Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

There is a great thread going in the Collectors Universe forums about favorite “combo” cards. I had not heard the term before, but it appears that combo cards are simply cards that feature more than one player. (Team cards don’t count, because they’re, you know, team cards.) Some of the cards posted in the CU thread have been autographed by all of the players–very cool.

Most of the cards posted in the CU thread are baseball cards, which isn’t surprising, since the card companies printed far more baseball cards than cards from other sports. What does strike me, though, is how few combo vintage football cards there are. The 1968 KDKA Steelers set is composed entirely of combo cards, but that is a minor regional set. Beyond that, I can think of only a few combos: the 1955 Topps All-American Four Horsemen card, the 1966 Philadelphia Morrall/Scholtz and Gabriel/Bass cards, League Leader and All-Pro cards in some of the 1970s Topps sets, and 1969 Topps 4-in-1 cards, which were actually meant to be separated into four stamps. Of these, only the Four Horsemen, Morrall/Scholtz, and Gabriel/Bass–a grand total of three cards–picture multiple players in the same image.

Vintage baseball cards, on the other hand, feature plenty of multi-player images. Some of the baseball cards posted in the CU thread are batting duos and trios from the same team: Aaron and Matthews; Brock and Flood; Schmidt, Rose, and Bowa. Where are all the football cards like this? Where are Unitas and Berry, Hornung and Taylor, Morris and Csonka, the Million Dollar Backfield, the Fearsome Foursome, and the Purple People Eaters? The football card folks had no imagination.

Some combo baseball cards even picture players from different teams in the same image. There’s Aaron and Mays; Banks and Aaron; Brett and Carew; Killebrew, Mays, and Mantle; on and on. I imagine that some of the multi-player baseball images were pieced together from multiple photos, but how many football cards picture players from different teams standing next to one another? Zero that I can think of. There have been Pro Bowls every year since 1951, but where are the cards of dream backfields, the league’s meanest linebackers, or even dueling punters? Someone must have taken photos–why didn’t the photos make it onto cards?

Oh well, I guess I have a little baseball card envy today. If you can think of more combo football cards, let me know.

• Search eBay for: Four Horsemen, Mays and Mantle, Banks and Aaron
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1955 Topps All-Americans, 1966 Philadelphia

Over the weekend I added 1974 Parker Brothers cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These fifty cards were pieces in a game called Parker Brothers Pro Draft. They were printed by Topps for Parker Brothers, and they closely resemble 1974 Topps regular issue cards. A message board thread at tradingcardcentral.com has some nice photos of the game. (Note that the box cover pictures 1973 Topps cards, not 1974.)

The object of the Pro Draft game was to assemble a complete starting offensive lineup, so the set of Parker Brothers includes only offensive players: five quarterbacks, five tight ends, five centers, ten running backs, eight guards, eight tackles, and nine wide receivers. (Topps labeled Dan Dierdorf a guard, though he played tackle from 1972 to 1981.) The cards are not ordered sequentially; they have the same numbers as the corresponding cards in the regular 1974 Topps set. The only differences between the Parker Brothers cards and the Topps cards are:

• Six of the Parker Brothers cards have different images on the front than their counterparts in the Topps set.
• Cards from early editions of the Pro Draft game have 1972 stats on the back instead of 1973 stats.
• Cards from early editions of the game also have two asterisks in the copyright line on the back, whereas their counterparts in the regular Topps set have just one asterisk. (Complicating matters, some of the regular 1974 Topps cards also have two asterisks in the copyright line, but those cards don’t have counterparts in the Parker Brothers set. According to Beckett.com, the regular Topps cards with two asterisks are 26, 129, 130, 156, 162, 219, 265-364, 367-422, and 424-528.)
• Cards from late editions of the Pro Draft game have 1973 stats and one asterisk on the back. Except for the six that have different pictures on the front, the late edition Parker Brothers cards are indistinguishable from the regular 1974 Topps cards.

Here are the six cards whose fronts differ between the Parker Brothers set and the regular 1974 Topps set. Click on any picture to see a slightly bigger image.

