Category Archives: Card Compared to 75

1975 Topps, 1976 SSPC, Card Compared to 75

Card Spotlight: 1976 SSPC Countdown Oscar Gamble 526 (#25)

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Built-in Traded Set.

This is the last card of Oscar Gamble in an Indians uniform. The back of the card highlights his trade to the New York Yankees in exchange for Pat Dobson. In his career, Gamble switched teams eight times (including two repeats: the Yankees and White Sox).

SSPC took full advantage of the timing of their release to include the trades after the 75 season. So the SSPC set is a base and traded set all in one. And that’s why this Oscar Gamble “Traded” card is among my 1976 SSPC favorites: to commemorate the coolness of that idea.

 

1975 Topps, Blogs, Card Compared to 75, Donruss, Upper Deck

Mail Call: 75s in the 90s

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I like seeing how players from the 1975 Topps set show up in other years. And that’s what you’ll find in this post.

I need to start with a classic Bill Buckner card. In Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, Mookie Wilson hit a ball that slipped past Buckner’s legs. The Red Sox eventually lost the series and he was blamed (but nobody really knows what the outcome would’ve been had he made the play). The whole thing was over in 40 seconds. But four years later, Upper Deck still poked fun of it in the 1990 set.

Even today the first thing a search for Bill Buckner World Series pops up is a YouTube video of the event. As time passed and the Red Sox won multiple World Series, most everyone including Bill got over it. He even appeared in a 2011 Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that joked about the incident.

So yeah, the card’s an oddball equivalent of a stand-up joke, but it also reminds me of perseverance and that’s why I like it. Winning is great but dealing with adversity really tests a person. How many people could’ve dealt with making a similar public mistake?

Cards and baseball are sometimes about more than just cards and baseball.


Buckner’s oddball vs. the real Buckner in 1975

There are other Upper Deck oddballs. You’ve got your footballs mixed with your baseball. And Frank either doing laundry or emptying a bucket of balls.

15 years is impressive for any line of work, let alone playing in the majors. Some don’t make it past a year.  Players from 1975 with the stamina to play into the 90s (like Buckner) quickly dwindle. In 1988, only 35 were still playing and 3 years later there were less than half – Dave Winfield was one of those still in the game:


I like how these cards contrast

A lot of junk wax era cards are just junk. I didn’t collect back then and missed most of it so Bru’s cards were an eye opener. Many of these Upper Deck cards are examples of when both photography and design are excellent. The results can be spectacular even if the cards were overproduced. They include great action shots:


Fans are much closer to the action

But just because you can take stop-action photos doesn’t mean you should use them. Like bad family photos, we just don’t need to see 1989 Upper Deck Charlie Hough’s weird facial expression. I had to pull 1975 Topps Charlie to make it better…

I haven’t owned a single DonRuss card and wasn’t seeking them out. Bru sent some and I won’t turn away any card with 1975 players. The photos in the 1990 DonRuss set are mostly mediocre. But I really like this Griffey – the photo’s good and the color fits in with his uniform. Even the potentially cheesy paint speckles seem to work. So this is my favorite DonRuss card so far:

1975 Topps, 1976 SSPC, Blogs, Card Compared to 75, Upper Deck

Mail Call: Astros Uniforms 75 vs. 89

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I’m always interested in any cards with players from the 1975 Topps set, and Bru from Remember the Astrodome delivered with a stack of cards. That motivated me to organize my cards and find some Astros he could use. It took a while (in between other projects), which explains the month long hiatus here.

I’ll break this mail call into two posts, starting with Astros uniforms. I really liked them growing up. They fit right in with clothes we wore those days (like Ocean Pacific t-shirts). Even today their iconic outfits from the mid-70s and 80s takes me back to those days.

The Astros had tame-looking uniforms in the 75 Topps cards:

They didn’t match my reality of what the Astros wore. It’d take another year to highlight their new threads on cardboard. 1976 SSPC Roger Metzger and 1976 Topps Joe Niekro look like they’re still getting used to their new outfits:

What started me on this path was one of the cards Bru sent. Buddy Bell was an Astro for a year but he was wearing a different outfit than I remembered. After digging into it, turns out there were four incarnations of what are dubbed Tequila Sunrise uniforms. These lasted until 1993 and the 89 Upper Deck card shows him in the third version:

The 1975 Buddy I knew played for the Indians (so he’ll always seem out of place in an Astros uniform):

There’s also a cool page I found on mlb.com with a slideshow of Astros uniforms throughout the years (starting with them as the Colts in 1962). I wasn’t planning a post about uniforms, so thanks for the inspiration and for sending the cards Bru!

1975 Reprint, 1975 Topps, Card Compared to 75, Kmart, Topps

1982 Kmart Baseball Cards

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One of the cool things about collecting cards is finding something shiny that leads you down a new path. I was scanning eBay listings and saw a glitch in my matrix, a Fred Lynn card that was unlike any other I’d seen:

It wasn’t the #622 Fred Lynn rookie card photo that I knew:


Look at Fred’s photo and notice it just looks weird. As in… what’s that white blob below his face?

It shouldn’t have shown up in my card search, but it was mislabeled. It was part of the 1982 Kmart 20th Anniversary AL & NL MVP’s Baseball Picture Cards Bubble Gum Collector’s Series.


Kmart box front

This set was co-branded with Topps – marked as a limited edition. Limited is ironic, there are so many unopened packs for sale it’s akin to the 90s mass overproduction. And that’s awesome because it makes a vintage pack break affordable.

What I like about this set:

  • an full (and likely unedited) rookie card photo of Fred Lynn – no future reprints have this view.
  • includes likely the first 1975 tribute cards
  • it’s cheap… you can get a set for less than 5 bucks including shipping – there’s your blue light special!
  • the experience of opening a pack of 44 “vintage” cards (complete with a stale stick of gum)


Back of box checklist

The 1975 Topps set is my favorite, but I’m not a fan of the shared four player rookie cards. The three rookies per card format in 1973 was pretty good, and then for some reason Topps started cramming in four tiny faces on a card in 1974. So this Lynn card rights that wrong and on its own made it worth getting the set. The only other ’75 reprint in the set is Joe Morgan:

Update: After I wrote this I found another blog post about this card from a while back