Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

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

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

The Fleer Corporation printed football cards each year from 1960 to 1963. In 1960, 1962, and 1963, Fleer had rights to the AFL players, while their competitor, Topps, had rights to the NFL players. In 1961, both companies printed cards of both AFL and NFL players.

The 1960 Fleer set contains players and coaches from the original eight AFL teams. Since 1960 was the first year of the AFL, many of the players were coming to the league from college, and they are shown in their college uniforms. 1959 Heisman winner Billy Cannon is one example, in his LSU uniform. Other players are shown in uniforms of NFL teams they played for in prior years: George Blanda, for instance, is in a Bears uniform. Some of the players in the set were either cut before the season or did not get any playing time, judging by the records at pro-football-reference.com. Jim Woodard and George Blanch, both with the Raiders, are two players who do not appear on that site.

I recently created a page in the Vintage Football Card Gallery that shows a virtual uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer cards. As you can see on that page, an uncut sheet contained all 132 cards in the set, so no cards were short-printed. Because of where they were positioned on the sheet, however, some cards are much more difficult to find in high grade. The scarcest card is Jim Woodard, in the bottom left corner of the sheet. The corners of the uncut sheets evidently got damaged just as the corners of cards do.

The 1960 Fleer set contains the rookie cards of Hall of Famers Ron Mix, Hank Stram, and Sid Gillman, as well as the rookie cards of Jack Kemp and Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon. (Sid Gillman also has a pre-rookie card in the 1959 Bell Brand Rams set.)

The 1961 Fleer set contains 220 cards, and it was released in two series: the first with 132 NFL players, the second with 88 AFL players. The cards in each series are sorted by team nickname. In the first series, the Bears cards are first, then the Browns, Cardinals, Colts, Cowboys, and so on to the Vikings. The second series has the Bills, Broncos, Chargers, etc. Interestingly, most of the photos of the NFL players show them standing, hands on hips, but most of the photos of the AFL players are action shots.

The 1961 Fleer virtual uncut sheet page shows what the second series sheets looked like, and it shows how the cards’ placement on the sheet has affected their availability in high grade. Though the price guides assign higher values to the second series cards, in reality they are more common than the first series cards, and they sell for less.

The 1961 Fleer set includes the rookie cards of two Hall of Famers, Jim Otto and Don Maynard, both AFL players. Because Topps also printed cards of AFL players in 1961, Otto and Maynard also have rookie cards in the 1961 Topps set. The 1961 Fleer set also contains two notable errors: the player on Goose Gonsoulin’s card is not Goose Gonsoulin, and the Packers logo is backward on every Green Bay Packers card.

Finally, the set reflects the changes to the leagues in 1961: the Vikings were an NFL expansion team, and the AFL’s Chargers moved from Los Angeles to San Diego.

The 1962 Fleer set contains 88 cards, and it appears to have been printed in smaller numbers than the other Fleer sets. The cards are attractive, but they suffer from poor quality control: many of them were cut off-center, and many have large amounts of wax on the back. The cards are grouped and ordered by city: Boston first, then Buffalo, Dallas, Denver, Houston, New York, Oakland, and San Diego. I have not seen an uncut sheet, but because the first four cards in the set are scarce in high grades, I’ll bet that they were on the left edge, as they are were on sheets of 1963 Fleer cards.

The only Hall-of-Famer rookie card in the 1962 Fleer set is that of Billy Shaw. Shaw is the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame who never played in the NFL.

The 1963 Fleer set contains 89 cards: 88 players and an unnumbered checklist. The addition of the checklist caused the Bob Dougherty and Charles Long cards in the set to be short printed, as discussed on my virtual uncut sheet page for the set. The set also has a variation that none of the price guides acknowledges: cards with numbers divisible by 4 come both with and without a bottom stripe on the back. See the 1963 Fleer uncut sheet page for a discussion of that, too.

The 1963 set contains the rookie cards of three Hall of Famers: Len Dawson, Lance Alworth, and Nick Buoniconti. It also reflects the AFL’s two team changes in 1963: the Dallas Texans moved to Kansas City and became the Chiefs, and the New York Titans changed their nickname to the Jets. According to Wikipedia, the Titans were sold in 1963 and moved to Shea Stadium, which is close to LaGuardia Airport, and they hence became the Jets. One of the new owners was Leon Hess, founder of the Hess Corporation. The early Jets colors and logo were made to resemble Hess’s.

1963 marked the end of Fleer’s short run. In 1964, Philadelphia Gum Company obtained the rights to print cards of NFL players, and Topps in turn obtained the rights to the AFL.

• Previous: E is for Error Cards
• Next: G is for Grading
• All of the ABCs

My old (2005) Beckett football card catalog defines checklist as such:

A card that lists in order the cards and players in the set or series. Older checklist cards in mint condition that have not been checked off are very desirable and command large premiums.

