clicking on an image in RustyWilly’s gallery brings up large scans of both the front and back of the card. The card backs are a nice feature, since they provide little bios of the Hall of Famers. They’re also a ton of work, which is why I haven’t included them in my own gallery.

RustyWilly also has a Baseball HOF Portrait Gallery. I don’t know much about baseball cards, though, so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Back in January I posted an article about an autographed 1963 Fleer Billy Shaw card that I picked up on eBay. Well, one collector has done 80 cards better: he has autographed copies of 81 of the 89 cards in the 1963 Fleer set. Yesterday he posted pictures of all of them on the Collectors Universe message board. Check them out!

I’m not an autograph expert, but the jewel in his set appears to be the checklist, which is in great shape and inscribed by Lance Alworth. (You need to scroll down in his post to see it.) The checklist is the toughest card in the set, because its thin borders make it hard to find well-centered. It is also a short print, as are two other cards in the set. They’re not as short-printed as the price guides indicate, though. See my 1963 Fleer virtual uncut sheet for an explanation.

Thanks to my friend Pat for pointing out this auction: an ungraded 1969 Topps Bob Brown card that sold for $96.45. Why so much? Well, 1969 Topps is a popular set in the PSA set registry, and I’m guessing that a couple of registry participants wanted this high grade example to submit to PSA. Buying ungraded cards on eBay is risky, since sellers often overgrade them, so the seller of the Brown card must have a reputation for being an accurate grader.

Brown is in the Hall of Fame, but that would account for only a small part of the premium the buyer paid. As you can see on my 1969 Topps virtual uncut sheet page, though, the Brown card is on the edge of the sheet, and edge cards tend to be scarcer in top condition than other cards. Edge cards evidently were damaged more often in the printing and packaging process than cards on the interior of the sheet. There are lots of lower-grade examples of the card on eBay, but apparently high-grade examples don’t appear regularly.

Brown also has a stamp on a 1969 Topps 4-in-1 insert card, but the picture isn’t him, it’s Bob Brown of the Packers.

Here’s an interesting item: a 1966 American Oil Game Sheet. The object of the game was to complete a row of stamps–which I assume you got from American Oil gas stations–to win a prize. One stamp in each row, of course, was rare.

The 1966-68 American Oil Sweepstakes Stamps page on thecowboysguide.com shows some of the stamps and has another view of the game sheet. If you hold your cursor over the game sheet, you can see that most of the stamps are pasted on it. The missing stamps are the key stamps needed for prizes. I can’t tell who is on the missing stamp in the Mustang row. I wonder if any examples of that stamp exist?

You can usually find examples of other American Oil game pieces on eBay.

Merry Christmas, everyone! So, did anyone give or get cards?

I can remember getting cards as gifts only twice. The first time was in 1972, when my 6-year-old brother gave me a pack of football cards for Christmas. Since it was so late in the season, I had lost interest in collecting for that year, so after opening the pack, I put the cards in the closet with the rest of my collection, and I forgot about them. Years later, when I looked through the box, I found that the cards from my brother were the only one that weren’t beat up.

The cards happened to be 1972 Topps 3rd series cards, and one of them was the Joe Namath Pro Action card. It’s worth $75-100 now, and it’s the only card from my childhood collection worth anything at all. It turned out to be a great gift!

As I wrote on my pre-rookie cards page, “rookie card” is an unfortunate term. Years ago, most players’ “rookie” cards were not printed in their rookie years, but sometime later, after they were established as pros. Many players, even Hall of Famers, didn’t appear on cards until well into their careers. Some didn’t appear on cards until long after their playing days were over. Dick Lane, for example, had 14 interceptions–still a league record–as a rookie for the Rams in 1952, but he didn’t appear on a card until 1957. Don Hutson played for the Packers from 1935 to 1945, but no one printed football cards from 1936 to 1947, so Hutson’s rookie card is a 1955 Topps All-American.

