Type Site: The Bespectacled Spectacle

Recent #5 site follower AB also authors an excellent theme blog, covering baseball cards with awesome glasses. How great are the spectacles he features? Very great.

1979 Topps #138

Now those are some best-of-the-1970s glasses. I can practically hear Rose Royce playing in the background!

Mark Lee shows up in my favorite Bespectacled Spectacle post, "Are Glasses Performance Enhancement?," which also features previous #5 player Cookie Rojas.

1963 Topps #221

This 1963 card airbrushed a Phillies hat over the sleeveless Cincy uniform, which isn't Topps' best work. At least the specs add something of interest. (Also peep his glasses in my 1967 Venezuelan post.)

Read more meditations on baseball eyewear at The Bespectacled Spectacle!

1962 Sugardale Wieners Baseball #5, Jim Perry

Prior to the record-breaking Neikro Brothers (details at the 1988 Topps #5 profile), Jim and Gaylord Perry set the gold standard for combined brotherly pitching victories. Today's guest picked up 215 of their 529 wins over 17 years, mostly with the Twins and Indians.

Card front

My favorite part of this card? The vertical notice at far right: "THIS CARD MAY BE WIPED WITH A DAMP SPONGE." Sugardale packaged each one with tasty wieners, so removing the "juice" made them less likely to get thrown out by stink-conscious moms.

Card back

Sugardale made two (nearly identical) sets of cards promoting Cleveland-area baseball in 1962 and 1963. Most picture Indians and are numbered, like Jim Perry. Hoever, both years include a supplementary lettered series of cards featuring Pittsburgh Pirates. If you want to chase a truly tough card, look for the 1962 Roberto Clemente! (Full 1962 Checklist at OldBaseball.com.)

Value: Sugardale cards are fairly tough to come by. Jim Perry's tricky, because he's also an expensive short-print in the (nearly identical) 1963 set. Prices for the 1962 card seem to run higher just by association. (I bought this low-grade Perry for about $40 on eBay in 2010.)

Fakes / reprints: Haven't seen any fakes or reprints in the market, probably because most players are too obscure to maintain a high demand. I would watch out for fakes of the Clemente card!

UPDATE: Here's a picture of me proving the "damp sponge" advice. There's a decent plasticky coating on the card, so no harm done!

Poll wrap-up: Return a counterfeit card?

It's almost unanimous, 9 of 10 folks voted to return the 1971 Bazooka of debatable authenticity. One said to destroy the card, which would protect any "downstream" collectors from buying something questionable. I completely understand and would've considered it more seriously for a cheaper card. (Apparently, my "take one for the team" cutoff is somewhere below $20.)

1971 Bazooka #5, sorta

To the card seller's credit, he did accept my return and process it quickly. This whole deal's just one card transaction in an ocean of buying and selling, but it's the closest I've been to a 1971 Bazooka's numbered proof set #5. Quoting many a baseball team, "just wait 'til next year!"

• My 1971 Bazooka numbered set profile
• "Would You Keep a Counterfeit Card?" posting

1971 Bazooka Baseball (Numbered) #5, Carl Yastrzemski

Card front (blank back)

Here's the rare-but-affordable card from the poll "Would you keep a counterfeit card?" Bazooka created two issues in 1971, one readily available set without numbers, and a limited proof run with "No. X of 48 cards" on the bottom. As mentioned there, a few problems stand out for this Yaz.

• Front ripples: the card should be smooth--odd gluing shows up even in this scan
• Re-printed paper: there's ink on the paper behind Yaz, prior to the front being glued to its cardboard backing (not out of the question for a proof set, but unlikely for Topps)
• Dotted printing: Color printers leave a haze of dots around black areas, which stands out along dark lines and text areas. (A magnifying glass helps big time here.)

Value: Picked it up for about $20 on eBay, thanks to its likely fakeness. It's hard to set a price for numbered Bazookas thanks to rarity; I've seen asking prices $10-$40 for singles and $100+ for stars. (For comparison, unnumbered non-stars cost a few dollars.)

Fakes / Reprints: Indeed, this is probably not the only 1971 Bazooka Numbered card of questionable provenance out there. Be aware!

