Collector Issue – Post War Cards

Collector Issues Part 3: Mike Cramer

December 31, 2024 by John

This article marks the conclusion of my series on collector issues, which began a few weeks ago with my look at Mike Aronstein and TCMA and was followed by an article about Larry Fritsch. This week, I’ll be looking at Mike Cramer, who, as T.S. O’Connell wrote, “parlayed his initial foray into minor league cards and collector issues into full-fledged licenses with baseball, football, and hockey. In other words, a collector-issue company became one of the big boys, no small feat when considering the size of some of his competitors.”

Hobby Figure Mike Cramer

Cramer was a fan of baseball cards from an early age. The details for his book Cramer’s Choice: Memoir of a Baseball Card Collector Turned Manufacturer note that before high school, he had a mail-order trading card business before founding Pacific Trading Cards.

In his early days, Cramer would buy vending cases of Topps baseball cards and collate sets from them. In a Sports Collectors Daily article, he shared that his wife Cheryl did a lot of the work while he was off crab fishing to make money.

After doing this for a while, Cramer started making his own sets and also innovated collecting a bit around that time. They produced plastic sheets to put cards in binders and cardboard boxes designed for cards.

Key Mike Cramer Collector Issues

Before getting those big licenses with the major sports leagues, Cramer got his start with a few minor league sets and Baseball Legends releases.

1975 Phoenix Giants Minor League Set

1975 Circle K Phoenix Giants Michael J. Cramer

It seems Cramer actually produced a few different sets for the Phoenix Giants, but his first is cataloged as the Circle K Phoenix Giants set and included a card of Cramer from the Phoenix Giants thanking him for his work in helping produce the card set. It added that his collection had almost half a million cards!

A search on TCDB also turned up a 1976 Cramer Phoenix Giants set that included a sponsorship from CocaCola.

Some of his other late 70s minor league sets included ones for the Seattle Rainiers, Tucson Toros, Salt Lake City Gulls, Spokane Indians, Tucson Toros, Albuquerque Dukes, Tacoma Yankees, and Hawaii Islanders.

1980-83 Baseball Legends

1980 Cramer Baseball Legends #5 Joe DiMaggio

From a collector issue perspective, Cramer is probably best known for the four Baseball Legends sets he released between 1980 and 1983. The cards have a sepia-toned photo on the front with a black frame. The backs are brown and include personal data, stats, and career summary. The key cards across the series include Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson’s portrait card, Roberto Clemente, Ted Williams, and Joe Jackson.

Each series had 30 cards, but the 124-card total comes from the four fourth series cards Cramer printed on this box in 1986.

Notice the ad for Pacific Trading Collector Sheets on the wrapper! The wrapper and box have a 1985 copyright, but I usually see them advertised as a 1986 product.

Cramer would develop another series of Baseball Legends cards from 1988-90 under the Pacific name that were printed in color.

Conclusion and Further Reading

Along with Mike Aronstein and Larry Fritsch, Mike Cramer was pivotal in moving the hobby forward since they were creating many of their now-famous collector issues at a time when Topps had their monopoly. However, the role of collector issues slowly diminished after 1981 when three major companies, Donruss, Fleer, and Topps, started competing to produce the most popular cards. Given the current market consolidation under Fanatics, one has to wonder if the hobby might need collector issues again.

Happy collecting!

Collector Issues Part 2: Larry Fritsch

December 30, 2024 by John

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.

Hobby Pioneer 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.

Key Fritsch Sets and Cards

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 One-Year Winners

1977 Fritsch One-Year Winner Eddie Gaedel

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.

1986 Fritsch Negro League Baseball All-Stars

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.

1986 Fritsch Negro League Baseball All-Stars Sample Back #11 Jackie Robinson

All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Cards

1995 Fritsch All-American Girls Professional Baseball League #1 Dorothy Wiltse

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.

Other Key Cards

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.

1982 Fritsch 1957 Spic and Span Hank Aaron Reprint

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.

1983 Fritsch Visalia Oaks #6 Kirby Puckett

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.

1983 Fritsch 1953 Boston/Milwaukee Braves #41 Eddie Mathews

Wrap-Up and Further Reading

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.

Baseball Card Alphabetical Handbook Volume 1 by Larry Fritsch and Bill Haber – 1975

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.

Collector Issues Part 1: Mike Aronstein and TCMA

December 29, 2024 by John

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.

Sports Cards Magazine and Price Guide – April 1998

The Baseball Card Hobby in the 1970s

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 101

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.

Mike Aronstein, SSPC, and Donruss

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.

Mike Aronstein Sorting 1963 Topps Baseball Cards

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.

Key TCMA Sets and Cards

1972 TCMA The 1930’s

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.

1973-80 TCMA All-Time Greats Postcards

1973-80 TCMA Robert Clemente All-Time Greats Postcard

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.

1973-78 TCMA League Leaders

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.

1977-80 TCMA The War Years

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.

Team Sets

1975 TCMA All-Time New York Yankees PSA Graded Set

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 Minor League Cards

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.

1981 TCMA Pawtucket Red Sox #15 Wade Boggs

1981 TCMA Rochester Red Wings #15 Cal Ripken Jr.

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.

1982 TCMA Oneonta Yankees #13 John Elway

Wrap-Up and Further Reading

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!