Pulled From the Pack: Topps Baseball Cards!

Redartz:  Hello all! With apologies to our UK contingent, today we are honoring Baseball Opening Weekend with a look at Topps Baseball Cards. Topps started producing baseball cards in 1952, and has released a set every year since. While there have been many other manufacturers of cards (Donruss, Upper Deck, Fleer, and so on), Topps has become almost synonymous with the little cardboard collectibles. 

Each year the company varies it's card design, and some of those designs have achieved great popularity. Of course, your favorite cards are probably the ones you had in your youth. Mine were!  I first picked up baseball cards shortly after being introduced to comic books. It was the 1969 Topps set, white borders. I had a favorite team, the Cincinnati Reds, and a favorite player, Willie Mays. I ended up with many Reds cards, but was frustrated that I couldn't get a Mays card. 

Side story here: our babysitter at the time had a brother who was a HUGE Reds fan. He sent me an offer through his sister to trade my Reds cards for a whole box of other cards. I took the trade, and ended up with a shoebox full of older Topps cards dating back to the late 1950's. Young and oblivious, I used some in my bicycle spokes (sound familiar, anyone) and didn't complain when my Mom got rid of the rest. After all, they were old cards; I was looking for this year's cards! I'm kind of glad I don't know what I threw away there...

Anyway. most of each year's sets are individual player cards. But some popular subsets stand out. I was always excited to pull a "Sporting News All Star" card, or league leader cards. Rookie cards

were a big interest (and remain so today, among card collectors). There were team cards, showing a whole team photo (and those made a perfect stack topper when you grouped each team's player cards together with a rubber band). And a big attraction were the playoff and World Series cards. Of course, it became a real challenge trying to get the whole set (you'd end up with three or four duplicates of one game, and none of another). It was only after years had passed that you could actually buy the whole card set, boxed by the manufacturer. 

The late 1960's and 70's were long before the advent of insert cards, variants and foil (again, sound familiar, comic fans?). However, Topps periodically included some extras in the card  packs (aside from that tooth-chipping stick of gum). One year they slipped in mini-posters of some star players. Another time it was little mini-biograpies of the players. Then there were the "coins", small metal discs featuring a player photo on the front and an informative tidbit on the back. One of these is shown here. It is the only bit of baseball memorabilia I actually kept from childhood . I still remember pulling that coin from a pack at a local candy store/barber shop one summer night in 1971.

Then there were game cards, in which you'd scratch off a card and see if you got a hit, or an out. In 1970 Topps made a limited series of giant cards, about 3 x 5 inches, of heavy cardboard stock. In the 80's, they made a couple mini-sized card sets. Between the yearly design changes, subsets. and oddities like these, there were plenty of areas to collect and specialize. And such is the state of the hobby yet today.

I collected these cards for several years, before giving them up. Years later, after quitting comics, I got caught up in baseball cards for a while, but when comic fever returned, I left the cards again. After all, one hobby is costly enough to maintain! Although, I still pick up a pack or two each season, just to see what they look like.

And now we present a year-by-year look at the card designs for Topps Baseball, throughout our Bronze Age:

 1970

 1971

1972

1973

1974

1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

1982

1983

 1984

 1985

Any of these cards bring back memories? How many of you had a shoebox full, perhaps still do? Share your thoughts and recollections. And good luck to your favorite team this season!

Pulled From the Pack: Wacky Packages!

Redartz: Today we introduce another category in our ever- increasing array of topics: "Pulled From the Pack", in which we will look at another fondly remembered  element of Bronze Age (and earlier, and later) childhood: trading cards! For the inaugural edition, we will yank the wrapper off of Wacky Packages- a very popular series of stickers (and cards) which featured parodies of well-known products. 

 
 
Wacky Packages were made by Topps, best known as a Premier manufacturer of baseball cards. "Wacky Packs" first appeared in the late 60's, and were revived to great reception in 1973. They were common trading fodder among kids throughout the 70's, and they have reappeared periodically ever since. And they may have a familiar style to comic fans: they artwork for the stickers was produced by some big names in alternative and popular comics: Jay Lynch, Tom Sutton, George Evans and Bill Griffith (who gave us Zippy). Indeed, while researching this topic, I was amazed to learn that the 'father' of Wacky Packages was none other than Art Spiegelman- the amazingly talented creator of the acclaimed graphic novel "Maus" (which may well be the subject of discussion some other day). 

I came to love "Wackys" in middle school. Among my frequent trips to the local drug store for Archie comics and baseball cards in the early 70's, I found these funny-looking packs of stickers for sale. Featuring some very familiar 'products' treated to a graphic version of the Dean Martin roast! They actually  had a slightly subversive feel (parents probably didn't find them so amusing) that really appealed to my pre-teen sense of humor. Therefore, my school notebook (and the closet door of my room) was soon adorned with "Crust Toothpaste", "Hostage Cup-cakes" and many other Wackys. And often, lunchtime at school would find a group of us trading stickers and snickering  over each one. Some of the parodies had great staying power in my memory: even today, at the supermarket, I can't see a bottle of Log Cabin pancake syrup without thinking of  "Log Cave-In". 

In 2008, Topps released a "Retro Set" of Wackys, representing some of the classic stickers from the 60's and 70's. In preparing for this post, I coughed up a few bucks on ebay, and got the whole set (all my original stickers being loooong gone). Best 7 dollars I've spent this week!

Obviously, we can't have a discussion about these stickers without looking at a few, so here we go:

 

As part of this retro set, several cards were included which depicted never-before used artwork. Here's a few of those:

 
So how many of you were captivated by these little 'provocateurs of Madison Avenue'?  And would you trade a "Liptorn Soup" for a "Swiss Mess" Cocoa?  I would...