Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
The Halper Collection is pretty legendary, but it’s also shrouded in controversy due to some fake/counterfeit items. I’ve hesitated diving deep into it for that reason. However, rediscovering a March 1997 Sports Card Magazine article on the collection gives me a great baseline from which to start on the blog moving forward.
I started my collector issue series a few weeks back with my article about Mike Aronstein and TCMA. Today, I’ll shift to another hobby pioneer from the 70s known as having had one of the largest personal collections of anyone in the hobby, Larry Fritsch.
Fritsch became a full-time dealer in 1970 when he launched Larry Fritsch Cards, Inc. on May 1st. But Fritsch traced his involvement in the hobby back to 1948 and was a collector first – he built one of the most legendary collections in hobby history. He was known to have bought, traded, and sold cards religiously since childhood.
Larry graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and worked multiple part-time jobs, including one as a train baggage handler, a tax researcher, and in a paper mill, before following his passion in the hobby.
Fritsch operated primarily as a mail-order business with giant catalogs. He advertised his company in many different publications, like The Sporting News. Around 1989, he was selling more than 200k mail-order cards per week.
Larry was the face of the business side of the hobby for over 30 years.
Today, many people know the Fritsch brand for having some incredible unopened material that Larry had bought directly from manufacturers’ end-of-year stock, but he created some significant collector issues.
Fritsch’s first offering was an 18-card set, One-Year Winners, printed in 1977 and sold through his catalog. It featured players “with brief, but often well-known, major league baseball careers.” The first card in the set was Eddie Gaedel, who, along with Pete Gray, had the key cards in the 1977 release. The set was continued with 36 more cards in 1979 and another 64 in 1983 (many of which used unused Topps pictures and were designed similarly to 1966 Topps baseball cards), all continuously numbered. As I said, he was a collector first, so it makes sense that his first set was something the hobby had never seen before.
The Standard Catalog describes this set as “one of the most comprehensive collectors’ issues to features stars of the Negro League…most of the photos are contemporary with the players’ careers from the 1920s into the 1950s, with a few of the segregated leagues’ earlier pioneers also included.” The set’s key cards are Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Moses Fleetwood Walker, Josh Gibson, Willie Wells, and Smoky Joe Williams. If you’re into baseball history, pick up this 119-card set.
The SAMPLE backs are a little more desirable.
From a collector issue perspective, Larry Fritsch Cards key set came out in 1995 when they released a set of 234 cards highlighting the women’s league that the movie “A League of Their Own” made famous. They added a second series in 1996 to bring the set’s total to 340 cards. Later, in 2000, they added a third series with another 72 cards and an updated series of nine cards in 2002.
As a collector first, Fritsch didn’t make reprint sets for a long time because it was against his philosophy. But he said that when a set reached $5k, a lot of folks couldn’t afford them anymore, and he wanted more people to be able to see the cards. An example is the 1982 Fritsch 1957 Spic and Span Reprints.
In the 80s, Larry Fritsch Cards created a few dozen Midwest League minor league sets along with a great minor league card of Kirby Puckett on the Visalia Oaks.
In 1983, Fristch commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Boston Braves’ move to Milwaukee with a 33-card set that included Eddie Mathews and Warren Spahn.
Not only did Fritsch contribute some incredible collector issue sets to the hobby, but he also did a lot to educate it. He contributed to many hobby guides and books like the Sports Collectors Bible series and authored the Baseball Card Alphabetical Handbooks.
The Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards also used his knowledge and collection to detail a lot of obscure and rare cards.
Unfortunately, Larry Fritsch passed away in 2007. Kit Young wrote a wonderful article about his friend in the Sports Collectors Digest.
While flipping through the April 1998 edition of Sports Card Magazine and Price Guide, I stumbled upon a fascinating article authored by T.S. O’Connell titled “Collector Issues” with a subheading that read ‘Once upon a time in the hobby, there weren’t enough cards for collectors to collect (no kidding)… so TCMA, Larry Fritsch, and Mike Cramer filled an important niche.’ It inspired me to write a series of articles as a baseline for future writing, dedicated to these hobby pioneers who gave collectors “something other than good ol’ Topps” cards to collect. In this particular piece, I’ll spotlight Mike Aronstein and his company, TCMA, along with a few of their key sets and cards.
