196(9) At A Time - Intro

1969 was a year full of memorable events. Richard Nixon took office, Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, and...



...the Cubs won the World Championship. Well, almost. But that was the season I got hooked. I got hooked not only on the Cubs, but also on baseball cards. They were five cents a pack for five cards and a slab of gum. (The next year the price went up to ten cents for ten cards, meaning you lost a piece of gum for your dime.)



Looking back on it 40 years later, you would have to wonder why I got hooked on a choking team and a really bad set of cards. I like to blame it on the youthful ignorance of a seven and a half year old.

The 1969 Cubs had a great team, a great start, and a lousy finish. Much could be written about them. But today I want to focus on the Topps cards of 1969. Because if you look at them objectively, you would have to say they are a major failure, too. But to me, with them being my first real cards, they are a thing of beauty.

Tomorrow I will begin a look at each of the cards from the set. I'm planning to do this twice a week. But being the impatient person that I am, I will go through the set nine cards at a time, which is one page from the album per post. And I also won't write much of a bio about the players because again, I am too impatient to do all the research. Instead, I plan to write about the card; what I see, what does the card say. When I get to a Cubs player, I will devote an entire post to that player and talk about their contributions to the 1969 team.

Today I'd like to give my overall impression of the set.

Overview: There were 664 cards in the set, divided into seven series. Four subsets were included: the league leader cards, World Series cards, All Star cards, and four cards with team stars together.

The Design: It lacks any originality.

The font and style for the team name is borrowed from the 1967 set, just shrunk down a little.



The circle with the player's name is borrowed from the 1968 set.



Topps even used the same color scheme for the teams as they did in 1967 and 1968 (orange was the color for the Cubs and White Sox).



Take 1967 + 1968 and you get 1969. The design team took the year off.

The Photography: I guess the photographers took the year off too. As I go through the set you will see that many of the cards used photos that were at least two years old, with some as old as five years.

Assorted Issues: 1969 was an expansion year, with the Pilots, Royals, Padres, and Expos beginning play. Since Topps had no photos of these players in their new team's uniforms, the set included a huge number of hatless players. The first expansion team player in the correct uniform didn't show up until the fifth series.

The set also had the Astros copyright problem that wasn't resolved until the fourth series. The A's presented a problem because 1969 was only their second year in Oakland and Topps was using many old photos of players with "KC" on their hat. The Topps solution was the infamous airbrush.

The Backs: No problems here for me. I love the cartoons, the red looks nice, although some cards have seen the red fade more than others. And after a two year absence, Topps returned the backs to a horizontal format. The stats are very readable on a white background. This is the only part of the card they seem to have gotten right.

In Summary...



This card sums up the 1969 set for me. It is of Senators manager Jim Lemon. Well, he was supposed to be their manager, but he was fired in January and replaced by legend Ted Williams. Its January and Topps has to decide what to do with the Lemon card. Should it be left in the set or replaced by another player, or maybe by a card for Ted Williams?

Well, Topps make the strangest decision. They left the card in the set, but changed the back of the card to this:



That right, they changed the drawing to say, basically, Jim Lemon, you stink, you got fired! That was the nicest thing they could say about him. Maybe the could have added a "U" on his hat since now he was on the Unemployed! And later they added two cards that featured Ted Williams.

And to you Topps, I say your 1969 cards stink (but in my seven and a half year old eyes, these cards are the best!)