Nearmint’s Vintage Football Card Blog

I recently added a couple of small enhancements to my eBay Sports Card Finder. First, there’s now a link, labeled “th,” from each eBay listing to Toolhaus.org. Toolhaus filters out all of the positive feedback for a seller, and shows you just the seller’s negative and neutral feedback.

For the sake of speed, picking a “th” link in the Sports Card Finder brings up a Toolhaus page showing three months of feedback for the seller. You can see older feedback by picking links on the Toolhaus page. Try it out.

The second enhancement is that you can now create an RSS feed for any auction search. When you register the feed with an RSS reader, it will notify you of new auctions that match your search. You will need an RSS reader, but there are plenty of free ones out there. I use Google Reader, but Yahoo, MSN, Windows Live, and other portals provide them, as well.

To create an RSS feed and register it with an RSS reader, first do your search in the Sports Card Finder, then pick the Subscribe button on the bottom of the page. It will bring up a long list of RSS readers. Choose the reader you use, and follow the instructions it presents.

Today I added 1975 Wonder Bread cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The cards are homely, but they’re cheap: you can find most of them on eBay for a dollar or two.

There are only twenty-four cards in the set, so not all teams are represented. There are no Bills, Falcons, Cardinals, Colts, Oilers, or Saints in the set. That seems odd, unless they didn’t sell Wonder Bread in those teams’ cities. Some cards have red borders and some have blue. At first I assumed that red represented one conference and blue represented the other, but that turned out not to be the case. As far as I can tell, the border color is random.

The backs of the cards contain the players’ stats and short quizzes. One question I saw was “What would happen if after a kickoff the ball deflates in flight?” Do you suppose that’s ever happened? Well if it did, the referee would get a new ball and it would be re-kicked, according to John Mendenhall’s card.

The card backs also say that Topps printed the cards. Like the regular 1975 Topps cards, the Wonder Bread cards have no team logos on them, and the two helmets that appear in the images are airbrushed. The cards don’t even have the teams’ cities on them. It’s not much of a set, I’m afraid, though I imagine that player and team collectors would be interested in individual cards. The little quizzes are the best part!

As I reported earlier, a few weeks ago I bought a set of 1972 Sunoco Stamps, and now I’m scanning them for the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Yesterday I did the Cincinnati Bengals and Cleveland Browns. As I’ve said, overall, I’m not fond of the images used in the set. The stamps are small, and because the images are mostly action shots, you can’t see much of the players.

When scanning the Browns cards, though, I noticed that several of the action shots pictured the Browns in a mud game. Now these I like! I love watching weather games, be they in snow, rain, mud, or wind. For one thing, I prefer defensive battles to offensive shows, and bad weather slows the offenses down. For another, it’s just fun to see guys flopping around in the mud. To me, the weather is part of the game, and playing in a dome is playing something short of real football. I’ll take a mud game in Cleveland or a snow game in Buffalo over a dome game anytime.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Today I assembled another virtual uncut sheet, this time for 1966 Philadelphia football cards. Those who collect the set know that some cards are much tougher than others. It appears that the cards in some rows were short printed.

(Click on the image to see the sheet.)