O’Connell wrote that some folks called the 1970s the hobby’s ‘Dark Ages’ because there wasn’t a lot of newly printed material. That’s why collector issues became a thing – card shows were also still a few years away. O’Connell also shared that Fleer’s Robert Laughlin sets, released from 1970-74, showed the hobby had room for more than Topps and probably continued to motivate Fleer to push against the Topps monopoly.
TCMA probably gets the most credit for “championing the collector issue,” according to O’Connell. Aronstein started the company with Tom Collier, so they used their initials “TC” and “MA” to name the company TCMA. Aronstein bought out Collier two years later and changed the company’s name to The Card Memorabilia Associates. They produced hundreds of sets, often in black-and-white and without a license.
The company re-printed older sets, made postcard-size sets of league leaders’ cards, and made a big push into the minor-league market. But, I know them most for their great teams of the past sets; they made over 50 of them from 1974-88. They also produced a few larger sets like “The 1960s,” with 293 cards in 1978, and “The Baseball History Series,” focused on the ’50s with 291 cards – the sets used the 1953 Bowman Color set design. The company was headquartered north of New York City in Westchester County. TCMA eventually sold to Impel Marketing.
Aronstein grew up around Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and collected cards as a kid. While he didn’t hold the first hobby convention, the one he had on March 15, 1970 (with 19 attendees) was the largest meet-up to that point, and you can read all about it in SABR’s Baseball Cards Research Committee article called ‘50 years ago today…‘ Before that, in 1968, Aronstein made a Sports Starts Publishing Company set with his uncle but dropped it because they couldn’t keep up with the demand. Then, with Collier, a hobby friend, Aronstein decided to do reprints of old cards and founded TCMA in 1972. Sports Collectors Digest has a lot more details about Aronstein, the early days of TCMA, and its history in this article, but there are two other stories I want to highlight.
First, in a separate venture in 1975, Aronstein produced the Sports Starts Publishing Company (SSPC) 630-card set, which featured current players. Topps sued and settled, but demand for the ~10k sets that TCMA distributed showed how much room there was in the hobby for competition. And second, because of that success, in 1980, when the Topps monopoly ended, TCMA became the exclusive distributor for Donruss baseball cards.
This set has over 500 cards and was one of TCMA’s first ventures. Because the “set” was issued in 21 series of 24 cards each, the designs have some variety. Most cards are black-and-white except Series 18-19, printed in blue. TCMA reportedly printed ~1000 sets, with the key cards being hobby icons Lou Gehrig and Joe Dimaggio.
These postcards represent one of the longest collectors’ series issued by TCMA. Six series of unnumbered cards were issued, so you will usually see them checklisted alphabetically.
These League Leaders cards were the same postcard size as the All-Time Greats and honored statistical leaders in each league from the 20s through the 50s. The key card is Mantle’s.
This set is one of the pricer sets of cards and featured players on MLB rosters circa 1942-46 when sets weren’t being produced.
I already mentioned that TCMA released a ton of Team Sets; I was really into the 1975 TCMA All-Time New York Yankees set when I returned to the hobby as an adult (they also had sets for the Giants and Dodgers All-Time greats the year)
TCMA produced many great minor league cards, including the 1981 Pawtucket Red Sox Wade Boggs card and the 1981 Rochester Red Wings Cal Ripken Jr. card.
TCMA also produced John Elway’s 1982 Minor League Baseball card and one for Rickey Henderson in 1979, featuring him on the Ogden A’s.
It’s not always easy to find every TCMA card you want, and I’m not sure there’s a complete checklist of everything they created that’s easily accessible, but the company and its sets are really important in hobby history for influencing the boom that started in the 80s.
I’ll continue to highlight Aronstein, TCMA, and its sets in future articles and deep dives in the future, but first, be on the lookout for collector issues articles focusing on Larry Fritsch and Mike Cramer in the next few weeks.
Happy collecting!
