Back to Base - DonRuss 1984

Today's lovely card was another one in the envelope from Tim.

Card Number 618: DonRuss, 1984; #324

Tony's DonRuss cards from the early 80s are strong contenders for best cards in the collection. There is so much to love about this, from the excellent portrait photo, through to the complementary design colours. The R in Padres is lost against the yellow uniform neckline - that's how well they go together!

Up until 1994 DonRuss included the year on the front of the card as well, which is really handy.

Their cardbacks were functional, but the Career Highlights were always relevant and offered more insight than Topps's factoids.

There's an intriguing item on that list - that Tony missed the beginning of his first full season because he had broken his wrist playing winter baseball. He was unlucky with wrist injuries. In August 1982 he broke his left wrist catching a fly ball and missed the end of the season - that's also mentioned in these career 'highlights'. Then a few months later he broke his right wrist playing in Puerto Rico. (Source on where he played winter baseball.) Sadly, Baseball Reference is blank for the Puerto Rican Winter League throughout the 80s so I can't see his stats.

On the plus side, it seems Tony recovered from those breaks quite quickly. However, if breaking his wrists is a career highlight in the eyes of DonRuss, it makes me wonder what the lowlights would be.

In terms of my collection, this means I now have Tony's DonRuss base cards from his rookie year 1983, through to 1995. All thanks to Tim!

Total: 618 cards

One sticker only - a Topps "halfsie"

Ask anyone who grew up in the UK in the 80s who was into soccer, and they probably collected Panini football stickers. The first sticker album my brother and I filled was Football '85. We then completed the Mexico '86 book for the World Cup. Then my mum enforced a break on us. The last book we filled was Football '88. I did have sticker albums for Football '86, Football '87 and Football '89, but didn't complete them.

As an adult I collected and filled the World Cup 2014 and the Euro 2016 sticker albums. It may have been regression, but it was great fun swapping football stickers again.

I didn't realise that Topps did sticker books in the 80s for baseball until I started delving into the depths of Trading Card Database. Also, a little known fact about these "Topps" stickers is that they were actually manufactured by Panini, who had the right equipment for producing them! (Source: BaseballCardpedia)

Hence the link to my childhood football sticker collecting.

This was all triggered by one of the items in the envelope that recently arrived from Tim in Pennsylvania.

"Card" Number 614: Topps Stickers, 1984; #160

These stickers could be stuck in the Baseball Sticker Yearbook that was sold for 25c. 

This sticker really reminds me of Football '85 because in the 80s, the Panini sticker albums had the English First Division with one player per sticker, then the teams and badges of the Second Division, and then at the back the players for the teams in the Scottish Premier Division. But the Scottish player stickers came like this - two stickers on the same sticker back. Although, unlike these, the Scottish stickers got stuck into the album next to each other. 

The nostalgia is almost overwhelming.

Tony is sharing this sticker with "Disco Dan" Ford, who was in the penultimate year of his decade-long Major League career. The Orioles was his final ball club after starting out with the Twins and then playing for the Angels. He was an outfielder like Tony and won the World Series with the Orioles in 1983 - so considering he was an established player and had a World Series ring, it's a bit odd he only got a 'halfsie' sticker. 

On the back it says the sticker was printed in Italy - another clue that this was produced by Panini under a subcontracting agreement. I particularly like the perpendicular baseball bat separating Tony and Dan's names. Another oddity is that the sticker-back suggest you collect the baseball cards, instead of completing your sticker collection. Maybe after they paid Panini for the print run, the stickers were less profitable for Topps, which is why they wanted collectors to buy the baseball cards instead.

Total: 614 cards

80s week: Fabulous Fleer base cards

I have yet to acquire one of Tony's Fleer rookie cards, but the recent package that arrived helped me fill in some other gaps in my Fleer binder. (Literally. When I put the base cards in, I left gaps. That's normal, right?)

These cards are fascinating, because before Tony's rapid ascent to star status, he was still a kid newcomer who might make it big, or might not.

Card Number 482: Fleer, 1984, #301

This the end of an era in terms of Padres design ethos. The Swinging Friar was replaced in 1985  by the arched 'Padres' logo, and the yellow and brown were ditched in favour of a Yankees-style pinstripe.

Fleer had photos on their cardbacks in 1984. That was a cut above their competition.

The factoids on this early card were quickly consigned to history. Tony generated a huge amount of firsts, mosts, bests and awards in his career. So things like the Win Clark Award that he won in 1981 have long been forgotten. The award itself seems to have disappeared over the years because I can't find any current references to it on the Internet.

Card Number 483: Fleer, 1985; #34

Tony was still wearing brown and yellow on his 1985 card. Why waste a nice photo, eh?

On the back we have more early-career highlights including his first batting title.

Tony's 33 stolen bases is an indication of his opportunism and sheer speed at the beginning of his career. He was two decades early for "Moneyball", but with his capacity to get on base and steal 90 yards he would have been a perfect moneyball investment.

I already had Tony's Fleer base card from 1986 - and it's blogged here in this post from way back in May.

Card Number 484: Fleer, 1987; #416

Practice jersey photo!

The Padres retained brown batting helmets. The switch to blue with the orange SD logo would come at the beginning of the 90s. Tony has a deadpan expression in the photo, as if the photographer has interrupted an important practice session.

No photo on the cardback, but there is a graphic breakdown of where Tony tended to hit the ball.

In the book Tony's Gwynn's Total Baseball Player, Tony talks about the difference between being a contact hitter and a power hitter. As a contact hitter, he tried to make sure his bat travelled across the entirety of the plate when he swung, aiming to hit the ball towards the back of the plate giving you more time to react and place the ball where you want it. 

