Don't feel much like blogging today

Today has just sucked. Maybe tomorrow will be better. I didn't want to let the day go by without posting an Olympic card though, so here's The Big O from the 1983 Topps Olympics set.

1983 Hostess Olympics

You didn't think I'd go Olympic crazy and not show you any cards did you? I'm going to start off with the first Olympic cards I got when I as a kid. These are from Hostess and were originally printed in panels on the bottom of the boxes their snacks came in. Just like Hostess baseball cards, dumb kids like me would cut them off the box when everyone knows that for full book value, you need them to be in panel form. Of course if I kept the panel intact, it would likely have been demolished at some point instead of the individual cards staying snug and safe in a box with a bunch of other cards. Here are the three from my panel:

#2 Dan Gable - Considered one of the all time best wrestlers, but he was a bit before my time.

#15 Bruce Jenner - The "World's Greatest Athlete", I was too young to remember seeing him compete in the games, but I remember how big a celebrity he was.

#18 Floyd Patterson - Heavyweight champ of the world and gold medal winner. Floyd was way before my time, but it's easy to see his fights nowadays on TV or on the net.

To cash in on the '84 Olympics in Los Angeles, Topps released a 99 card Olympic themed set in 1983. Two spin off sets were created using the photos and the backs of the cards. One 44 card set with an M&M advertisement on them and this set from Hostess. I don't have any of the M&M cards, so here's a sample image ganked off the net for your educational enrichment:

The design of the cards is slightly different in each set but the photos are the same. For some reason the Hostess cards us the US Olympic Committee logo instead of the Los Angeles Olympic Committee logo which may indicate it was released at a different time than the others. The copyright on the pack is "1983 Finder Image Inter'l" but I'm not sure if the cards were actually released in '83 or '84. The text on the back is written as a newspaper clipping from the date of the Olympics the athlete competed in, and in Patterson's case has a little foreshadowing of his eventual Heavyweight championship. I don't remember what kind of snacks these cards came with or even when exactly I got them. I was card crazy back in 1983 so it's strange I only have these three cards. The Hostess set appears to be more scarce than the other two so it could be that the set was released too early in 1983 before anyone was interested in the games, or that the cards were printed on unpopular products. I have a lot more of the Topps version of this set, I'll post some of them later on this week.

Sticky Saturday - Just Barely Made It Edition

I was looking all over the place for a Fleer Star Sticker of Julio Franco but it was all for naught. I can't find anything lately. Well, that's not exactly correct, I'm finding things I was looking for two months ago while looking for things I desperately need tomorrow. I know exactly where my autograph of Dominique Wilkins is. It's inside an old copy of the NBA Register from the mid 80's. I put it in there for safe keeping when I got it and it's stayed in there ever since. Problem is, I have no freaking clue where that damn book is. I found an autograph of another Hall of Famer while looking for the book (which is bright red too just to make it aggravating that I can't find it) and a copy of the NBA Guide from the same year but that book still eludes me. So to all the Hawk fans out there ready to tar and feather me if I don't post a 'Nique and the Hawks lose tomorrow, I'm trying. I do have a backup plan at any rate.

This Braves sticker is my Julio backup plan. I know for a fact I have a star sticker or Panini sticker or some kind of Julio sticker somewhere, but I just couldn't find it. I scanned this 1983 Fleer sticker with the hat and team name on it at the last possible minute instead. 1983 was the first year I really collected cards like an insane addict so cards from that year are a little special to me. The Revco next to the Winn Dixie my grandparents went shopping at had a big bin full of Fleer Cello packs that I bought tons of. I pulled one of these stickers from one of those packs and stuck the hat on a notebook or a binder. I always really liked the hats from that period, the thin red line around the A just looked cool to me. I have a hat like that squirreled away, it's one with the crappy mesh in the back and the cloth on the bill is frayed and it looks like a trucker hat from hell and I love it. The Braves swapped from the old style hat with the white panel with the lower case script a right when I really started following the team so this is the hat I grew up with even though it was replaced just a few years later.

The sticker has team stats on the back. The hat cards had away stats and the big logo stickers had the home stats. The Braves were actually better on the road than they were at home. It mostly had to do with the Launching Pad. I'll post the logo card with the home stats next week to compare, but if you check the batting average and ERA, both are on the low side. Not at home though, the ERA jumps to over four and there are almost twice as many home runs hit. Atlanta Fulton County was just a hitter's park, and the pitching staff while talented wasn't really good enough to keep it in the ball park. The real culprit was Chief Noc-A-Homa's teepee. When the Braves were on fire and leading the division, greedy management types decided to remove the teepee to have more seats to sell. It may have been a subtle change of wind patterns, or a Cherokee curse, or the pitchers got wore out, but they went on a huge slump after it was taken down and damn near lost the division. They prevailed though and took the National League West crown in 1982, Julio Franco's debut year. There's no more active players from the year I started collecting cards now, and boy do I feel old. Oh well, back to hunting for an autograph and a card of Julio.

