2020 Archives - The 1974 Cubs

 The 1974 design is used for the second hundred cards in 2020 Archives.  The Cubs fared much better with this group, with nine cards.

 

 

Four of the nine are retired players, including my favorite, Billy Williams.  I'm working on getting several of the parallels of Billy's card for the player collection.  Billy also had a card in the 1974 set.

I wrote a detailed post about the card here.

https://wrigleywax.blogspot.com/2011/12/saturday-august-18-1973.html

 

And while we're at it, let's compare the originals with the Archives.  The font for the player's name is different.  The difference is immediately obvious.

 

 

These are the five active Cubs with 1974 cards.  The picture on Lester's card was taken this spring, since this is the first year the Nike logo crept onto all the MLB jerseys.

Other than the smaller name font, the design is pretty close to the original.  The backs, however, have a major difference, and it is a downgrade.

The 1974 cards had autographs next to the players name.  The archives version got lazy and use a signature-type font.  I'm sure Topps has signatures of all the players in their files.  Why did they decide to forgo the autographs?  Bad move.