Type Site: Captain Canuck's Waxaholic

New #5 site follower Captain Canuck has published a collecting blog called Waxaholic for the last two years, which is almost two decades in Internet time. He posted a staggering 342 updates last year alone, covering almost anything under the sporting sun, from current events to tobacco era cards. But do his Canadian origins mean nothing but polite language and only non-controversial topics? Let's check some select quotes!

• "I am just a [hockey] fan, watching his game be ruined by a [redacted] in a suit who never played the game."
• "The [MVP] finalists were announced today, and amazingly enough, the NHL screwed the pooch on this one too."
• "What the HELL?!?! A Maple Leaf? How did a Maple Leaf get on this blog?!?!"
• "Keep your damn useless FA rookie never-has-been wannabe autos....GIVE ME MORE JERSEY CARDS!!!!!"
• "...[redacted] card shops and their owners. Dooming themselves, and the hobby in one fell swoop!"

When he's not telling you how it is, C.C. (aka Brian) covers a vast array of sports and cards. My favorite recent post's "Tobacco Mania Part One: Hungarian Hotties," featuring a 1930s European film stars set. Check out this snazzy chanteuse!

Check out more of everything at Waxaholic.

1974 TCMA Cedar Rapids Astros #5, Tom Rima

Today's Astros uni, taken from their A-league Cedar Rapids squad, has a simple logo treatment of the parent club's own late-60s and early-70s shooting star. The zip-up front caught my eye, given that most baseball shirts used buttons then and still do today; that alone makes it look more like a warm-up jacket.

Card front

Thomas Rima patrolled minor league outfields in the Astros farm system from 1974 to 1976. Only 34 of Tom's 231 career hits went for extra bases, which unfortunately limited his future as a big-league outfielder. (Recent 1975 Kellogg's #5 Greg Gross already had the "high average, low-power" role nailed down in Houston proper.)

Card back

TCMA started producing cards in the mid-1970s for minor league clubs. This Cedar Rapids set's one of two they made in 1974 and it contains 28 players (with, unfortunately, no major stars). Find the checklist on TeamSets4U.com's minor league page.

Quality increased significantly as time went on, with TCMA sets going full-color by 1979. By the early 80s, they made cards on par with Fleer, a nice achievement given their minor league focus.

Value: I found Mr. Rima on Beckett Marketplace for $5. That's somewhat high for a minor league card, but not egregious.

Fakes / reprints: It'd be relatively easy to fake a black-and-white card, but probably hard to find a buyer. I haven't seen any reprints in the marketplace.

Would you keep a counterfeit card?

I recently purchased a never-saw-it-before #5 Bazooka card on eBay. Though rare, it's not outrageously valuable and the seller set a Buy It Now price around $20, the high book for its condition, according to SCD's annual guide.

The seller's favorable feedback % and high number of total sales pushed me to buy the card, since who knows when it'll pop up again? It definitely didn't seem like an eBay scammer trying a 1-time con. (Most experienced buyers have seen those guys in action.)

Short story, my purchase turned out not so authentic; three things gave it away.

1. Its front picture had "ripples," where the picture-to-backing glue dried unevenly. I've never seen this on authentic Bazookas.
2. Paper peeling at the card edge revealed a hint of colors behind the player photo. In other words, something was printed on the back, flipped over, and reused for more printing. Topps almost never did this.
3. Modern color printers use "dotted" ink printing. Vintage cards don't and this card had it. This is the most damning proof, but can be hard to see with the naked eye. (Check out #3 in this counterfeit-spotting guide.)

The seller accepts "any reason" returns, so I sent the card back. While professional about the process, he also remained confident of its authenticity. Unfortunately, there's not a middle ground for us--it's either an original or not.

Knowing that the seller will probably resell this card, I had second thoughts. Keeping (or even destroying) the #5 might make more sense than returning it. After all, this saves the trouble of a less experienced buyer picking it up, thinking they've got the real deal, and getting a rude surprise much later. Of course, that also wastes my $20!

This week's poll: what would you do? Return the card as I did? Destroy it? Keep it as a souvenir? Add comments if you have other proposals.

1935 Goudey Baseball #5-B, Cincinnati Reds

This Goudey set's most identifiable by its 4-on-1 layout, featuring half-a-field of players on each card. Some put everyone from a single team together, but today's mixes Ohioans--two Cleveland and two Cincinnati.

