One and Done: Keith Comstock

This series looks at players who were featured on a Topps card as a Cub only once in their career.

Today's one and done is pitcher Keith Comstock, who had his only Cubs card in the...

...1991 Topps set.

The southpaw was a 5th round draft choice of the Angels in January, 1976 draft.  After three season in the minors, getting as high as AA, the Angels released him.  He was picked up by the A's and resumed his career in AA.  He spent four more years of toiling in the A's system before being sold to the Tigers in the spring of 1983.  He seemed to find his grove in AA that season, going 12-3.  He became a free agent and was signed by the Twins.

He made the Twins roster to start the 1984 season, but the 28-year-old rookie had an ERA of 8.53 after four appearances and was sent back to AAA for the rest of the year.  The Twins released him after the season.

He spent the next two years in Japan, pitching for the Yumiuri Giants.  That stint led to his 1987 return to the bigs with the San Francisco Giants.  In mid-season  he was traded to the Padres, where he split his time between San Diego and AAA.  At this point he was 32 years old, but he kept plugging away.

The Padres released him in June, 1989, but two days later he was signed by the Mariners, for whom he pitched the next year and a half.  He pitched 1/3 of an inning for the Mariners in 1991, and 15 more innings in AAA before he was finished for good at the age of 35.

It was quite a 15 year journey for Keith Comstock: 367 games in the minors over 13 seasons, 144 games in the majors over seven years, and two other seasons in Japan.

Now, my sharp readers may be asking....OK, when did he play for the Cubs?  The answer...


....never.  He wasn't even a part of the Cubs system (though his mediocre numbers might make you think he was!).

So why is he shown on a Topps card with the Cubs in 1991?

Simple....Topps screwed up!

They later put out...

...a corrected version, showing him with the Mariners.  It turned out to be a bit of a waste of time, since he only pitched in one game for the Mariners in 1991, but we all know how desperate Topps is to be accurate.

Senor Barney

Bear with me while I add one more Heritage post, though it's more for the player collection.

One 2013 Heritage insert set I didn't talk about yet is the Venezuelan set.  These cards mimic the 1964 set that Topps released in Venezuela.  Though the front were identical, the backs were black instead of orange.  The cards also lacked the scratch off option--the answers to the trivia questions were shown plain as day.  Of course, if you lived in Venezuela  you spoke Spanish instead of English and couldn't read the question or the answer!

The Heritage version is unnumbered, but according to casebuster Brentandbecca, the run on these, based on what he pulled, is 64 cards per player.  That would make these pretty rare.

I wasn't going to go after an entire Cubs team set of /64 cards; that would be a little to extravagant for me.  But I did go after the Darwin Barney card for my player collection and here is...

...the front and...

...the back.  I think a got a pretty good bargain on a /64 card since is set me back only $6.50.  Remember that last years Barney SSP has sold 30 copies on Ebay over the past year at an average of nearly $100.  Do you suppose that there are at least 34 more of these that weren't listed on Ebay?  I do.  That would mean matching the run of the Venezuelan cards, but not the price.

At this point, only five of these have been sold on Ebay, at an average price of $4.19.  What a bargain!  After the same amount of time last year, the Barney SSP had four sales at an average price of $103.

If you are a player collector, I suggest you snag your player now while these are still available and still cheap.

Heritage 2013 and Topps 1964 Side By Side

I've been doing a comparison of Heritage with its Topps counterpart for years.  Today its time to look at Heritage 2013 and Topps 1964.

Since the 1964 design was so basic, coming up with a Heritage version shouldn't be too hard.  The one unique thing about the '64 design is that it was the first time Topps cropped the players's pictures outside of the picture frame.  Almost every card features a bit of the player's head extended into the team name banner.  Heritage was able to duplicate that feature.

I showed in an earlier post that Topps didn't do an exact match...

...with the team name font.  Close, but no cigar.

The bottoms of the card were fairly close.

The big question for me before the release was about the back side. The '64s had the scratch off trivia question.  Would Heritage match it?

And the answer was YES!  I'm sure that there was some extra expense to add this, so kudos to Topps for going for accuracy instead of profits.  Only three of my '64 Cubs have the backs scratched off.  I would have thought they all would have been scratched.  I haven't done anything to the backs of my Heritage cards.  Should I scratch them off?

