Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Lou Creekmur, a hall-of-fame offensive lineman, died last week. He played on the outstanding Detroit Lions teams of the 1950’s.

Pictured here is Creekmur’s rookie card, a 1951 Bowman. The back of the card says he was obtained by the Lions from the “frozen player pool,” which I had to look up. The frozen player pool, it turns out, was where the players from the AAFC were placed when that league folded, and the NFL had a special draft from the pool in 1950. Creekmur did not actually play in the AAFC, but both the Philadelphia Eagles from the NFL and Los Angeles Dons from the AAFC had drafted him in 1948, and evidently the Eagles did not still have the rights to him in 1950. (Instead of playing pro football in 1948, Creekmur stayed in school and got his masters.)

The Lions also obtained Bob “Hunchy” Hoernschemeyer from the frozen player pool. That doesn’t have a lot to do with Lou Creekmur, but Hunchy Hoernschemeyer is a great name, so I wanted to mention him.

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This might be common knowledge among old football fans, but I learned today that the man on this 1974 Topps card, Brian Dowling, was the inspiration for the character B.D. in the Doonesbury comic strip. Dowling was the star quarterback at Yale during the time that Gary Trudeau, Doonesbury’s creator, attended school there.

Though Dowling had a stellar high school and college career, he got significant playing time only one season in the NFL. To my knowledge, this is his only football card.

According to his Wikipedia article, B.D. never removed his helmet, making excuses that his ears stuck out or that he had bad hair. Perhaps this was inspired by Dowling, too: his hair indeed looks a bit unruly!

Search for Brian Dowling cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s Cards

Steve Liskey, from The Cowboys Guide, recently asked me if I planned to add scans of the backs of the cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. My first thought was “Are you out of your mind, Steve?” But then I told him that scanning just the fronts has taken an enormous amount of time, so I will probably never get to the backs. (Another visitor had a more modest suggestion: providing a single example of a card back for each set. Now that sounds like something I can accomplish–someday.)

It turned out, though, that Steve was particularly interested in the backs of 1966 Philadelphia cards. Why? Well, because as shown on the Dennis Claridge card to the right, each card in the 1966 Philly set has a player pictured on the back who is not the player on the front. (That’s Roman Gabriel on the back of the Claridge card.) Steve collects Dallas Cowboys cards, of course, and he wanted to know which cards have a Cowboy on the back.

Now that’s a serious collector, and I understand completely the desire–no, the need–to get every one of whatever type of cards you collect. If you collect a certain team, of course you want the cards that picture your team’s players on the back. So what I will probably do–again, someday–is note which players appear on the backs of the 1966 Philly cards so that the cards show up in searches for the players and their teams.

It had occurred to me even before Steve wrote that a player collector might want any cards on which his player was pictured, whether the player was identified on the card or not. That’s why, for each 1966 Philadelphia team play card, I have added the names of all the players appearing in the action on the front of the card. For example, for the Cowboys play card shown here, I included all five players pictured–three Cowboys and two Giants–in the list of players appearing on the card.

While adding players for the team play cards, I noticed that some of the players don’t appear on cards of their own. For example, to my knowledge, the Cowboys play card above is the only card on which Jerry Rhome appears. (Jerry is the holder for the kick.) I sell a lot of cards to players’ friends and relatives, and I suspect that this extra information will someday help a player’s grandson find his granddad on a card he didn’t know existed.

Search for 1966 Philadelphia cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s cards.

There are two versions of 1954 Bowman football card number 97. My Beckett price guide calls them “97A Tom Finnin ERR” and “97B Tom Finnan COR.” PSA lists the two versions as “Tom Finnin (incorrectly spelled)” and “Tom Finnan” in their price guide, and in their population report they say the two versions are “Tom Finnin – Wrong Last Name On Back” and “Tom Finnan – Correct Last Name On Back.” SGC‘s population report says “TOM FINNAN – Error ‘Finnin’ Reverse” and “TOM FINNAN.”

So which is right? As it turns out, none of the above.

Indeed, one version of the card says Tom Finnan on both sides, and the other says Tom Finnan on the front and Tom Finnin on the back. But according to nfl.com, databasefootball.com, and pro-football-reference.com, the correct spelling of Tom’s last name is Finnin. So both cards are error cards: one is wrong on both sides, and one is wrong on just the front.

So which version of the card is harder to find? My old Beckett says “Tom Finnin ERR” is worth $60 and “Tom Finnan COR” is worth $8 in near mint condition. PSA’s price guide says a PSA 7 “Tom Finnin (incorrectly spelled)” is worth $75 and “Tom Finnan” is worth $14. PSA’s population report says that they have graded three times as many “Tom Finnan – Correct Last Name On Back” cards as “Tom Finnin – Wrong Last Name On Back” card. But then I have an example with Finnin on the back that PSA has labeled “ERROR-TOM FINNAN.” That label doesn’t match either of the versions listed in PSA’s population report.

It appears that the card with “Finnan” on the back is more common than the one with “Finnin” on the back. But with all the confusion over the two versions of the card, it’s hard to say how scarce the latter card really is.

Search for 1954 Bowman cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s Cards

Most of us have taken photos in which our subjects appear to have trees growing out of their heads. We shouldn’t feel bad: the professional photographers for sports cards sometimes miss things in the background, too. Here are a few cards with funny stuff happening behind the players.

First we have Bart Starr’s 1961 Fleer card. A stadium light in the background makes Bart appear to have a knob on his head, and there’s a little man with a machine gun shooting Bart in the neck. Fleer also got the Packers’ logo backward, as they did on all of the Packers cards in 1961.

Next up is a 1965 Philadelphia Bob DeMarco card, in which Bob appears to have a few extra appendages. Bob doesn’t seemed bothered by it.

Finally, we have a 1960 Topps Leo Nomellini card, with a couple of Leo’s Lilliputian teammates praising him. Leo, focused on the camera and accustomed to adulation, is ignoring them.

Today I put together another “virtual uncut sheet” page, this time for 1961 Fleer second series sheets. The 1961 Fleer second series contains cards from the eight AFL teams of the time, including rookie cards of Jim Otto and Don Maynard. It also includes one card with a mistaken identity.

While the price guides do not designate any 1961 Fleer cards as short prints, it is clear that some cards are much scarcer than others in high grade. Uncut sheets can show why some cards are tougher than others.

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.

Earlier this week, via the Remember the Rams blog, I came across the Eddie Meador Hall of Fame Nomination site. The site is well-done and thorough–did you know that he worked in an Arkansas pickle plant during college?–and it’s clear that his friends and family are very devoted to him.

Meador played mostly before my time, and until I read his Awards and Statistics page, I didn’t know how good he had been. Meador’s rookie card, a 1963 Topps, is relatively easy to find, and it is inexpensive for a rookie card of a hall-of-fame candidate. Meador also had three cards issued before his rookie card: 1959 Bell Brand, 1960 Bell Brand, and 1962 Post Cereal, all of which are challenging to find. I can’t think of another other player with three “pre-rookie” cards, so if he does make the hall-of-fame, I’ll have to add a new section to my pre-rookie card page.

Altogether, Meador appeared on at least eleven cards, a large number for a defensive player in the 1960’s. The card pictured here is his 1960 Bell Brand Potato Chips card.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Ed Meador cards, 1960 Bell Brand Rams
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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!