Before we get on with the main event, if you haven’t already done so you should think about signing up for the Offical Condition: Poor First Anniversary Giveaway Contest. It involves fun guessing games and you could even win something. Do it.

Okay. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on. This particular eBay score came from the same seller that I won that batch of ’53 Topps cards from. I always feel better about doubling up on seller who combine shipping. It was a lot of 2 1955 Bowman cards.

First was card #24 Al “Lefty” Aber, who spent 6 seasons in the Majors, pitching for Cleveland, Detroit and Kansas City. Most of that time was spent in the Motor City. He compiled a career 24-25 record, 4.18 ERA and a mere 169 strikeouts. Interestingly, he started 168 games which means he struck out a hair over one batter per game. Sounds like he was a real power pitcher. He also missed the 1951 and 1952 seasons while serving in Korea.

Here’s the back of the card. Now, it doesn’t have quite as much information as you would normally see on the back of a Topps card, but I must admit that there is something a little refreshing about how uncluttered it is. I also like that rather than just throwing some general biographical write-up back there, they have “the player” (or a ghost writer) talk about, in this case, “The Most Exciting Game in Which I’ve Played”. Of course it’s a little bit of a let down that Al doesn’t want to go into details. Tease.

The other card that came in the lot was #222 Russ Kemmerer. This might or might not be his rookie card. According to the Beckett site and COMC it is, but the Standard Card Catalog does not. I guess in the end it doesn’t really matter beacuse really who cares about a rookie card  of some journeyman pitcher from the late 50’s / early 60’s? Either way it’s a cool card. It just annoys me that there’s so much discrepancy in the reference resources out there.

On the back of Russ’s card, the theme of his little essay is “My Biggest Thrill in Baseball”. Russ is much more informative than Al, so he gets a B- for his assignment, where all only gets a C. What can I say? That was some poor essay you turned in, Al. I like how Russ tries to be humble in his write-up but still slips in that he threw a 1 hitter against Baltimore. Also, just for the record, not all ’55 Bowmans have these themes essays supposedly written by the players. The only other ’55 Bowman that I have, #148 Bob Chakales, has just a regular old biographical write up on the back. I guess Bob never turned in his assignment.

Speaking of the other ’55 Bowman that I own, I found it a little strange that both the  Chakales and the Kremmerer have that very rich looking, almost deep red toned wood frame whereas the Al Aber has that much lighter, almost blonde looking wood frame. I suspected that something might’ve gone awry in the printing process on Al’s card and decided to scan both the Aber and Kremmerer cards super high resolution to get a closer look at the printing pattern. Here’s what I found.

First the Russ Kremmerer card.

You can pretty clearly see the dot patterns from the yellow ink, the cyan ink, magenta ink and the black ink. It also almost looks like there was another dot pattern that is a true red ink, rather than the much pinker magenta pass. I know with 4 color printing jobs (what people call the Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black printing process) it sometimes is very difficult to produce certain colors so sometimes the printer will add additional color passes to get whatever color they’re having trouble with. These jobs are refered to as 5 color or 6 color or however many color jobs.

Here is the close up scan of the Al Aber card. You can defiantly see the cyan, magenta, yellow and black, but that red is clearly missing. Did the printers mistakenly leave out that 5th color?

Of course after rooting around a little bit on the interweb, I saw that there were a bunch of cards from the ’55 Bowman set that had that lighter, more yellow looking wooden frame. It just turns out that some of them had the light wood and some had the dark wood. It was just a little bit of variety. No messed up printing jobs. No missing 5th colors. Hell, not that I think about it, I don’t think the Russ Kremmerer card had a 5th color at all. I think that red was just the magenta ink laid over the yellow ink to make it look red. Oh well, I tried.

Although I will say that Al Aber still has really bad color registration.

Tags: 1955 Bowman, Al Aber, Russ Kemmerer
Filed Under: It Came from the 'Bay by slangon
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