Here’s a rare gem REA offered for sale in 2000: a complete set of 50 never-assembled 1977 Hostess boxes featuring all 150 cards in Mint condition.
Here’s the lot’s complete description from the July 2000 catalog:
The 1977 Hostess set of 150 cards was issued on the bottom of boxes of Hostess snack cake products, with one 3 card panel appearing on the bottom of each box. This complete set of 50 panels is very unusual (and possibly unique) in that they are on 50 complete never assembled boxes. This is what the boxes looked like before they underwent the assembly process into box form. These were obviously saved by someone at Hostess or by the printer. Each box has one three card panel for a total of 150 cards. Set includes many stars and superstars such as Bench, Brett, Brock, Carlton, Fisk, Hunter, Jackson, Munson, Rose, Ryan, Schmidt, Seaver, Yastrzemski and Yount. The boxes range from Nr/Mt to Mt, the cards are in Mint condition. Total 50 boxes (150 cards).
Interestingly, it appears REA may have re-sold the boxes twice, first in the spring of 2010 for $705 and then again the following year, in the spring of 2011 for $823. PSA had just started grading hand-cut panels around that time, so one has to wonder if these ended up being cut up for the registry or re-sale.
Perhaps the biggest mistake a card company can make is depicting the wrong player, but is the 1966 Topps Dick Ellsworth card the worst example? This card mistakenly pictures a teammate who had been deceased for 2 1/2 years.
In 1966, Topps made its most embarrassing blunder by mistakenly picturing Chicago Cubs pitcher Dick Ellsworth’s former teammate, Ken Hubbs, who had tragically died 2½ years earlier in a plane crash. Hubbs, a rookie Gold Glove winner and Rookie of the Year in 1962, perished at 22 while trying to overcome his fear of flying in February 1964.
I can’t imagine Ellsworth, who played for 13 seasons and has Topps cards issued every year between 1960 and 1971, is a big fan of this one. And Topps should have caught it; Ellsworth was a lefty, and the image of Hubbs on Ellsworth’s 1966 Topps card was a carryover of Hubbs from inside the little circle of his 1963 Topps card.
Those who follow me on X/Twitter know that I collect hobby-related books, magazines, periodicals, etc., and that I’m building “The Hobby Library.” In mid-2023, I bought a program from the Fourth Annual National Sports Collectors Convention held in Chicago from July 7-10, 1983.
One of the advertisements inside the program from Fenway Sport Enterprises caught my attention, so I tweeted it out to ask if anyone had one of these Baseball Card Tee Shirts.
The ad shows a Dodgers and Yankees shirt but explains that team shirts were also available featuring the Brewers, Mets, Cardinals, Angles, Red Sox, Phillies, Orioles, Royals, and White Sox. They mentioned using 1983 Topps baseball cards, including update (traded) cards “such as the Billy Martin Yankee card, the Garvey Padres card, and Seaver Mets card.”
In response to my Tweet, SABR Baseball Cards responded with photos of a “Yankees are Topps” shirt they found on Etsy. Notice the Hanes 50/50 tag, just like the ad mentions.
However, the shirt isn’t the same as the young boy’s in the advertisement. The Guidry and Gossage cards are swapped on the bottom, and the Billy Martin card photo on the t-shirt is nothing like his actual 1983 Topps Traded card! So, SABR asked if there could be a Mets shirt somewhere with an ultra-rare Darryl Strawberry rookie card or Seaver that folks don’t have.
I wonder if PSA would grade one of these “cards” cut out from the shirt.
Happy collecting!
Back in September 1991, goober’s auction catalog dedicated a full page to 1912 T202 Hassan Triple Folders, with estimated values that might surprise collectors today. Three decades later, I’m taking a look at what those values were back then—and how much they’ve changed in today’s market.
I’m presuming those card conditions are accurate; here’s an approximate comparison of each lot to the most recent sale on PSA’s Auction Prices Realized page (which isn’t as all-inclusive as it used to be but still a decent guide). And as for inflation, $1,000 in 1991 is approximately $2,314 today.
Generally, the relative prices have held over the last 30 years; happy collecting!