Price Guides, Past and Present

You may have seen a new Beckett Baseball Card Plus price guide out on the shelves and done a double take at the cover. Yep, that's Charlie Hustle there smiling on the front, the poster child for one of Baseball's forgotten scandals. Pete was scheduled to be the cover boy for the monthly issue (with an infinitely more obnoxious headline) but Beckett was bailed out when the Sox swept the Rockies. I finally saw it in the magazine rack this weekend and picked one up.

It's a typical Beckett Plus, 4 or 5 pages of articles you've read online already and the rest is solid card prices seven columns wide in about a 4 point font that will make you go blind. I really needed one to help me write my countdown of Bowman Heritage Sets, which I'll hopefully have ready sometime this week. I haven't bought one since about 2003, so I was overdue anyway. Pete is no stranger to price guides though. While cleaning out the garage last month I found this:

The Official Pete Rose 1983 Price Guide to Baseball Car. I cut out the D and S to use in an art project or a ransom note, I can't remember which. This is about the most pristine example of this guide I've come across and you can thank me for that. It's been in my sole possession since I got it in a Baseball Card Collecting kit back in '83. As you can see in addition to the missing letters, there's light wear to the cover, the binding has been reinforced with packing tape, the pages from 1973 Topps to 1982 Donruss have fallen out and are more or less randomly dispersed throughout the middle of the book and I traded Pete to the 1972 Oakland A's and Charlie Finley made him grow a full beard and handlebar mustache. The Harry Carey glasses Pete is wearing was a copy of my own, sadly. The back of the guide sums up the contents:

The thing I really love about this book is it is one of the few that acknowledges that 1951 Topps was their first standard issue. So what they look like playing cards and are the size of the smaller Bowmans, they were Topps' first set, not the massively overrated '52 set. Did Sy Berger dump a bunch of '51 Topps in the ocean? Nope, because he didn't have to. 1951 is a superior set in every way, not the least of which is that it's actually completable. Let's have a race: I'll put together a complete set of Red Backs while you try to find one card, any card from the '52 High series. I'll complete my set first and spend less money than you at the same time.

A sign of the times can be seen in that Burger King, SSPC and TCMA are considered mainstream sets. The book has complete set prices in addition to a complete roster of cards issued. It's refreshing to see such a book that is the size of a pulp novel and not a Cerebus anthology. At one point there was an exclusive Pete Rose collector card in there, but it is looong gone. There's also a bio of Pete Rose and his quest for 4000 hits, a brief introduction to card collecting, a suggestion to read other hobby publications as well at The Sporting News so the collector can actually keep up with who these players are and finally an exclusive checklist grading system. Here's the system:

I love this system because by using it, all my cards become instantly mint. I was nerdy and anal enough as a child to actually attempt to use this system with the half scribbled in boxes. The first time I got a card and entered it at Mint, then dinged a corner and has to erase the pen mark and put it back in as Excellent, then left it in my back pocket and sat on it so it had to be changed to a Good, and finally downgraded to a Poor when I got mad at the player for getting a hit against the Braves and crumpling it up and biting it and spitting it out on the floor and stomping on it a few times for good measure I abandoned the effort and just filled in all the boxes. Instant gem mint collection! And I did use this book for checklisting purposes as you can see here:

Here's some of the 1981 and '82 Topps I had back in early 1983. I didn't have the George Brett card worth a whole dollar and fifteen cents, but I did have the fantastic '81 Eckersley which was horriffically undervalued at 5 cents. That card is worth three-fiddy just for the hair alone. I do need to zoom in a bit to emphasize a small glimpse into my 9-year old psyche.

Apparently in 1983 I was a real big Andre Dawson fan. He probably pwned my Braves with a big hit in a game at some point to prompt me to deface his illustration thusly. I summed up career record with the single word "STINKS" and gave Andre a handlebar mustache Picasso would be proud of. To further emphasize the odoriferous quality of the card I renamed the Montreal franchise the Expostinkos, which quite frankly is a much better nickname than a lot of them out there. Washington Nationals? Please. Don't hand me that pandering jingoistic hogwash. Now the Washington Expostinkos, THAT'S a franchise we can all support! And quite indicative of the town's most famous denizens as well. The name just rolls off the tongue, like drool. Now, don't think that because I am a crabby jerk now that I was always a cynical little bastard. I was a happy maladjusted child as can be seen by the final scan of Pete's guide.

Yessirree, look how happy I was to have Del Unser and Jamie Easterly from that 1979 set. Ah, simpler times. Nowadays there isn't even an Expos franchise to make fun of and you certainly wouldn't chew on your Joba superfractor just because he beat your team. At least some things are still the same, publishers will put an inveterate gambler on the cover of their price guide if it will make them an extra buck.