The first football set to include a checklist card was 1956 Topps. That card is shown here, to the right. Except for 1958, every Topps set from 1956 to 1975 includes checklists. (More recent sets undoubtedly do, too, but my collection stops at 1975.) In both 1956 and 1957, the checklist was short-printed and not numbered, but for both years the checklist is considered part of the set.

Topps printed two versions of the 1957 checklist, one with a Bazooka bubble gum ad on the back, and the other with a Twin Blony ad. The Twin Blony checklist is scarcer, but either version of the checklist is considered sufficient to complete the set. Shown here is a 1957 checklist with the Bazooka back.

In 1959 and 1960, rather than printing standalone checklist cards, Topps put a checklist on the back of each team card. Some team cards have a checklist for the first half of the set, and some have a checklist for the second half. Since there is a team card for each team in the league, each checklist appears numerous times in the set. Redundant, yes, but the kids were reasonably assured of getting the checklists.

The second 1961 Topps checklist is unusual: besides listing 1961 Topps cards 78-132, it has a checklist on the back for 36 Cloth Emblem inserts. (See I is for Inserts for a picture of one.) I believe the 36 emblems listed here were distributed with the first series of 1961 Topps cards; they included the NFL teams, the NFL insignia, and some colleges. Twelve more emblems–the AFL teams, AFL insignia, and three more colleges–were released with the second series, but, oddly, Topps did not print a checklist for those. The second series checklist, card number 198, lists just cards 133-198. Perhaps Topps simply did not have enough room on that checklist to include the second series emblems.

Topps checklists from 1962 to 1965 are unremarkable: one or two per set, with a few being short prints. I won’t show them all here, but you can see all of the checklists for all of the sets in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

In 1966, Topps got weird. Included in 1966 football card packs were Funny Rings, insert cards from which you could punch out silly rings to put on your fingers. (You can usually find some on eBay.) The inserts themselves aren’t odd–cards back then were printed for kids, after all–but what is odd is that the checklist for the Funny Rings is card number 15 in the football card set. Nothing on the Funny Ring Checklist has anything to do with football, but since it is a numbered card in the set, collectors are compelled to have it. No problem, except that the checklist has notoriously poor top-to-bottom centering, so it is hard to find in high grade, and hence it is very expensive. (An article by Kevin Glew about the 1966 Topps set describes the poor centering of the checklists and the woes of the men who collect them.)

In 1967, the Topps checklists again were unremarkable. In 1968 and 1969, though, Topps decided to issue a second series checklist with both the first and second series cards. Why? I’m guessing that they included a second series checklist with the first series to entice kids to buy the second series, but they also put one in the second series in case the kids hadn’t bought the first series cards. At any rate, the checklists issued with each series have the characteristics of the other cards in that series, so there are two variations of each second series checklist.

First series 1968 Topps cards have green printing on the back, and second series cards have blue printing, so the second series checklist can be found with either green or blue printing. First series 1969 Topps cards have no border, but second series cards do, so the 1969 second series checklist comes both with and without a border. Shown here are the two variations of the 1969 Topps second series checklist.

I am not aware of any oddities in the Topps checklists from 1970 to 1975, but I do know that Topps printed team checklists in 1973 and 1974, in addition to the regular checklists. These team checklists were not part of the regular sets. I don’t yet have them in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but you can see examples of the team checklists on eBay.

Now, on to Topps’s competition:

Fleer printed football cards from 1960 to 1963, but only the 1963 Fleer set includes a checklist, and it appears to have been an afterthought. The 1963 Fleers were printed on two sheets, with most players appearing three times between the two sheets. (See my virtual 1963 Fleer uncut sheet for details.) The checklist displaced a Bob Dougherty card on one sheet and a Charles Long card on the other, hence the Dougherty and Long became short prints. The checklist is also a short print, since it appears just twice between the two sheets. Like the 1956 and 1957 Topps checklists, the 1963 Fleer checklist was not numbered, but it is considered part of the set. The borders on the checklist are thin, so high-grade, well-centered examples are rare. The centering of the card shown here is typical.

The Philadelphia Gum Company printed football cards from 1964 to 1967, and they included two checklists in each set. Philadelphia was consistent from year to year: each of the four sets is a single series of 198 cards, and cards 197 and 198 in each set are the checklists. The 1964 Philadelphia checklists are error cards–they both say 1963–and they are typically off-center, like the one shown here. The 1965-1967 Philadelphia checklists are unremarkable and plentiful in high grade.