So what is Heritage missing?  The biggest omission for me is these...

....team pictures.  It's been a couple years since they've been a part of Heritage.  I know that with 30 teams, the cards would take up a bit of the checklist.  If Topps only had team cards for the teams that existed in the '64 set, we are now talking 19 (or 17 if you want to eliminate the Milwaukee Braves and KC A's).  That would leave more room for other players.

And what did Topps really mess up?  For me, it's some of the rookie cards.

Only one Cub was on a rookie card, so he got a shared card.  Here is a shared card...

...from 1964.  Notice that its labeled "N. League."  But here is how Heritage handled the cards with players from two different teams...

...with two team headings.   It looks bad.  They should have combined the Cubs player with another NL player and put the Indian with an AL team.

Now let's put the cards side by side.

There was only once instance of a '64 and Heritage Cub player sharing the same card number, pitchers...

 

....Dick Ellsworth and Matt Garza were both #220.

Here are the position players...

 

 

 

 

 

Here are the outfielders...

 

 

 

...and the pitchers...

 

 

 

 

 

....and finally....

 

....the managers.

As I looked at the cards side by side, I noticed another flaw--the Heritage pictures.  One of my favorite features of older cards like the '64s would be the ballpark backgrounds.  I love to look at them and see the Polo Grounds, Candlestick Park, or Connie Mack Stadium.  But most of the Heritage cards are cropped so tightly that you see very little in the background.  Or if there is a background, its boring blue sky.

With today's technology, here's what I'd love to see:  put today's players into the old parks.  That would give the cards a more authentic, vintage look...

Using my limited Photoshop skills, I took these two cards....

 

and...

....put Starlin Castro in the Polo Grounds?  And yes, I know that Castro is wearing a home uniform in New York, but none of the '64s were shot at Wrigley Field.  Ignoring the wrong uniform, what do you think?

The 1964 Chicago Cubs

With this year's Heritage set based on the 1964 set, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the 1964 Cubs and their Topps cards.

The 1964 Cubs were not very good.  They finished in 8th place in a ten team league, winning 76 games while losing 86.  Only the 1962 expansion teams placed lower than the Cubs.

The face of the team was still Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks.  But Ernie was now 33 years old and was starting to show some decline in his play.  He hit 23 homers and knocked in 95 runs, solid numbers, but not the MVP type numbers from a few seasons earlier.

 

Though Ernie was the face of the team, the backbone was two buddy stars and future Hall of Famers: Ron Santo and Billy Williams.  Both players hit over .300 and had 30+ homers.

A fourth Hall of Famer on the team was, sadly, traded away mid-season.  Never living up to what the Cubs brass thought he should do,

Lou Brock was traded to the Cardinals in a trade that will live in Cub infamy.

The rest of the position players were a bunch of young guys trying to establish themselves or veterans trying to hang on.

 

 

 

 

There's not too much to say about with this group, so lets move on to the pitchers.

Larry Jackson was the ace of the 1964 staff and had the season of his life that year.  He was the winningest pitcher in the major leagues, with 24 victories against only 11 losses.

But after him, the staff was pretty thin...

 

 

...and that's what led to the trade of Brock to the Cardinals for starter Ernie Broglio.

A couple other notes about the team...

***They were still in the midst of the "College of Coaches" but by 1964 the head coach wasn't being rotated around the team's minor league affiliates.

Bob Kennedy was pretty much the manager and even got a card in the Topps set, being the only person ever listed by Topps baseball as "Head Coach."

***The team suffered a blow prior to the season when budding star second baseman Ken Hubbs was killed in a plane crash.  Topps remembered him with this

....In Memoriam card.

***Cubs players were featured on four different rookie cards, a total of seven players.

 

 

None of the seven did anything with the Cubs, though a couple had decent careers with other teams.

I hope the 2013 Cubs have more success than the 1964 Cubs, though I guess I'd be thrilled with  76 wins this year.  That's how bad the team was last year!

Tomorrow I'll put these side by side with the 2013 cards and look at the similarities and differences between the sets.