He also claimed to have "extended" his strike zone to hit balls higher and lower, which he was able to do because he had that fraction longer to hit the ball than a power hitter who was trying to hit the ball at the front of the plate. That level of detail isn't shown in the graphic on the back of this card, which seems to indicate a small area of hitting success within the strike zone.

Total: 484 cards

One card only to launch 80s Week

Tony Gwynn's 1984 Topps card has been a gaping hole in my collection for ages, and probably the card I most wanted to acquire. It's an iconic set template, and it's from the season the Padres reached the World Series for the first time in their history. As soon as I decided on doing an 80s week here on the blog with my newly acquired cards from the 80s, I knew this would be the card to launch the week. 

As ever with cards, there's always the possibility of discovering a new tangent of interest, and this was certainly true for me.

Card Number 481: Topps, 1984; #251

Being totally objective, the photo on the front is a bit odd, although a bit better than the one on Tony's rookie card. The portrait photo more than makes up for it, though.

And on the back we get the Swinging Friar team logo. It was the last season the Padres used that logo, after 25 years of service. 

I've never seen the term "twinbill sweep" before. It's referring to a double header against the Cincinatti Reds where the Padres won both games, 11-4 and 6-2. August 6th would prove to be an auspicious day for hits in Tony's life, of course. Both his 2000th and 3000th hits came on August 6th (in 1993 and 1999).

But that wasn't the thing that really caught my eye about the cardback. It was the career record that included a stint in Las Vegas in 1983. I knew about Tony's progression through the various leagues from Walla Walla to Amarillo to Hawaii. But I didn't know, or hadn't remembered, that he had a brief stint back in AAA in 1983. 

That seems to get dropped off Tony's career stats later on, even if they keep his minor league stats on the cardback. It is included on his card for 1985, but from 1986 onwards Topps only included his major league totals. DonRuss never included his minor league totals, not even on his rookie card in 1983, while Fleer kept references to his minor league appearances in their stats boxes until 1993 - but never once mention Las Vegas. 

Clearly he was too good for the Pacific Coast League though, with 25 hits in just 17 games and a batting average of .342. No wonder he was back in the bigs in 1984!

Total: 481 cards

Saturday round up: Cardbacks and coincidences

This may become a habit. Last Saturday I blogged about how I had discovered more about a card I has already blogged about. This week I'm going to do the same and also talk about a second serendipitous tangential addition to the 'collection'.

One of my first posts was about Tony's 1980s Topps cards. I mentioned how in 1988 there was an acknowledgement of scout Cliff Ditto on the back of Tony's card.

This week I've finished reading He Left His Heart in San Diego, an anthology of memories of Tony Gwynn compiled by prolific author Rich Wolfe. On page 142, one-time Padres manager Jack McKeon is quoted thus:

"About the middle of November... Sy Berger from Topps Baseball Cards called me. He said, "Jack, I've got a problem... I've got four or five scouts claiming Tony Gwynn." I laughed and said "Let me go through the scouting files and see which guy should be credited." I went through the scouting files and there was one report on Tony Gwynn. That was from Cliff Ditto out of the Los Angeles area. That was the only scouting report we had. So I told Sy, "Make them all feel good. Give them all a certificate or whatever they need." They all claimed Tony Gwynn but we had only one report."

There are some learning points from this.
1) Always submit your reports!
2) Other people will try and claim your successes. Which is why point 1 is important.
3) For all that I bust on Topps for their bizarre choices of cardback factoids, they actually did some diligent digging to make sure they were right.
4) Cliff Ditto has risen even higher in my estimation because it seems he was the only scout who actually spotted Tony.

And on to the Saturday Serendipity. A couple of weeks back Jack contacted me via one of the Facebook groups for UK baseball card collectors to show me a couple of Tony Gwynn cards he had, including this one.

Card Number 60: Topps Mini, 1986; #65 (League Leaders)

As you can guess, I didn't have this card but I do now thanks to Jack. The back is unremarkable but is a nice shade of pink.

Anyway, that's not the serendipity. Jack said he was happy to sell this and the other card of Tony's or he would trade. He collects Derek Jeter. So I took a photo of four Jeter cards I had accumulated and asked if there were any he wanted. Turns out he wanted all four, so I asked if he had any other Padres cards and I'd just pick two extra and we would swap four cards for four cards.

Jack showed me his binder pages of Padres and one card leapt out at me. It was a Topps 1984 card. Somehow I have accumulated plenty of Padres 1983 cards and 1985 cards, but I had exactly zero 1984 cards in my binder. So I said I'd take that one and another card as well (which may make an appearance on this blog in a future post.

Anyway, the 1984 card was #224, pitcher Sid Monge. This almost a quintessential example of what a real baseball card looks like.

The back is centred poorly. This makes it almost a quintessential example of what the back of a real Topps baseball card from the 80s looks like. (As an aside, I love that Friar logo.)

A few hours after we agreed the trade I got another message from Jack. "I take it you knew this," he said with a screengrab of Sid Monge's Wikipedia entry with the following line highlighted:

"Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn of the San Diego Padres got his first hit off Monge on July 19, 1982 while he was pitching for the Philadelphia Phillies."

My first reaction was "WHAT!?!?" I wish now I'd played it cool and said, "Yes, of course I knew that. Why else would I have selected that card?" But, really there's no point lying to a fellow collector (who I discovered lives not very far away from where I grew up), especially when a fellow collector is not only helping you out with cards for your collection, but is also going off and doing your research for you! That's going above and beyond, isn't it.

So, there you go. My first 1984 Padre, traded as an add on in a deal, turns out to have an important connection with Tony Gwynn. Being totally truthful I doubt I would have done any research on him at all, just happily filed him away in my Padres binder full of Topps cards. So a massive thanks to Jack for giving me a reason to include Sid's card on this blog.

Total: 60/394