Having reviewed the checklists, let’s look again at Beckett’s definition. The first part says a checklist lists, in order, the cards in a set or series. That sounds right. But what about the second part, “Older checklist cards in mint condition that have not been checked off are very desirable and command large premiums”? Well, like the claim that the first card and last card in a set are scarcer in high grade (see the discussion on my virtual 1959 Topps uncut sheet page), I think the claim that unchecked checklists command a premium is greatly exaggerated. Sure, kids marked some checklists, but I’ll bet that more went unmarked than were marked. Not all kids bothered to check off their cards, and even when they did, one checklist would have sufficed, and any duplicates would have gone unmarked.

No, I think that if a checklist is scarce in high grade, it is because of other factors, namely short printing or poor centering. The 1956 and 1957 Topps checklists are scarce, but they were short printed. The 1963 Fleer, 1964 Philadelphia, and 1966 Topps checklists are scarce in high grades, but it is because they are usually off-center.

On the other hand, checklists that are not short prints and that are not known for centering problems do not command much of a premium. The 1961 Topps #198 checklist shown here (also the last card in the set) lists for $65-100 in price guides, but a PSA 7 sells for about $20 on eBay. Even generously doubling that $20 to get a retail price puts it well below the “book value.” The 1960 Topps #132 Redskins team (checklist on back, last card in set) lists for $28-30 in the price guides, but a PSA 7 on eBay goes for $8-10. Likewise for the 1965 Philadelphia #197 checklist: it is $30 in the price guides, but about $8-10 on eBay. What’s more, I think the prices realized are actually inflated by the price guides: if the price guides didn’t overprice them, would they sell for as much as they do?

• Previous: B is for Bowman
• Next: D is for Defensive Players
• All of the ABCs

The Bowman Gum Company printed football cards in 1948 and from 1950 to 1955. On the whole, they are my favorite vintage football cards, and if I were to start my collection over, I would focus on collecting these early Bowmans. Except for the 1953 issue, the cards are attractive, varied, and interesting, and eight sets to me is about the right number to work on.

1948 Bowman

The 1948 Bowman cards are small, nearly square, and black-and-white. The cards picture the current players of the time, and since no one had printed football cards since National Chicle in 1935, every card in the 1948 Bowman set is a rookie card. The cards have no printing on the front, only on the back, a format I really like. Every third card–that is, each card with a number divisible by three–is considered a short print. This, says my old Beckett catalog, is because the sheet they were printed on was “printed in much lesser quantities” than the other two sheets. Judging by PSA’s population report, the “lesser” is accurate, but the “much” is not: PSA has graded about third fewer of the short prints, not enough to justify the 4x to 5x premium that Beckett assigns to them.

1950 Bowman

The 1950 Bowmans are the same size as the 1948 cards, and they look like little oil paintings. Like the 1948 cards, they have printing only on the back. 1950 was the year that the All-American Football Conference folded and three of its teams–the Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns, and San Francisco 49ers–joined the NFL. Because no major card company had printed cards of AAFC players, several of the stars from the AAFC made their football card debut in the 1950 Bowman set. Of the 10 Hall of Fame players whose rookie cards appear in the 1950 Bowman set, 6 came from the AAFC, and 4 of those 6 played for the Browns.

The Los Angeles Rams were the first team to put a logo on their helmets, and this might be why most of the Rams are wearing helmets on their 1950 Bowman cards. The artist who colored the cards took liberties with the colors, however. On the cards the Rams’ horns appear white in the front and yellow in back, but on the actual helmets the horns did not change color somewhere in the middle.

1951 Bowman

In 1951, Bowman enlarged the cards and put the player’s name and team logo on the front. The logos overwhelm the cards a bit, but logos were more intricate back then, and they needed to be large to show the detail. (See the Lions and Giants logos, for example.) Though attractive, the 1951 set seems to be less popular than the 1950 and 1952 sets, perhaps because it has fewer rookie cards of prominent players.

1952 Bowman Large

In 1952, Bowman released two sets of football cards, identical except for their size. An article in the PSA Library provides a detailed description of the 1952 Large set. In addition to the rookie cards of several Hall of Fame players, the set includes the rookie cards of three Hall of Fame coaches: George Halas, Paul Brown, and Steve Owen. Some cards in the set are challenging to find in high grades: cards with numbers divisible by 9 and the cards immediately following them (i.e., 10, 19, 28, …) are reportedly short prints, and PSA’s population report indicates that some of the other cards (#70, Gene Schroeder, for example) are actually as scarce as the designated short prints.

The PSA article says that the most valuable card in the set is #144, Jim Lansford. The article is correct: the price guides list the card at 2-to-5 times the value of the next most valuable card. Why? Well, the price guides say, not only is the Lansford a short print, but it’s the dreaded last card in the set! This to me is another example of where the guides are off base, since numerous other cards in the set are at least as scarce as the Lansford. (For more “last card” silliness, see my 1959 Topps virtual uncut sheet.)

