Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

This uncut sheet of 1946 Sears Cleveland Browns cards was on eBay last week. 1946 was the Browns’ first year; they were part of the new eight-team All-American Football Conference. The Browns were the AAFC champions all four years of the league’s existence, 1946-1949, and they joined the NFL when the AAFC folded in 1950. As far as I know, these Sears cards were the only cards printed of an AAFC team.

Conspicuously absent from this set are Marion Motley and Bill Willis, African American stars who later made the Pro Football Hall of Fame. According to Willis’s Wikipedia page, the two did not play in the Browns’ 1946 game against the Miami Seahawks, because they were forbidden by law to play against white players in Miami.

This small Sears set contains pre-rookie cards of three other Hall of Fame players: Otto Graham, Dante Lavelli, and Frank Gatski. (For more pre-rookie cards, see my pre-rookie card page.) The black-and-white head shots are nice, but otherwise the cards are unremarkable: all eight have the same ad on the front and the team’s 1946 schedule on the back.

The set is rare–these particular cards are the first I have seen–so it is hard to assign a value to the cards. The highest bid in this auction was $2000, and it did not meet the seller’s reserve. Perhaps the seller will list it again with a better description and a scan that shows the corners of the sheet.

For more interesting auctions, see my Interesting eBay Auctions page.

Here’s another 1961 Lake to Lake Packers card that fetched a strong price. It’s a Larry Hickman card, one of the short prints, and it sold for $97.28, despite having paper loss on the back. Considering the paper loss, I would guess that a grading company would grade it G or VG.

As I wrote in K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets, the short prints in the Lake to Lake set are far more difficult to find than the regular prints. The set is popular among old Packers fans, so when the short prints come up for auction, they usually do well. You can see the full set of Lake to Lake Packers cards, including all of the short prints, in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Here are some interesting items that were recently listed on eBay: print blocks that were used to print 1961 Lake to Lake Packers football cards. The 1961 Lake to Lake Willie Wood card is a short print and also a pre-rookie card of Wood. (His rookie card is a 1963 Topps.) The Lake to Lake Emlen Tunnell card is his only card with the Packers, though he spent three years with the team. Tunnell, who is now in the Hall of Fame, had been a star with the Giants, and it is odd that neither Topps nor Fleer printed a card of him in his last years in the league.

I don’t know much about printing, so I don’t know how people printed cards with these blocks. I do know that half of the Lake to Lake cards were severely short-printed, and four of the five blocks the seller had for sale were for short prints. Why the cards were so short printed is a mystery to me; unfortunately, the print blocks aren’t giving me any clues.

I made a few small improvements to my eBay Sports Card Finder today. The changes provide more information to help you decide whether to click through to the auctions.

• For auction listings, added a field for number of bids.
• For each listing, added the seller’s feedback score and positive feedback percentage.
• Turned the seller name and feedback score fields into links that will take you to the appropriate eBay pages.

Check it out–comments are welcome.

Today a collector on the Collectors Universe message boards posted pictures of 5 uncut panels of 1952 Wheaties Champions cards. From the looks of it, his panels are in great shape. The Wheaties Champions set is a multi-sport set, and it includes women as well as men. There are 10 cards on each panel, so the collector has 50 of the 60 cards in the set.

There are thirty athletes in the set, with each athlete appearing on both a portrait card and an “in action” card. Six of the athletes are football players: Doak Walker, Otto Graham, John Lujack, Tom Fears, Glenn Davis, and Bob Waterfield. I haven’t yet added the football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but since there are only a few of them, I’ll try to do that sometime soon. There is currently a full set listed on eBay, but I’ll probably pick up individual cards as they become available. Surprisingly, though they were hand-cut from the boxes, most of the cards I see are in pretty good condition. I infer from this that people saved the full boxes, and the cards I’m seeing were cut from boxes relatively recently.

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.

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.

As I wrote in O is for Oddball, I don’t collect many oddball items. This full set of 1963 Nalley’s CFL coins is pretty darn cool, though, and if I had $12,000 to burn, I’d grab it. The seller has a 1964 set of Nalley’s coins up for auction, also.

I recognize a few names from NFL teams. Dave Mann, who played for the Chicago Cardinals in the 1950′s, finished his pro career with the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL. Bud Grant, Joe Kapp, and Bobby Walden jumped from the CFL to the NFL later in the 1960′s.

Bronko Nagurski, Jr., also appears in the 1963 Nalley’s set. He played eight years for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

You can also find lots of individual 1963 and 1964 Nalley’s CFL coins on eBay. For more interesting vintage football auctions, see the Interesting eBay Auctions tab.

eBay seller “batnbal” is auctioning off some old San Diego Chargers items that I’ve never seen before. I thought I’d point them out.

1961 Golden Tulip Chargers cards were distributed in bags of Golden Tulip potato chips. As I wrote in K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets, you could send in five Golden Tulip cards of the same player for a 8×10 photo of a San Diego Charger. The cards themselves are scarce, and this is the first time I’ve seen any of the photos. The seller has two: the Charlie Flowers pictured here, and Ron Nery. I have not seen the full list of photos, but there are 22 cards in the Golden Tulip set, so perhaps there are also 22 photos. If you sent in five Ron Nery cards, would you get a Ron Nery poster? Sounds logical, but I have no idea.

The seller also has three 1962 Golden Arrow Dairy San Diego Chargers milk bottle caps up for auction: Jim Bates, Emil Karras, and Dick Harris. These aren’t pretty: they’re milk-stained, and they have staples in them. I suspect they’re rare, though–who would have kept them?–and they’re sure to sell to a hardcore Chargers fan or a collector who’s gotta have it all. The seller included a little write-up for each player, so it’s worth checking out the auctions just for that.

There’s a fun thread developing on the Collectors Universe message boards: collectors there are posting their worst miscut cards. Here’s my entry, a 1963 Topps Tom Bettis with -5/105 centering. It’s nowhere near as bad as the other cards posted, though. Check out the severely miscut ones.

Just out of curiosity, I did a little search for “miscut” on eBay. Most of the results are ordinary miscuts like my Bettis card, but at the moment there’s a half-and-half baseball card and a hockey card that shows parts of four cards. Here are the searches: baseball, hockey, football.

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.

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!

Today I put a nice group of ungraded 1971 Topps cards up for sale. Included is the comical card on the right. The photographer’s previous experience was evidently with the DMV.

Even though Topps was printing these for kids, it amazes me that photos like this made it onto the cards. Was film too expensive to take more than one shot? When they saw this, wouldn’t they have said oops, better grab a picture from last year instead? Or maybe with their airbrushing skills, they could have given poor Gerry some eyes?