Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
John The September 1992 issue of Baseball Cards Magazine is special because it deep-dives into Upper Deck’s earliest years. One of my favorite things they included was this checklist of all the sets, but primarily all of their promotional-sheet issues.
You can read that they credited Don Butler, with the assistance of Jeff Kurowski and Nigel Spill, with putting it together for Sports Collectors Digest.
Here are two of the sheets pictured in the magazine.
Here’s page 5 of the December 1981 issue of Trader Speaks.
1933 Goudey Babe Ruth cards (#144 and #149) for $200 each! The Gehrig for $50 ain’t too bad either!
And in case you don’t remember, here’s what those Ruth cards look like (both photos are from Robert Edward Auctions).
I’d love to know if a complete (18 + 1 variation) 1959 Bazooka Football Box set run exists in the hobby. Larry Fritsch always said the Chuck Connerly variations were the toughest to track down, but there can only be a few of this Frank Gifford copy that was auctioned off in April 2003.
From a printing perspective, these Bazooka gum boxes first had baseball players on them; football players came later in the fall. The belief is that the Conerly’s, Groza, and Tracy are short prints. That’s mostly a conclusion related to the baseball cards and then football card availability. A forum user wrote, “In early 1959 Topps released a nine card Bazooka baseball card set on the bottom of 25 piece Bazooka gum boxes. The promotion was so popular that they added 14 additional baseball players to the set later in the season. These 14 are short prints. Late in the year, Topps replaced the baseball players on Bazooka boxes with football players. The SP’s are likely ones added later just like the SP’s in the baseball set.”
UPDATE: August 2024. I snapped a photo of a case of football cards while exploring the 2024 National in Cleveland. While perusing the photos in detail while on a business trip, I noticed the following Bazooka Gifford card in one of them!
It seems like the food-issue category is getting more hobby love lately – so here’s a 1962 Jello Baseball Advertising Poster featuring Mickey Mantle.
This example was offered for sale in November 2000. It was described as a 28” x 33” thin-coated stock display poster heralding the availability of baseball cards with JELL-O Gelatin Dessert featuring the most popular figure of his generation, Mickey Mantle.
With ‘Dune: Part Two’ having just been released in theaters, I’d be remiss not to remind everyone of the 1984 Film and that Fleer, of course, made a set of cards for it.
Collect Auctions sold this 12-box sealed case of the 1984 product for $566 in November 2020.
However, one of the bottom seals (where the bottom meets the side) of the tape was torn, and the case had some significant handling wear.
Last week, a collector sold another full case on the Facebook ‘Vintage Wax and Packs’ group, this one with very dried tape, and hence not sealed, for $1500 (the boxes looked super clean and untouched).
Vintage, empty display boxes just weren’t as popular as they are today when, in April 2003, this trio was auctioned off in a lot TOGETHER.
Included were a two-piece red and blue 1951 Bowman 120 Count One-Cent Box, a one-piece red and blue 1952 Bowman 24 Count Five-Cent box, and an incredible two-piece red and green 1952 Topps 24 Count Five-Cent Box.
The 1952 Topps box is particularly rare. It has a blue and white “NEW SERIES” label on the front pane of the bottom of the box.
Here’s the original artwork used as the foundation for the 1957 Topps Football Paul Hornung rookie #151.
The flexichrome, a full-color painting on a black-and-white photograph, is 3-3/8” x 4-3/4”, larger than the finished card. The back of the art piece has working pencil marks and adhesive residue.
The item came from the 1989 Guernsey’s Auction, where Topps sold a large portion of their archives.
