1951 Topps Week 2 Cubs

 The second week of 2021 1951 Topps included another Cub.  Two Cubs out of 26 cards is a pretty decent allocation.  

The second week's print run was just a bit higher than week one, 7,725 vs. 7,679.  I wonder what the profit margin is on sets like this?  How much does Topps clear when they sell 7,725 packs of cards?  I guess it must be enough since they keep cranking out sets like this.

And who was the lucky Cubs player to be in the week two set?

Kris Bryant!  And he gets the runner over, too, though not by anything he did.  Maybe Bryant's awesome plate presence scared the pitcher so much that he committed a balk.

The third week's pack also included a Cub - they were three for three.  I hope to have it in hand soon. 

They Did Photoshop the Picture, Just Not Enough

 

I showed the 2021 Topps variation card for Ernie Banks yesterday.  I made the comment that I liked the picture but I would have Photoshopped out the green railing.  It is very distracting, right in the middle of the picture.

 

This is the original photo Topps used, and as it turns out, they already did some Photoshopping.  They took the time to get rid of that other arm on the railing.  I'm glad they noticed the ugly arm and decided to get rid of it.  So why didn't they recognize the big green railing that was still there?  Getty Images has plenty of other pictures to choose from.  This is one Topps should have skipped.

My First 2021 Topps Cubs Card

 My main shipment of 2021 Topps cards is coming via Brentandbecca.  He lives in Arkansas and the mail has been slowed up by the last week's winter storms.

I needed to buy just one card from someone else and it has arrived.

What a great way to start the collecting year... with Mr. Cub.  The card is a short-print variation, which is why I picked it up elsewhere.  The picture is nice, though I would have photoshopped out the green railing.  And kudos to Topps for using a Cubs logo from Ernie's era.

But now that I have a card in hand, I really don't like the design at all.  The player name and position is really hard to read.  Its too small, the slant is not good, and there isn't enough contrast between the font color and the background fill.  Bad, bad, bad.

Will the bad design stop me from buying any more 2021 cards?  Nope.  But I am already looking forward to an improved look in 2022.

1991 Sports Educational

 

Today's card come from 1991 Sports Educational.  The magazine wasn't a price guide but it often gets lumped in with the others from this era.  Instead, it was, as its name implies, an educational workbook that happened to have cards inside.  Editions were made not just for baseball, but for football, hockey, and basketball too.

I don't own the magazine, so I borrowed a picture of the cover from eBay.  But as I was writing this, my teacher's curiosity got the best of me.  I wondered what skills were being taught in the book and at what grade level.  So I found an inexpensive auction and was able to get the book for less than the 1991 cover price of $7.95.  By the way, $7.95 seems pretty high for a book like this.  That price is the equivalent of $15.72 today

The one Cub card belongs to Ryne Sandberg, as usual with these types of books.

1983 Fleer Stamps

 I've shown a couple stamp sets recently.  One was very old and very cool, the 1949 Eureka stamps. The other was half as old and less than half as cool, the 1982 Fleer stamps.  I wish I had another really old, cool set. But instead, its just another Fleer.

The 1983 Fleer stamp set has 244 players and 64 team logo stamps.  They were sold in four different 72-stamp sheets.

This is sheet #1.  If you look closely you can see that this time Fleer included the player's name and position, which was an improvement of the 1982 stamps that had just a picture of the player and the stamp number.  And oddly, the 1983 stamps don't have any number.

Only eight Cubs players were in the set, along with the Cubs logo.

 

 

 

 

Five Random Cubs Cards

I've got 19,023 Cubs cards from 282 different brands listed on a spreadsheet. A random number generator picked five cards, one each from the past several decades.

1900s - 1970s: 1976 Hostess #17 Rick Reuschel  Topps produced the cards for Hostess and it looks like they used a picture from the same photoshoot on the 

1976 Topps card.  And why was Reuschel wearing a batting helmet?

1980s: 1988 Donruss #539 Greg Maddux  He looks so young in his early cards because he was.  This picture would have been from the 1987 season, when Maddux was just 21 years old.

1990s: 1992 Team Issued Old Style #11 Gabby Hartnett This set was sponsored by Old Style and given away to the first 20,000 adults on August 28.  It features 28 Cubs greats.  Hartnett and Randy Hundley are the two catchers.

2000s: 2007 Fleer #329 Scott Moore  Moore was less with the 2007 Cubs, playing in just two late-July games.  He was traded to the Orioles at the end of August.

2010s: 2019 Diamond Kings #44 Javier Baez Photo Variation  Perfect glove placement as it covers up the Cubs logo for Panini.  Nicely done, Javy!

2009 Cubs Program Cards

 The Cubs and Topps partnered up for the second year in a row as Topps provided cards to be included in the 2009 Cubs program.  The cards used in 2008 came from the factory team set and they had no special markings or numbering exclusive to the program.  Would 2009 be the same?

Opening to the page with the card gives a pretty good answer right away. The card of Wrigley Field was not part of the base Topps set.  It was only found in the factory team set.  And the back?

That's the regular factory team set back.  

No exclusive set in the 2009 programs.

The 2009 edition was the last put out by the Cubs.  Beginning in 2010 they sold just the scorecard, which came with a mini-program of eight to ten pages.