Lenticular fun with more Sportflics

I am blogging through a small parcel of cards I bought off eBay. Said parcel spent its time winging its way to me, and in the meantime I received an envelope of cards from Tim, which included two Sportflics cards. I knew one of the cards in the eBay purchase was a Sportflics card so I mentally added it to the pile of dupes in the lot, thinking it was bound to be one of the ones I received from Tim. But when it arrived, it was from a different series of Sportflics cards released the year after the ones Tim sent to me.

Card Number 629: Sportflics, 1987; #31

Lenticular cards don't like scanners. And scanners don't like lenticular cards.

There are three pictures in the lenticular array. Tony swinging...

... Tony in his batting stance ...

...and a portrait.

This time around, Sportflics added in a little portrait photo on the back of the card. 

There are apparently two versions of this card - one with a copyright notice saying 1986, and the other version saying copyright 1987. This is the 1986 version. It's not the sort of variation that makes much difference in terms of monetary value of the card.

Sportflics carried on producing these lenticular cards until 1990, so there are a few more featuring Tony from later series. Maybe one day I'll master the art of photographing them.

Total: 629 cards

Tony's first crowning

Tony has made several appearances as a DonRuss Diamond King. This was his first.

Card Number 619: DonRuss, 1985; #25

The Diamond Kings cards were the first 26 cards in the DonRuss set. There was one player depicted for each team (this was before the two expansions in 1993 and 1998). 

The artist was Dick Perez, who ended up painting four Diamond Kings portraits of Tony between 1985 and 1996. Here's another link to his gallery.

There is a fairly big write up on the back. I enjoyed the way DonRuss equated being selected for a Diamond King card with being voted onto the All Star team!

There is a reference to Tony's time at Las Vegas, where he started the 1983 season after his Major League debut in 1982, and subsequent wrist injury. He only played 17 games for Las Vegas, recording a .342 batting average from 73 at bats. After being called up he then had over 300 at bats for the Padres that season.

Reading these early cards is quite informative. A lot of this detail quickly got lost as Tony racked up batting titles, All Star appearances, and so on. It's a reminder that after his hot debut, Tony still had work to do to establish himself as a Major League player. 

This is the final card Tim sent me that was new to the collection. However, Tim also included a 1984 Fleer card that was an upgrade on the one I already had in my binder - so thanks for that Tim!

Total: 619 cards

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

Lots of pics of Sportflics

In a previous post, I outlined the history of Sportflics, which became the Score and Pinnacle conglomerate. About 10 years after the first lenticular Sportflics cards were released, the brand was updated for the 90s as Sportflix, with an X. 

In the PWE from Tim, there were two of the original Sportflics cards from 1986. These do not scan very well, so I have tried to take some photos of them to capture the full Sportflics experience.

I'm also going to be a bit weird and show the cardbacks first.

Card Number 616: Sportflics, 1986; #13

At first I thought this was card #19 in the set, which would have earned it 10 bonus points. But it isn't They've just put '19' in a baseball to look like the card number. Bad Sportflics! No bonus points for you! Harrumph!

Here's the scan of the front.

There are three pictures revealed by moving the card. (Or holding the card still and moving your head!)

Tony at bat...

...Tony swinging...

...and a portrait photo.

Tony appeared on another card in the set.

Card Number 617: Sportflics, 1986; #140

The "Tri-Stars" had pictures of three different players. This leads to odd pictures of all three. Tony was on a card featuring players with high batting averages.

Notably, Al Oliver wore 0 (zero) on his uniform. 

The scan offers a bizarre mash up of all 3 faces.

Tony is youthful, with a shadow of Bill Buckner's eyebrows on his forehead.

On Bill's card you can really see his caterpillar eyebrows in all their glory. That's some 'tache too.

Al also has a 'tache, and escapes Bill's ghostly brows by virtue of having a cap on. You can just see Tony's cap logo behind the jay, like a bad airbrushing job on an old baseball card.

These are fun cards to hold and fiddle with to try and get photos of the images. 

Although these cards say 'First Series' on the back, no second series was issued that year. The company who developed them, Major League Marketing, launched the Score range in 1988. That first Score range included 'magic motion' trivia cards, which were lenticular. (According to BaseballCardPedia, these were included because at the time Topps had exclusive rights to sell packs of just baseball cards - this explains why Fleer included a logo sticker, and DonRuss included puzzle pieces in with their baseball cards!)

Thanks again to Tim for sending me these!

Total: 617 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

Mail from Pennsylvania! (Another rookie card!)

I was in the middle of a virtual work meeting when my wife propped up an envelope next to me. I could see the USA International Postage Forever Stamp and the return address for Tim, who posted a comment on my 'Gaps in the Wantlist' page a short while ago saying he would send me some cards. 

That meeting took forever to end!

When it finally did, I was able to open the envelope and see what cards Tim had sent me. I was not disappointed.

Tim lives in Pennsylvania, supports the Padres and collects Tony Gwynn cards. Tim posted a video of his collection on Twitter and I am envious of his binders, let alone his cards! 

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that one of the cards is the fourth of Tony's rookie cards from 1983. I blogged last weekend about acquiring the Fleer card that completed the trinity. I now have the "Fundamental Four" (Tim's term), although I think I'm going to refer to this as the 'Quaternity', which was a suggestion that came from one of my fellow UK collectors on Facebook.

So with no further ado...

Card Number 613: O-Pee-Chee, 1983; #143

This is a straight reprint of the Topps card #482, except for the change of logo and the addition of the word 'voltigeur' under Tony's name.

There is more French on the cardback. The pressure to make this card bilingual meant they shrank the font size and dropped one of the factoids in the box at the bottom.

For comparison, here's the Topps cardback.

The O-Pee-Chee cardback is noticeably lighter cardboard. It also says it's printed in Canada.

As someone who has experienced the difficulty in producing bilingual documents, I share the pain of the O-Pee-Chee designers trying to include as much information as possible in two languages. It can be really difficult to do, especially when one language requires more words than the other. (Typically, anything translated into Welsh takes at least 25 per cent more space than the English.) Fortunately, I don't have to produce bilingual baseball cards!

I want to say a huge thank you to Tim for sending me this card (and the others, which I will blog about soon!) and for helping me with this fourth rookie card. It nicely bookends them when they are all together.

Total: 613 cards