So “first card” would be a more accurate term than “rookie card.” Even that isn’t quite right, though, since players sometimes appeared on cards in minor sets before their rookie cards were issued. To be a rookie card, it is understood that a card has to have been printed by a major card company, such as Topps or Bowman. And it has to be a regular issue card, not an insert. So “first regular issue card printed by a major card company” is more precise, though it would make for a long abbreviation. And there’s even some contention about that: PSA’s Pro Football Hall of Fame Rookie Players registry set accepts either 1950 Topps Felt Backs or 1951 Bowmans for the rookie cards of Lou Creekmur and Ernie Stautner. Why? Perhaps because the 1950 Topps Felt Backs are small and ugly. So the registry’s definition of rookie card is “first regular issue card printed by a major card company, unless it’s small and ugly, in which case you can substitute a different one.”

There are other slight hitches. One is that sometimes cards picture the wrong player. Packer fullback Jim Taylor’s rookie card, a 1959 Topps, actually pictures Jim Taylor of the Cardinals. So does his 1960 Topps card. The 1959 Topps card is generally known as Taylor’s rookie card, but his picture doesn’t actually appear on a card until 1961. Some collectors consider his 1961 Topps and 1961 Fleer cards to be his real rookie cards, and Taylor himself reportedly won’t sign his 1959 Topps card.

Also, how about the 1964 Philadelphia Packers’ Play of the Year and Colts’ Play of the Year cards, which have small images of Vince Lombardi and Don Shula? Are they Lombardi and Shula’s rookie cards? I would say so, but my Beckett doesn’t have them marked as such. It does have them priced like rookie cards, though.

And why aren’t cards in the 1961 Nu-Card set considered rookie cards? Roman Gabriel, John Hadl, and Ernie Davis all appear in that set, but their Topps cards from later years are considered their rookie cards. The Nu-Card set pictures college players, but so do the 1951 Topps Magic and 1955 Topps All-American sets, and cards in those sets can be rookie cards. Is the 1961 Nu-Card set not considered a major issue? To my knowledge, the cards were distributed nationally, and there are plenty of them around, so they seem to me to be a major issue.

Whether or not a card is a rookie card has a large influence on its price, of course. Rookie cards, especially of Hall of Famers, are popular with collectors, so there is a high demand for them. Why are rookie cards more popular than other cards? Well, honestly, I think that someone with an early influence on the hobby–perhaps someone compiling a price guide–said “rookie cards should be worth more,” collectors said “okay,” and so it was. Intuitively this makes some sense, since older cards are generally scarcer than newer ones, and a player’s first card would tend to be his scarcest. This certainly isn’t true in all cases, though, so declaring rookie cards more valuable than others is largely artificial.

Perhaps rookie cards were declared valuable to help fuel the modern card market. Modern card collectors like to buy new players’ rookie cards, speculating that the players will become stars and their cards will become valuable. Collectors in the vintage card market do some of this, too: since rookie cards of Hall of Fame players are valuable, collectors speculate by buying cards of senior candidates for the Hall of Fame. The Bob Hayes rookie card pictured here is an example of a card whose price jumped recently, when Hayes was elected to the Hall of Fame.

Some players have more than one rookie card; this happened when more than one company printed cards of the same league in the same year. Sammy Baugh has a 1948 Bowman rookie card, for instance, and also a 1948 Leaf rookie card. Jim Otto has both 1961 Topps and 1961 Fleer rookie cards. For most years before 1970, though–the years I think of as vintage–only one company per year printed cards for a given league, if anyone printed football cards at all.

It seems to me that the concept of a rookie card serves as a convenient way to identify a player’s most desirable card. Which card is a player’s rookie card can sometimes be ambiguous, but identifying a player’s rookie card is much less contentious than, say, trying to decide on his most attractive card, or his scarcest. Picking a most desirable card for each player helps collectors narrow their collecting focus: they can collect rookie cards of Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, players from their favorite team, etc.

I have 80-90% of the rookie cards marked in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, including those of players who appear on only a card or two. You can use the Advanced Search page to look for rookie cards in combination with other criteria.

• Previous: Q is for Quarterbacks
• Next: S is for Scratch-Offs
• All of the ABCs

I made a few improvements to the eBay Sports Card Finder last week:

• All of the search controls are on top now, rather than in the left column, so you don’t have to scroll to see the bottom ones. I changed most of the controls to pull-down menus to save space.
• I added a Submit button so you can set all of the search criteria before doing the search. Previously the page sent out a search each time you changed an option. That got annoying if you were changing a few of them.
• I added options in the Grading menu to let you search for cards graded PSA 7 and higher, PSA 8 and higher, and so on. There are similar searches for SGC cards.

