Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
“How can you say you’ve got the whole set when you haven’t got what it came in?” Here’s Ed Henderson’s look at the collectibility of wrappers from the November 1992 issue of Baseball Cards Magazine.
PS: I’d love to see a resurgence of multi-page hobby writing like this today.
So many of us overlook card backs in this day of hard plastic card encapsulation and grading, so I was super happy to find an article dedicated to them while perusing the September 1991 issue of Baseball Cards Magazine.
Jim McLauchlin penned an article titled “Card Backs,” in which he celebrated the reverse side of cards. He kicked it off by stating that he likes card backs more than he likes card fronts! Here are the first two pages of the article.
He talks about the plethora of data that has been included on them, chats about some growing pains in card back design in our hobby’s history before digging into the real story, the specific card back highlights over the past 50 years of sports cards that he jokingly called “the first quasi annual Sy Berger Awards for Card Back Excellence (or Lack Thereof).”
I thought the Set Awards were so well-researched and accurate that they deserved to be shared with folks who don’t have junk-wax-era card magazine back issues, so I’ll share a highlight card from many of the categories before sharing the rest of the article.
He noted their incredible variety.
I’ll also note that Guernsey’s sold a lot of original card cartoon art in the 1989 Topps Auction.
Leisure-time activities.
Anything by Upper Deck.
1955 Bowman Baseball.
1990-91 Pro Set Hockey for using terms like rugged blue liners, crafty blue liners, veteran blue liners, and bruising blue liners.
1961 Fleer Football.
Puzzles.
Classic.
1990 Score Football Johnny Johnson.
1975 Topps Carlton Fisk.
1958 Topps Sandy Koufax.
1971 Topps Football Spider Lockhart.
He challenged readers to find a Joe Nuxhall card that didn’t say he was the youngest player in the majors.
1990 Pro Set Football Chris Singleton.
1971 Topps Football Charlie Krueger.
1958 Topps Stan Lopata.
1963 Topps Dick Radatz.
1974-75 Topps Basketball Louis Dampier.
1965 Topps Mike De La Hoz.
1951 Bowman Leo Nomellini.
This 1991 Classic Basketball Draft Picks advertisement takes me back.
We all wanted that Larry Johnson card, thinking it’d be worth a million bucks, but it turns out they printed 450k sets (not exactly a limited production, eh?)!
PS: Here’s the cover of the September 1991 edition of Baseball Cards Magazine, from which I scanned the ad.
The February 1993 issue of Baseball Cards feature called Readers’ Choice not only had a reader call (incorrectly, IMHO) the 1951 Bowman Paul Richards card the worst baseball card of all time, but it also featured this gem from Dan Tisdale about a pair of 1974 Topps football cards.
Here’s each card in full color. What do you think? Are these the worst football cards? Lineman didn’t get the love from Topps in the ’70s!
The February 1993 issue of Baseball Cards featured a section called Readers’ Choice, but I’m going to have to disagree with Eric Hoffman on this one!
The 1951 Bowman #195 Paul Richards card is the only cartoon image in the 324-card set.
I’ve read that the most common theory concerning the card was that Richards wasn’t named the manager of the Sox until the Bowman cards were nearly ready to print and because Richards retired as an MLB player in 1946 (he was a player-manager with the Buffalo Bisons of the International League from 1947-49), Bowman didn’t have any recent or suitable photos of Richards to colorize, so they had one of their artists do a last-second drawing.
The Premier Issue of Baseball Cards was released in the Spring of 1981 as “the complete sports collectors’ magazine,” the team behind it introduced themselves with this great piece.
Bob Lemke was always known to make great cards, so I presume he designed these. Unfortunately, he died in 2017, but his blog remains online.
Here’s the cover of the issue, too.
I’ve been reviewing my Baseball Cards magazine collection from late 1992 and have been seeing Studio cards everywhere. Hello nostalgia!
Here’s the cover of the December issue.
And this ad was on the back of the October and December issues in 1992; I might need to pick up a few packs.
