Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Because I buy large lots of cards, I often end up with duplicates. To diversify my inventory, I will trade those duplicates for cards of equal value that I don’t already have listed on nearmintcards.com. So that assessing the cards’ value is simple, I limit my trading to cards that are already graded.

To see the duplicates I have available for trading, see my post on the Collector’s Universe message board. I add cards every few weeks or so, so check back occasionally.

I also accept trades for cards listed on my sales site, but those trades have to be in my favor–and worth my time. Most people understand this, and I work a lot of trades with my customers. I’ve even been know to take a baseball card now and then!

A customer once bought a Lions team card from me because his friend played for the Lions the year the card was printed. Unfortunately, his friend wasn’t in the picture, and the customer got upset. What he didn’t realize is that the card companies would use the same photos year after year, and the photo on his team card was an old one. I explained and offered a refund, but I didn’t hear back from him.

Here are the cards I used to demonstrate to him that I wasn’t making it up. The Philadelphia Gum Company used the same image of Mick Tingelhoff in 1964, 1965, and 1967. (They used a different image in 1966, but it wasn’t as good as this one.) If you browse through the Football Card Gallery, you can find many more instances where the card companies reused photos. Joe Namath is another good example: look for the Band-Aid on his head in cards from 1968 through 1970.

Sometimes the companies would even recolor the player’s uniform if he happened to change teams. John Henry Johnson’s 1957 Topps card, which I showed in an earlier post, is a great example–though in this case, Topps got John Henry’s new team wrong.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Mick Tingelhoff, Joe Namath, John Henry Johnson
• Search eBay for: Mick Tingelhoff, Joe Namath, John Henry Johnson

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.

I gave my nearmintcards.com home page a little sprucing up this week. As usual, it took me twice as long as I expected. Each of the browsers–especially Internet Explorer–has its bugs and quirks, and getting a site to behave well in all of them can be challenging. If you spot something that I broke, please let me know.

I did a search on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and found the site’s humble beginnings. The first records of the site are from June 2002. The Vintage Football Card Gallery came later: its first snapshot is from January 2004. The images on the gallery’s old home page aren’t working, unfortunately, or it would look much as it does today. The links in the left-hand navigation bar still work, though–and so, of course, do the Google ads!

This came in the mail yesterday. I’m so proud! I’m putting it in a place of honor, right behind my Dwight Schrute Bobble Head doll.

Here are my current eBay listings. Bid early and bid often!

I could tell that Jack Kemp had died even before I heard the news. A bunch of his cards suddenly appeared on eBay, and I got a couple of orders for his cards, as well. If I look at the log for my gallery, I’m sure I’ll also see a lot of recent searches there for Jack Kemp cards. I check the logs every week or so, and I can often tell that a player has died by the number of searches for him.

Pictured here is Kemp’s rookie card, the cornerstone of my 1960 Fleer set. I don’t recognize his jersey, though. Many of the players in this set are pictured in their college uniforms, but Kemp doesn’t appear to be in current Occidental colors. Before the Chargers, he also spent time with the Lions, Steelers, Giants, 49ers, and Calgary Stampeders, but I don’t recognize the jersey as being from any of those teams, either. Can anyone help?

Happy Earth Day!

I wouldn’t say I’m a fanatic, but I do try to reuse and recycle whatever I can. My wife and I have a compost bin, we use cloth shopping bags, and we reuse plastic bags until they fall apart or have dog poop in them–whichever comes first.

In my business I also try to reuse as much as possible. I am happy to say that in my ten years of selling cards, I have never bought a box, bubble wrap, or packing peanuts. I get plenty of those in the mail, and as long as they’re clean, I reuse them. I ask my friends for their bubble wrap and foam wrap, too. They wonder what fun they’re missing.

My wife and I get way too many packing peanuts to reuse, so we bag the excess peanuts and take them to the UPS Store, where the clerks reuse them. My last load was eight or ten garbage bags full. Some eBay sellers, I’ve noticed, use peanuts made from corn starch, and those dissolve when they get wet–much more Earth-friendly than the styrofoam peanuts.

I do buy one type of packaging new, and that’s bubble envelopes. From eBay sellers I sometimes get cards in bubble envelopes with six layers of labels on them, and I think that’s great. As long as the cards make it safely, I don’t care what the envelope looks like. I do this as a business, though, and I need to maintain a reasonably professional appearance. So I compromise: I use a shiny new bubble envelope for the outside, and on the inside layer I wrap the cards in bubble wrap or a cut-up used bubble envelope. This works well for one to three cards, and for more cards than that I use a (used) box.

Awhile back, a collector called to ask if I had any 1962 Post Cereal cards, because he was interested in the Bob Lilly card from that set. He said he collected pre-rookie cards of hall-of-famers, and that the 1962 Post Lilly was one he still needed. An interesting idea, I thought.

Today I added a page to the gallery that highlights a few pre-rookie cards. I included a few well-known players that aren’t in the hall of fame, in part because I wanted to include a few 1961 Nu-Cards. The Nu-Card set is one of the few vintage college sets, and it contains cards of a lot players who went on to play in the NFL and AFL.