The purpose of the page is to do eBay searches tailored for vintage sports cards. For whatever search criteria you choose, it creates the appropriate eBay search strings behind the scenes. For vintage baseball sets it searches for both the set name and set number, for example: if you choose 1910 Mello Mint, it searches for E105, as well. If I’m aware that a set has been reprinted, the page filters out the reprint cards for that set. The page shows auctions, fixed price listings, and store listings all in the same table. It also shows the seller for each listing, so you don’t have to open the listings to see if they’re from your favorite or not-so-favorite sellers.

Like normal eBay searches, the page depends somewhat on the accuracy of the listing titles. If someone has a baseball card listed under football cards, the page won’t find it if you do a baseball card search.

Check it out and see what you think. I haven’t tested every set, so if you find a problem, just send me an email. I have not completed the basketball sets yet, but I can do that quickly if someone asks.

Yesterday I added 1955 49ers Team Issue photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The photos are bigger than cards, at just under 5×7, and I had to order extra-large toploaders for storing them. They came in the original envelope, pictured below. The photos, amazingly, are in much better condition than the envelope.

The photos are sharp black-and-whites, and each includes a facsimile of the player’s signature. On the back of each photo is a glowing biography of the player on the front. (Hardy Brown‘s bio calls him “the most feared linebacker in the game because of his fantastic ‘shoulder tackle’ which uncoils like a pile driver and causes many fumbles”!) Most of the images of the well-known players are familiar, since they also appear in color on 1950s Bowman and Topps cards. Being a team issue, though, the set also includes numerous players who never appeared on cards. In the 50s and 60s, the major card companies printed cards of only 10-12 players from each team, and most linemen and defensive players were left out. I love team sets for this reason: I get to see players I’ve never seen before.

There are 38 photos in the set, and it includes photos of the 49ers’ coaches and their TV and radio announcers. I imagine that in the 50′s, the announcers for each team were as familiar to fans as the players, so it was natural to include them in a team set.

The set includes six Pro Football Hall of Fame players, including the four members of the 49ers’ “Million Dollar Backfield”: Y.A. Tittle, Hugh McElhenny, Joe Perry, and John Henry Johnson.

Jack Zilly, who played offensive end and defensive end for the Los Angeles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles, died on December 18. In college, Zilly played on Notre Dame’s national championship teams of 1943 and 1946. In the intervening two years, he served in World War II. Before his rookie season with the Rams, Zilly played in the 1947 College All-Star game, scoring a touchdown in the All-Stars’ win over the Chicago Bears. He played for the Rams from 1947 to 1951, finished his career with the Eagles in 1952, and went on to coach at Montana State and Notre Dame.

Zilly is pictured here on his 1951 Bowman football card. I always liked this action shot, with the grass flying up behind him and the ball entering the picture in the upper right. Zilly also appeared on a 1950 Bowman card, and his obituary in the Los Angeles Times has a nice action photo of him with the Rams.

A few months ago I wrote about how the card companies misspelled Herb Adderley’s name on many of his cards. I noticed yesterday that Topps had trouble with Jerrel Wilson’s name, too. Between 1969 and 1973, they got it wrong four times, spelling it with two L’s. I don’t have his cards from 1975 to 1978, so it’s possible that some of those are incorrect, as well.

Pictured here is one of the error cards, Wilson’s 1969 Topps rookie card. Interestingly, though my old Beckett catalog documents all sorts of picky errors–such as typos in stats–it doesn’t have the Wilson cards marked as errors.

Wilson, by the way, was a darn good punter. In 16 years in the AFL and NFL, he averaged 43 yards a punt. He led the AFL in punting average twice, he led the NFL in average three times, and he was a three-time Pro Bowler.

As I wrote in an earlier post, it will take me several steps to add the 1972 Sunoco Stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Last night I skipped ahead and finished step #4: Add player information (college, etc.) to player database. Now when you do a search by college, the Sunoco Stamps are included in the search. (To search by college, see the Search by College page or the Advanced Search page.)

Now everything’s done except the scanning. I finished the Atlanta Falcons and Baltimore Colts, so I have just 24 teams to go. Whew.