Number	1974 Parker Brothers	1974 Topps
23
49
116
124
126
127

Here are examples of the backs. The back on the left appeared on Parker Brothers cards in early editions of the game. The back on the right appeared on regular 1974 Topps cards and on Parker Brothers cards in late editions of the game.

This is a picture of an uncut sheet of 1974 Topps cards that my friend cardbender posted on photobucket. The cards in the block marked in orange correspond to the fifty cards in the Parker Brothers set. You can see that three cards in the block are All Pro cards, and three are action cards, oriented horizontally. These are the six cards that Topps changed for the Parker Brothers set.

Though the Parker Brothers cards are less common than the regular 1974 Topps cards, they don’t appear to sell for a premium. I’m sure that collectors often don’t recognize them; in fact, before writing this article, I went through my own 1974 Topps set and found that three of the cards were actually Parker Brothers cards. You can find some Parker Brothers cards correctly identified on eBay, and you can also find some hiding among the 1974 Topps cards. For most of the cards–all but the six pictured above–you need to see the backs to identify them. Wheatstatecards is one seller who has some unidentified Parker Brothers cards. He includes scans of the card backs in all of his listings, so you can peruse his 1974 Topps listings and look for Parker Brothers cards. I rummaged for a few minutes and found these: Ed Flanagan, John Niland, Dan Dierdorf, Bob Hayes, Gene Upshaw, and Chuck Foreman.

Occasionally you will see uncut sheets of vintage cards up for sale. Studying uncut sheets can give you insight into why some cards are much harder to find than others. For example, by looking at the uncut sheets for a set, you can see why some cards are considered short prints or double prints. For most sets, the price guides indicate which cards are short prints or double prints, and they adjust the cards’ prices accordingly. I say most, because I believe some short prints are not documented–those in the old Philadelphia sets, for instance.

(Image from legendaryauctions.com; click on it to see whole sheet.)

Short prints and double prints are just part of the story. A card’s position on an uncut sheet can also affect its scarcity, because cards on the corners and edges of the sheets were more likely to be damaged in production. I have not seen this factored into price guides’ prices, though: if two common cards were printed in equal numbers, the price guides will usually–if not always–assign them the same price.

The price guides do assign higher prices to the first and last cards in a set, applying the theory that the first and last cards generally have more wear than the other cards. Supposedly, lots of kids sorted their cards into numerical order, put rubber bands around them, and banged them around. In practice, though, I find that first and last cards aren’t noticeably scarcer in high grades than the other cards, unless they happened to be on the corners and edges of the sheets.

A recent–and timely!–thread in the Collectors Universe forums includes pictures of numerous uncut baseball card sheets and a nice discussion about short prints and double prints. The thread shows the patterns that the card companies used when arranging cards from sets of different sizes on the sheets. Depending on the size of the set (or series within a set), the card companies repeated rows of cards on the sheets in different patterns. I recommend reading the thread.

Pictured here is the card I always use as an example of one that is scarce because of its position on the sheet. It’s a 1960 Fleer Jim Woodward card (his name is misspelled), and it was in the bottom-left corner of the sheet. The Woodward is easily the toughest card in the set–PSA has graded only four of them 7 or better–and a PSA 8 would sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Most other PSA 8 1960 Fleer commons sell for $10-20.

Over the past year, I have put together a number of “virtual” uncut sheets in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, including one for the 1960 Fleer set. I have included a little discussion for each sheet, as well. Rather than repeat the information here, I’ll just point you to the pages for the sheets:

• 1959 Topps
• 1960 Fleer
• 1960 Topps
• 1961 Fleer
• 1963 Fleer
• 1966 Philadelphia
• 1968 Topps
• 1969 Topps
• 1970 Topps Super

Here are more of the ABCs:

• Previous: T is for Topps, Part 4: the 1970s
• Next: V is for Values
• All of the ABCs

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.

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.

I found this “customized” 1962 Topps Jim Ringo card buried in my junk card drawer today. The Packers traded Ringo to the Eagles after the 1963 season (because he asked for a raise, according to a Packers legend), and whoever owned this card adjusted it for the trade. It reminded me of a thread in the Collectors Universe forums about cards that kids had “improved.” A couple are pretty funny–check them out!

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.

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.