Several weeks ago I showed the base cards from the Allan Kaye's Sports Card News. I mentioned that I wasn't done, though. There were a couple of other sets within the price guides that I was after. I've got them all now.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
This card of Carlos Zambrano came from volume 2 of the Cubs 2007 program. It's numbered 2 of 2. My question is where is 1 of 2. Today I've got the answer.
The 2006 Cubs program arrived. This was the first of four consecutive years that the program advertised "Collectors' Card Inside."
I knew for the eBay listing that the book has a Derrek Lee Upper Deck card inside.
Here it is, attached to the front of the scorecard in the middle of the program.
The card is the base 2006 Upper Deck card. The big unanswered question is whether the back is the base Upper Deck or a special Cubs-only card.
And the answer is...
.... base Upper Deck, just regular card #90. Nothing special to see here. The card will go back into the program since I already have the card in the UD binder.
I have my first 2021 card in hand and its my first from 1951 as well.
This is from the on-line only 1951 Topps set by artist Blake Jameson. Topps used the template from their first set, 1951, and Jameson provided the player's image. There were 13 cards issued each of the four weeks in January. You'd get the 13 cards for $19.99. They were available for just the one week and then cut off, like the Living Set.
Cubs were included in three of the four weeks, which is a really good turnout. The Baez card comes from week #1. That week's set had a print run of 7,679.
I expect to be getting the other two Cubs cards in the next week or two. One came from the second week and the other was from week 3. I'll get them posted as they arrive.
Today I'm featuring the second of three price guides that were new to me as of a month ago.
Ryne Sandberg! The photograph of the whole sheets gives a better look at the gold foil compared to the scan of the card. I still haven't found a good way to scan foil and keep if from looking so dark.