In a comment on my last article about the stamps, Rob Lewis, the eBay seller who sold me the set, offered to send a copy of the order form for the update stamps to anyone who sends him an SASE. He also added some remarks about the update set. To see his comment, go to the article and scroll toward the bottom. Rob said the stamp album–which I still haven’t opened–contains 144 stamps, too. So I guess those 144 would be double-printed and a little easier to find? When I finish scanning–sometime next year–maybe I’ll summarize the different ways you could obtain the stamps, show which ones were replaced by updates, etc.

Card companies love quarterbacks, and quarterbacks appear on more than their share of vintage cards. This isn’t surprising, since quarterbacks are typically the most recognizable members of their teams. Even considering that, at times the card companies have gone a little quarterback crazy. As I wrote in other posts, the only two Packers in the 1953 Bowman set are quarterbacks, and there are four Bears quarterbacks in the 1957 Topps set.

One set that isn’t quarterback crazy is the 1935 National Chicle set. Only 2 of the 36 National Chicle cards are quarterbacks. In 1935, football was still primarily a running game, with rushing attempts outnumbering passing attempts 2.5 to 1, and rushing yards exceeding passing yards 1.5 to 1. By 1948, when the next major football card issues were released, these ratios had changed dramatically, and total passing yards for the league had surpassed total rushing yards. Football cards reflected this shift: the 1948 Bowman set, for example, includes 17 quarterbacks for 10 teams. The black-and-white “Pitchin’” Paul Christman card shown here is from the 1948 Bowman set.

As the passing game emerged, quarterbacks also became more photogenic. On nearly all old quarterback cards, the quarterback is holding the ball, and in most cases, he’s ready to pass. He’s often straining to throw it past imaginary defenders: running, jumping, and otherwise contorting himself. Sometimes an artist would even enhance the contortions. Check out John Huarte’s 1965 Topps card–he looks like a puppet!

Quarterbacks also have lots of stats, of course, and fans love stats. I actually remember being disappointed as a kid when I turned over a lineman’s card and didn’t see any stats. Quarterbacks have relatively long careers, also, and that makes for plenty of material for the backs of the cards.

Interestingly, it seems that the card companies were more apt to put unproven quarterbacks on cards than players from other positions. In 1957, for example, Topps printed a card of Cardinals quarterback Paul Larson, but not one of Lamar MaHan, who had been the Cardinals’ starting quarterback for three years. McHan remained the starter in 1957, and Larson threw just 14 passes. In 1960, Fleer printed another card of Larson, this time with the Raiders. The Raiders’ starting quarterback in 1960 were Tom Flores and Babe Parilli, but they did not appear in the 1960 Fleer set. Larson appeared in only one game, and he did not throw a pass.

By contrast, defensive players (see D is for Defensive Players) and offensive linemen usually had to play well for a few years before the card companies would put them on cards. I suppose that the card companies, in order to maximize sales, simply printed cards of players with the greatest name recognition. Quarterbacks might be well-known right out of college, while other players in other positions needed to play in the pros for a while before becoming household names.

To query the Vintage Football Gallery for all of the quarterbacks from your favorite team, just use an address of this form: http://www.footballcardgallery.com/position/quarterback/team/Washington+Redskins/. This works for other positions, as well.

• Previous: P is for Philadelphia
• Next: R is for Rookie Cards
• All of the ABCs

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I bought a set of 1972 Sunoco stamps on eBay. Well, I received them, and I’m very pleased. The stamps are just as described, and the seller packed them well: stars in sleeves and top loaders, and commons in team bags. The auction included a deluxe stamp album, and the seller also threw in a checklist and two stamps from the update set. (They’re the Norm Thompson and Dave Costa stamps pictured here.) It was great fun opening the package: I kept pulling out more and more stuff! The seller, rl1114, has lots of other items for sale, too, so check him out.

It will probably take me months to scan the stamps for the Vintage Football Card Gallery, so I’ll write blog entries for intermediate steps. So far I entered all of the players’ names, added personal information (college, position, hometown, etc.) for some of the players, and scanned the five pre-rookie stamps in the set so I could add them to my pre-rookie card page. Two of the pre-rookies are pictured here: Dan Dierdorf and Art Shell.

The stamp album is still in its original shrink wrap, but I’m curious, so I’ll probably have to unwrap it. Maybe that will be my next article on the set.