It's interesting to get 4 players at once, but there's nothing really "new" here. All four players have the same image on previous Goudey cards.

• 1933 Goudey Glenn Myatt #10
• 1933 Goudey Jim Bottomley #44
• 1933 Goudey Willis Hudlin #96
• 1934 Goudey Adam Comorosky #85

Check the back for this set's "innovation," a series of puzzle pieces that assemble into one of several complete images. Here's a quote from the excellent Obaks.com set profile.

"The puzzle pieces form nine different pictures: Detroit Tigers team, Chuck Klein, Frankie Frisch, Mickey Cochrane, Joe Cronin, Jimmy Foxx, Al Simmons, Cleveland Indians team, or Washington Senators team. The interesting thing about these puzzles is that there are more puzzle pieces (72) than cards in the set (36). As a result, all cards have several different backs. This may have been designed to entice the card buyers of 1935 to buy more, but the exact reason can only be speculated. In any case, most collectors piece together their 1935 Goudey sets based on the fronts, without paying attention to which puzzle piece appears on the back. For those chasing a "master" set, there are a total of 114 different front-and-back combinations."

Although Babe Ruth appears in the set--his only "playing days" card as a Boston Brave--they didn't create a puzzle portrait for him, possibly for lack of studio shot or to avoid paying a larger licensing fee.

Value: So many Hall-of-Famers appear in this set, it's hard to find a real "common." My #5-B cost about $10 because of the front staining. Anything with a superstar can command big money.

Fakes / reprints: Full-set reprints exist and individual stars have likely been faked. Check the card stock carefully and compare the print quality to others from the same era when buying.

Friday poll wrap-up (aka, "when bad things happen to good cards")

Mucho gracias to folks who voted in last week's poll about the "special treatment" your cardboard heroes received during those days as a youthful collector. I gave several options open to anyone with school supplies, including pens, rubber bands, and hole punches. The only one no one picked was "I left my cards alone!" Clearly, we're all veterans of the School of Card Knocks.

You want specifics and we have them.

• Ink autographs, glasses, and beards: 4
• Rubber bands: 5
• Hole punch: 1
• Staples: 1

Here's to cards that put up with that extra love!

Available for only $4!

Whoa!

1933 Goudey Baseball #5, Babe Herman

This low-grade beauty comes from Goudey Gum's wonderful 1933 set. It's arguably the first "modern" baseball issue, featuring multi-color fronts, professionally written player bios, and a large (for the time) 240-count checklist.

Goudey honored Babe Ruth with four different cards in this set and several other players got two each. The whole thing's a cavalcade of Hall-of-Famers and legendary stars, from Lou Gehrig to the Waner brothers.

Card front

No doubt about it, my #5's seen better days. Here's the same card in much better shape, courtesy of The Virtual Card Collection. (It also has the full set.) Babe looks about 10 pounds lighter without all the creasing and corner wear.

Herman's "C" cap reflects his move to the Cubs, following several years in Brooklyn and one in Cincinnati. His powerful stick and quick feet led to a ton of triples, averaging more than 10 per year from 1926 to 1933, with a league-leading 19 in 1932. (Check my 1933 World Wide Gum #5 for his infamous "triple that wasn't.")

Card back

Nope, I can't read that back text, either. Here's what his bio says.

"Boy, can't he hit the ball! He's a big fellow, six feet, four inches tall, and weighs 180 pounds. Hits and throws left-handed.

Hit 16 home runs last year and batted for .326. Played five years in the minor leagues before he got a real chance to break into the big league. Brooklyn bought him in 1926. Broke in with a wallop. Hit .319 and has been slugging the ball ever since. Second best batter in the National League in 1930 and made 35 home runs.

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., June 26, 1903."

Value: Many folks charge more for first series 1933 Goudeys, cards #1 - 60, due to perceived rarity. Herman runs more than a typical common, about $20 - $30 in low and mid grades. (I traded for my poor-fair version.)

Fake / reprints: There are lots of full-set reprints and faked Goudeys in the market. The "official" reprints have thinner card stock and say "reprint" on the back. (Watch out for cards missing paper near the "GOUDEY GUM CO." text, as someone could've scratched it off in an effort to deceive.)