In 1977, Topps tried translating their football cards to Spanish and producing and selling them in Mexico. The composition of the 1977 Topps Mexican set was the same as the 1977 Topps football set released in the U.S., but the Mexican cards were printed, packaged, and distributed differently, and they are much scarcer than their U.S. counterparts.
Scott Alpaugh, who collects the 1977 Mexicans, has put together a terrific web site that describes the set in detail. I don’t have anything to add to what Scott says, so I’ll just point you to his site: 1977 Topps Mexican Football Cards.
Pictured here is the 1977 Topps Mexican Golden Richards card. Around the edges you can see the perforations that Scott discussed in his article. Oddly, Topps translated Cowboys to Vaqueros on the front, but not on the back. (Click on the scans to see larger images.)
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.
One problem with collecting rookie cards is that it locks you in to the cards that you will include in your collection. Whether you collect rookie cards of Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, or players from your favorite college or team, there’s not much wiggle room: if you want to complete your collection, you’ll probably have to purchase some cards that aren’t very attractive. Check out Bobby Mitchell’s rookie card, for example. He looks like he’s ordering a five dollar footlong while falling over backward.
One way to avoid this is to choose your own “best card” for each player you want in your collection. A great example of such a personalized collection is RustyWilly’s HOF Portrait Gallery. Rather than collecting whatever happens to be the rookie card of each Hall of Famer, RustyWilly chose a nice head shot of each player. He didn’t limit himself to major sets, either, so he has cards from Kelloggs, Swell, Stop N Go, 7 Eleven, and Wonder Bread. Not only did this give him a wider selection of images to choose from, it allowed him to include Hall of Famers who didn’t appear on cards in major issues, and hence didn’t have rookie cards. (See R is for Rookie Cards for the definition of “rookie card.”)
Clicking on an image in RustyWilly’s gallery brings up large scans of both the front and back of the card. The card backs are a nice feature, since they provide little bios of the Hall of Famers. They’re also a ton of work, which is why I haven’t included them in my own gallery.
RustyWilly also has a Baseball HOF Portrait Gallery. I don’t know much about baseball cards, though, so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
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?
The first set of football cards printed was the 1894 Mayo Cut Plug tobacco card series. The 35-card set, which was distributed in tins of chewing tobacco, includes only college players from Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. There is a nice article about the Mayo cards on The Harvard-Yale Football Gallery, a site dedicated to the Harvard-Yale rivalry. According to the article, one of the Princeton players in the set, “Poe,” was a direct descendant of Edgar Allen Poe. Another card in the set pictures an unnamed Yale player, initially listed as “Anonymous,” but later identified as John Dunlop. The Dunlop card is the rarest card in the set.
This is the oddest oddball set I have ever seen: they are sweepstakes cards given out by the American Oil Company in 1968. A full game piece consisted of two of these cards–one Mr. and one Mrs.–and the object was to find a matching pair of Mr. and Mrs. cards to win a prize. You can see an example game piece (along with other types of American Oil game cards) at TheCowboysGuide.com.
Evidently there are 32 cards in the full set, and the 16 cards in this auction are the common halves. Their matching halves, the ones key to getting prizes (such as the Mr. Dan Reeves card on the Cowboys Guide page), are far scarcer: scarce by design, and scarcer still because they would have been turned in for prizes.
The auction description provides more details (pick the little green VIEW & BID button to open the auction), and you can usually find an assortment of American Oil cards on eBay.
Today’s article in the Uni Watch blog bemoans the disappearance of “shoulder loops” on NFL jerseys. (Scroll down to Getting Loopy On You.) The article prompted me to look through my old cards to find which teams’ uniforms had the loops. As I did that, I realized that my favorite uniforms were the ones with the loops, and the loops were the reason I liked them. Here they are, both on 1964 Topps cards: the Patriots uniform, modeled by Ron Burton, and the Chargers uniform, modeled by Earl Faison.
I believe these 1964 cards show the players in their 1963 uniforms, so these are also the uniforms that the Patriots and Chargers are using as throwbacks this year. The eight original AFL teams are wearing throwback uniforms in several games in 2009 to commemorate their 50th year of play. The Patriots chose their 1963 uniform because they won the AFL East Division that year, and the Chargers chose 1963 because it was the year they won the AFL championship.
According to the Oldest Living Pro Football Players web site, Ralph Kerchival is the oldest living pro player, at nearly 98 years old. He was a back and kicker with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the NFL from 1934 to 1940. In a 1993 interview, Kercheval said that he played on both offense and defense for the Dodgers, and in his rookie year he played for all but five minutes of the entire season. (Don’t miss the cartoon clipping from the Additional Photos section of the interview page.)
Another site, Remember the AFL is dedicated to the American Football League, and it makes the case for 42 ex-AFL players. This list of candidates overlaps only a little with that of Crazy Canton Cuts, so the two sites together promote over 60 candidates.
In 1977, Topps tried translating their football cards to Spanish and producing and selling them in Mexico. The composition of the 1977 Topps Mexican set was the same as the 1977 Topps football set released in the U.S., but the Mexican cards were printed, packaged, and distributed differently, and they are much scarcer than their U.S. counterparts. 
Scott Alpaugh, who collects the 1977 Mexicans, has put together a terrific web site that describes the set in detail. I don’t have anything to add to what Scott says, so I’ll just point you to his site: 1977 Topps Mexican Football Cards. 
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.
The first set of football cards printed was the 1894 Mayo Cut Plug tobacco card series. The 35-card set, which was distributed in tins of chewing tobacco, includes only college players from Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. There is 
