Eighties Alphabetically - Ajax Dog Food

Working my way through all of my 1980s Cubs card brands in alphabetical order...

These are the two Cubs in the ten card set known as the 1984 Ajax Dog Food set.  There is also a 1983 Ajax set, but there weren't any Cubs in it. The design is pretty minimal.... player's last name, one stat, the Ajax logo.  The back is blank.

Here's where is gets really strange.  Do a Google search for Ajax Dog Food.   You won't find anything.  The brand doesn't exist.  The cards are one of those Broder-type sets from the '80s.  It is unlicensed, yet used logos.  Of course, you wouldn't really care about being licensed if you are making up a fake dog food company.  

From what I could find, the cards were sold at shows at a time when collectors would scoop up anything.  Seems kind of crooked yet kind of ingenious to make up a brand and sell the cards.  And in those pre-internet days, you couldn't check into the Ajax brand.  Collectors probably assumed it was a brand sold in other parts of the country and bought the cards.  

If you go to all that trouble to make the cards, I wonder why the set was made so small, just ten cards.  Seems that you'd make more money if the set had more players. Ingenious maybe, but not smart. 

2023 Archives Insert Set Cubs

 I showed the base Cubs Archives a couple of weeks ago.  It's taken me some time to get all of the inserts but I finally have them now.

There were eight basic insert sets.  By basic, I mean sets that are just regular cards (no relics or autographs) and are not numbered (like a /25 set).

The sets are listed below.  Those in italics have Cubs cards.

1954 Topps Tarzan 3D - 20 cards

1957 Topps Hit Stars - 15 cards

1969 Single Player Foil - 60  cards

1969 Team History poster - 30  cards

1979 Topps Baseball Comics - 15 cards

 1989 Topps Double Headers - 25 cards

 1997 Topps Season’s Best - 25  cards

1998 Topps Baby Boomers - 25 cards

This is the team history poster.  It is based on the 1969 team posters.  By the way, the Cubs 1969 poster is something I'd like to get some day, but they are a bit too pricy for me.

These are foil cards of individual players base on the design of the 1969 posters. They are a fabrication as there were no individual players done in 1969.  

 

Baby Boomers has two Cubs in it out of the 25 cards.  That makes up for the Cubs being snubbed in the original 1998 set.

2023 Trading Card Day Cub

 Last year Topps changed the name of National  Baseball Card Day to International Trading Card Day.  They kept the new name in 2023 as well.  The day celebrates not only baseball, but other international sports and and entertainment also.

This years date was August 5 and free backs were given out to anyone visiting a card shop that day.  There were 30 baseball cards available, one player from each team.

Cody Bellinger was the Cubs player.

Look carefully at the back and you can see a move that is classic Topps.  

See the card number?  It is NTCD-B6.  The B is baseball but the NTCD I'm assuming is for National Trading Card Day.  Should the N be an I since it is International Trading Card Day???

2023 T206 High Series Cubs...And They Messed Up Billy

 In the past, the T206 set was released in waves of 50 or 100 cards.  The sets ended up with 500 cards.

Topps changed things up this year as the set came out in just two releases of 150 cards each.  And Topps got real creative with the names, called the two issues the Low Series and High Series.  The High Series cards were released on October 26 (another of the after the season is over sets).

Six Cubs were included on the checklist, three current and three retired.

 

 

 

While I am happy to see Billy Williams included, I think that they really messed up the picture.

Look at all of those black dots on his jersey.  That's not a dirty scanner bed, they are really on the card.  None of the other cards have those, so what happened here?  His face is also messed up.  It looks like he spent the day playing in the dirt.

I found the original photograph (1968 at Shea Stadium) and it is crystal clear.  Look at the sharpness of his jersey.  Whatever software they use to make the fake paintings from photographs did not do a good job at all.  They got the jersey and face messed up, but the bat and the #19 on the knob are sharp.  Yikes.

44% After the Season is Way Too Many

There are 129 Cubs cards in this mosaic.  They are 44% of the 296 2023 Cubs cards that I have purchased this year.  They were all bought after the season ended on October 1.  I find that to be ridiculous.

It's not that I was putting off my purchases. I try to get my cards within a couple weeks of their release.  The problem is the release dates, with so many coming after the season has ended.

In the old days, after the season you would have the update set and maybe one or two others.  I get that after covid, with the supply issues, products were delayed.  But by 2023 that shouldn't be the case any longer.  Sadly, it still is.

What makes the problem look worse is all the products that Topps cancelled for this year.  Not having Gypsy Queen, Fire, Gold Label, Gallery, and others has cut into the number of cards I have for this year.  My 2023 total is going to be about 65% of the total cards I had from a few years back, and an even smaller percentage from the 2016 and 2017 numbers.  Having 129 post-season cards out of a smaller number of total cards really jacks up that percentage.

I looked at 2019, the last pre-covid year, to see how out of whack the 2023 numbers are.  I have 496 cards from 2019 and just 296 from 2023.  Of the 496 cards from 2019, there are 91 that were bought after the season ended, which is just 18%.

And I'm not done with 2023.  We still have Stadium Club and Heritage High numbers coming out, which will boost the 44% even higher.

Baseball cards should come out during the baseball season, not the football season.

2023 Panini Chronicles Cubs

Chronicles is the weirdest of all the sets put out by any company, in my opinion.  It consists of a base set and then 22 different insert sets.  Yes, 22.

The base Chronicles set is made up of just 35 cards.  Yes, 35.

And since this is a Panini product, it has no active players and no logos.

Yes, a very weird product.

Somehow the Cubs were given two players on the 35-player checklist.

Mark Prior I have heard of.

Will Fritch I have not.  Topps has not either as the only set that included him in 2023 is Chronicles.  He has never been in Bowman, Pro Debut, or Heritage Minor Leagues.  

Here's the reason for Topps' exclusion:  He was drafted by the Cubs out of Oregon State as their sixth round pick in 2022.  But he had Tommy John surgery in the spring of 2022, a few months before the draft.  He is still recovering and has yet to throw a single inning for the Cubs organization.  In fact, the last time he pitched was for OSU in 2021.

So in a set with no active players and no logos, we get a card of someone who has yet to toss a single professional pitch.

Yes, Chronicles is a very weird set.

Five Random Cubs Cards

I've got 21,330 Cubs cards from 316 different brands listed on a spreadsheet. A random number generator picked five cards, one each from the past several decades.

1900s - 1970s: 1976 O-Pee-Chee #227 Oscar Zamora I love to look of this card, with the low angle of the picture.  So who far down did the photographer have to get?

1980s: 1988 Fleer #419 Shawon Dunston One of just a few of Dunston's cards that don't show him with a huge grin.

1990s: 1992 Pinnacle #414 Mike Morgan This is a pretty plain looking card for something called "Pinnacle."  And the way the card is cropped, it looks like Morgan is getting decapitated.

2000s: 2007 Team Issued Upper Deck #1 Alfonso Soriano The Cubs partnered with Upper Deck on this card, which was included in the first edition of the 2007 game program.  

2010s: 2016 Stadium Club #199 Hector Rondon Hector looks pretty pumped here.  With the bunting along the brick in the background, I'm assuming that this if from a playoff game. Rondon got the save in game four when the Cubs clinched the NLDS against the Cardinals.