1952 Bowman Small

The 1952 Bowman Small cards, except for their size, are identical to the Large cards. The PSA library also has an article on this set. It appears that Bowman printed fewer Smalls than Larges, but collectors evidently prefer the large format, because the Larges, in general, command higher prices. Because they fit differently on the sheet, the Smalls do not have the same distribution as the Larges, and no Smalls are designated short prints.

1953 Bowman

Bowman’s follow-up to their classic 1952 sets was the disappointing 1953 Bowman set. In a previous article, I wrote about the ugly white football on the front of the cards, but that’s not the only problem. Outside of the white football, the cards are dark–often too dark to get a good scan–and there is not a single significant rookie card in the set. The card distribution is strange, too: there are 96 cards in the set, and only two of them are Packers.

1954 Bowman

1954 Bowman football cards are the plainest of the old Bowmans, but they are colorful, clear, and attractive. Cards 65-96 were clearly printed in smaller numbers, but my old Beckett has them priced five times higher than the other cards, which is excessive. My favorite is Jim Dooley, in his College All-Star uniform. There is a Whizzer White in the set, but he’s not the Supreme Court justice. There’s an old thread about the Whizzers on the Collectors Universe message board.

1955 Bowman

Finally, there are the 1955 Bowmans. Bowman got experimental again with this set, putting each player on a colored background and giving him an aura. All of the players on a given team have the same colored background: the background for the Packers is yellow, for example, and the background for the Giants is green. I like the uniformity that the background brings to this set. In 1953 and 1954, Bowman put some players on solid color backgrounds, some on geometric backgrounds, and some in front of trees and shrubs.

In 1956, Topps bought Bowman Gum, and Bowman’s run of football cards ended. Now that I think of it, don’t 1956 Topps football cards look like a hybrid of 1955 Bowman and 1955 Topps cards? The 1956 Topps cards have the player on a colored background, with a bit of an aura, and the logo box looks just like the one on the 1955 Topps All-Americans.

• Previous: A is for All-Americans
• Next: C is for Checklists
• All of the ABCs

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

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.

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.

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

You know a collector loves his cards when he takes the time to scan each card and comment on it. The PSA Set Registry allows collectors to attach scans and comments to the cards they register, but not many collectors take advantage of this feature.

A couple of collectors’ vintage football sets are worth a look: Wolfbear’s 1962 Fleer set and Frank Evanov’s retired 1964 Philadelphia set. Each collector has provided a description of the set, scans of each card, and comments for each card. (If a comment appears truncated, hold your cursor over it to see the whole thing.) Did you know that Robert Brooks was a “a mahjong enthusiast and an accomplished bassoonist”? I didn’t, either!

Yesterday I added the 1959 Bell Brand Rams set to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Like the 1960 Bell Brand Rams, these cards were distributed in packages of Bell Brand potato chips and corn chips, and they are difficult to find. The cards are sturdy and attractive, with a high-gloss finish unlike other issues of the time, but many of them were cut off-center. Each card features a facsimile of the player’s autograph, a nice touch except that some autographs are tiny relative to the size of the cards.

The 1959 set includes a pre-rookie card of hall-of-fame coach Sid Gillman. In 1960 Gillman moved to the Los Angeles Chargers of the new American Football League, and his “official” rookie card, a 1960 Fleer, is with the Chargers. Why is it his official rookie card? That’s debatable, but it is generally accepted that a rookie card must have been printed by a major card company, and cards from regional issues such as Bell Brand are not considered for rookie cardism.

Of course, a player’s rookie card would be more accurately called his first card. I often get emails saying “you say that so-and-so’s rookie card was 19xx, but he was a rookie in 19yy.” And so I have to explain. Oh well, it’s too late to change it now.

I’ve settled on a few eBay sellers for sports card and mailing supplies, and I thought I’d pass them on. Columbia Sports Card has all the card holders, pages, cases, and bags you can imagine, and their prices on Card Saver 1′s and Card Saver 2′s are the best I’ve found.

ShopFamilyFun has great deals on bubble envelopes–they’re way cheaper than Office Max and the like. Some other places on eBay sell thin envelopes that seal poorly, but those that ShopFamilyFun sells are high quality.

Finally, since postage keeps going up, it’s nice to save a buck here and there on stamps. For this I sometimes buy discount postage and use that on my bubble envelopes. Discount postage is just old stamps in denominations that are no longer commonly used. (I am not a stamp collector, but I assume discount postage is to stamp collectors what “modern crap” is to card collectors.) Since postage for bubble envelopes typically adds up to odd amounts, anyway, a few of the old stamps will work just fine. And they’re fun to look at, just like old cards.