No Ginter Today

Nope, not in the mood.

About eleventy billion years ago, Dinged Corners expressed an interest in seeing the back text of old timey vintage cards. The more stilted the language, the better. Today's as good a day as any to finally post one...

JOHN ALLEN
New York Yankees

"In his first year with the American League, Johnny Allen led the pitchers with 17 victories and only 4 defeats. This was in 1932, when the Yankees won the Championship of the League. Last year Allen won 15 games and lost 7.
"He is a right-handed pitcher, 6 feet tall, and weighs 185 pounds. Allen has been playing professional ball 7 years, starting with Greensboro, N. C. in 1928. He is a native of Lenoir, N. C., where he was born in September, 1905.
"In 1931, before going up to the Yankees, he pitched for Jersey City and Toronto in the International League, winning 21 and losing 9 games."

LOU GEHRIG -

I don't believe for a minute Lou Gehrig wrote any of that. Christy Walsh, you are a deceiver!

And now for the front. I had never heard of this John Allen guy at all, and I'm supposed to be Mr. I-Love-The-Moldy-Vintage-Stuff. Dude was an All-Star! Won twenty games for the Indians! Went 17-5 as a rookie and won a ring with the Yankees! He went 15-1 in 1937! He's got a lifetime record of 142-75! How have I never heard of this guy?? It goes to show that commons aren't always common.

Also - when you find a vintage Goudey for five bucks YOU BUY IT. Good 'ol ASC.

Card of the Week 06/01/09

Ok. Time for Card of the Week. Gotta do this quick so I can have a beer and get to bed for an early meeting. Remember I promised to show of the centerpiece of my trade with A Cardboard Problem in its own special post? Well here it is:

Taa Daaa!

1934 Goudey Baxter Jordan of the Boston Braves. Baxter (Better known as Buck) had a healthy 10 year career in the bigs as a first baseman. Most of his production was with the Braves, but he also played for the Reds, Giants, Senators and Phillies. There isn't much to say about Buck, he was a good defender with not much of a bat. While he had virtually no power, he could definitely hit for average. He was an amazing contact hitter and only had 109 strikeouts in 3216 at bats. His stats sort of reminded me of Ken Oberkfell on first glance.

Here's the back of the card. It's a pretty sharp looking card overall, no real creases and only a slight glue or wax stain underneath the team name. It's definitely one of the best looking Goudeys in my collection. Check out the text on the back though. First you'll notice that everything is in quotes as if Lou Gehrig actually said any of that drivel. "He is a native of North Carolina, 27 years old." Thrilling commentary there. Also note the multiple use of "altho". The "ugh" just got cut right out of "although". It's not like they were tight for space, there's plenty of room on that back for 6 more characters. Lou Gehrig was a lazy speller. Or was he?? You'll note that these bios are "By arrangement of Christy Walsh". Who is Christy Walsh? Let's check Baseball Library.com:

Walsh was a pioneer of sports licensing. His most frequent device was getting sports stars to put their names on ghostwritten articles in newspapers and magazines.

Baseball cards too, apparently. He sure didn't waste a whole lot of that licensing money on the ghostwriter either. How else can you explain this gem:

"[Buck] is now considered one of the most dependables of the Boston Braves"

Oy. How can you put words like that into a Legend's mouth. I guess Gehrig wasn't officially a Legend with a capital L yet in 1934, but still. I wouldn't even put words like "Altho he is the most dependables" in A-Rods mouth without a serious crisis of conscience.


Marie pulled this card out of a blaster of Goudey and now I wish I had bought a lot more blasters of Goudey. I still would never in a million years pulled a buyback of a card I actually needed for my team set though. I now have four out of seven from the 1934 Braves team set which is pretty dang cool. I also have this nifty Goudey Buyback card. It reminds me of the Title card from a non-sports set and it a nice addition to my Goudey set.

The odd thing is that the buyback comes with the card but there's really no proof that the particular Baxter Jordan I have actually was a buyback unless you pulled it from the pack yourself. It doesn't really matter in the least since I just wanted the card for my team set, but I guess if an unscrupulous person could just put this card with any other Goudey they wanted to and pawn it off as a buyback. I don't know why anyone would want to do that, but it's technically possible. On the other hand, I'm very glad that Upper Deck didn't foil stamp the card or emboss it or number it or put a matching holo sticker on the back of the vintage card to prove that it was in fact an official buyback. I'm very happy with a vintage Goudey and a nifty buyback card. Thanks Upper Deck for keeping this one simple. And thanks again to Marie, I hope you're enjoying those Yankee Stadium Legends cards. I think this is one of those trades where both parties are amazed and somewhat ashamed that they were able to pawn off some junk they didn't want for something truly awesome. That's the best kind of trade, is it not?

2008 Goudey & the old stuff they ripped off

Ripped off is such a harsh term. Let's call it an homage. Last year's Goudey was comprised of a few different '30s designs all mashed up into a sort of awesome Frankencard, this year is a little different. UD is following the 1934 Goudey design for their base cards fairly closely but don't capture the same level of detail as the '38 Heads Up cards from the '07 set. Let's begin at the beginning shall we? Here are a couple of base cards from the '08 set:

Here are a couple of the base cards. They are a standard 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches this year. The original size mini cards have been relegated to a parallel. Such a shame. One improvement this year is that retired players pepper the base card checklist instead of being all short printed. Bobby Doerr is a nice addition to a Red Sox team set. The front design mirrors the 1934 Goudey cards fairly closely. The picture of the player is a painting this year, possibly rotoscoped (or whatever the non-animation term is for painting directly from a photo) as I recognize a few of the pictures from other sets. For example the 2008 Goudey Phil Niekro has the same picture as his 2005 Origins card. The backgrounds are brightly colored and have baseball line art on them if space allows. The bottom features either Derek Jeter or Ken Griffey Jr. More on that later. Here is an original 1934 card next to a 2008 mini card for comparison.

A pretty good copy of the original design if you ask me. The main differences are the slightly smaller font for the name, the added team and position and the replacement of Lou Gehrig with Derek Jeter. The Derek Jeter has confused some people who are not familiar with the original set, so here's the scoop: In 1934, Goudey used Lou as their spokesman for this set and put his picture on most of the cards in the set with a "Lou Gehrig says..." line on the bottom. In addition to being the spokesman he supposedly made some comments about each player. Let's check out the back.

If you look at the original card, you'll see the text is all in quotes and has Lou's facsimile signature signing off on it. "I'm Lou Gehrig, and I approve this message" Also notice that these quotes are "by arrangement with Christy Walsh", who was one of the first successful ghostwriters in the sports scene. To Lou himself was most likely not responsible for that very dry, bland text on the back of the card, disappointing as that may sound. The 2008 version doesn't bother with the artifice, but does keep Jeter's mug on half the cards in the set. Why only half? Let's look at a couple more cards for the answer.

Here's a 2008 Corey Hart mini and a reprint of one of the tough hich series '34 cards I don't actually have in my collection. For the high series in 1934, Goudey let Phillies star Chuck Klein get into the action. Chuck "wrote" the copy for the National League Players while Lou retained the job for the American Leaguers. Upper Deck kept up the conceit, and Derek is on every AL card, while Ken Griffey Jr. is on the National League cards. The stripe on the bottom is blue for the AL and red for the NL. Marty and Corey also share the same baseball diamond in the background of their cards. While the mini cards have only text, the full size cards add stats. You can see the back of Scott Rolen's card here in my pack break. Ah, lovely stats.

One more thing on the mini cards... As you can see the back of Hamilton's mini card is red. Scott Rolen's base back is green. The large size cards have green backs for the base cards and black for the short prints. There are no red/green variations in the large size cards like last year as far as I can tell. HOWEVER... I've already seen red back, blue back and serial numbered minis numbered to 88, 34 and 8. So the parallel weirdness is confined to the mini cards this year. Which is the same as last year in a way, since every card was a mini card, but I digress.

There are 130 short prints in the set. Yes, 130. No one said this set was going to be easy. I've only pulled two short prints so far (I've only bought two packs, actually) so here they are:

Yay, more president cards in an election year. Just what we need. I think we can all agree on this card... Ugly as sin. It's a shame too, because Upper Deck had an excellent opportunity to rip off the 1932 US Caramel Presidents set here. Actually as I look at it, the design is a little similar, but they blew it by using a black and white background. Slap on the bright red of the '32 set and you have an interesting looking card instead of this mess. For some reason a few of the cards are in color. I'm not sure why they didn't go for the consistency of making them all color or all black & white. It makes the set look a little cheap, if you ask me.

Here's a Sports Royalty card of the Horse Faced Bronco, John Elway. The bulk of the short prints are Sport Royalty cards, which were a boxtopper in last year's product. A bunch of these are autographed too, so look closely at those cards. Subjects include players from all sports, there are even a few baseball players in there. Imagine that! Here are the various short print subsets:

Short Print Base 201-230
Goudey Presidents 231-250
1936 Goudey Black & White 251-270
Sports Royalty 271-330

More detail can be found in an earlier post... Long story short, the base card SPs are just that, base cards. Presidents are presidents and also unnecessary. Black & White cards are copying the 1936 Goudey set. Sports Royalty consists of starts from all sorts of sports.

Unlike last year when all the inserts were extremely short printed boxtoppers numbered to 15 or less, Upper Deck let us peasants in on the action this year with a mini card set. They're actually inserted into packs this time! Hooray! Here's an example:

These are the "Hit Parade of Champion" cards that are based on the 1951 Berk Ross set of the same name. You can see an original "Jet" Jethroe card on the left. The '08 Reggie is a black & white photo, but most cards in the mini set are in color like the originals.

Here's the back of these cards. About as similar as you're going to get since today's cards require an eighth of the card to be chewed up by legalese. I like the set, and I'm glad there's something to chase in packs other than jerseys and autos now.

The set's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good. If you're hopelessly intimidated by a 330 card set full of presidents and Olympians and black & white cards, my suggestion is just to shoot for the base set plus the 30 SPs. It would make life a whole lot easier for a set collector. If/when I get a box of this stuff I'll go into more detail on the relics and insert ratios and stuff. Right now I'm still trying to figure it all out.