Card of the Moment #64
March 10th, 2011 by slangon
I’m by no means the worlds biggest hockey fan, but I am surrounded by some pretty rabid New Jersey Devils fans. My Dad, both my brothers and my bother-in-law are all insanely passionate Devils fans. If you follow hockey at all, you’ll know that right now, they’re all on the verge of having heart attacks.
For those of you that don’t follow hockey, the Devils had a horrendous start to the 2010-11 season. I mean horrible. In their first 41 games, their record was 10-31-0. Any hope of heading into the post season was about as alive as a rat carcass rotting on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. In their last 25 games, however, they’ve won 20, tied 2 and lost 3. I don’t know how far out they were at their worst point in the season, but as of now, they’re 8 points out of a playoff spot. As I’ve pointed out, I’m not a big hockey guy, but as I understand it, that translates into them having to win 4 more games than either the Sabers, Hurricanes, Maple Leafs or Thrashers. Oh, and they have to do it with 16 games left in the season.
Because of all that, I’ve been paying a bit more attention to hockey over the last few weeks, anxiously awaiting the outcome of this very intriguing playoff race. So todays Card of the Moment is a hockey card, albeit a hockey card that comes from a baseball set. Since I’m not a big hockey fan, I’ve never purchased any hockey cards so the few that I do own come from various retro sets that happened to feature athletes from other sports.
2008 Goudey Hit Parade of Champions #HPC-30 Wayne Gretzky
Usually when I do a Card of the Moment, I highlight the things that I like about the card design and/or interesting things that I’ve discovered about the player. Since everybody already knows that Wayne Gretzky is famous for being the card collector who once owned the most most famous/notorious baseball card in the history of the hobby, I won’t talk about him so much. I would also like to take this opportunity to talk about what I don’t like about this cards design and how that relates to retro sets in general.
In my mind 2007 was the best year for Goudey, but I was also a pretty big fan of the 2008 set. It happened that I didn’t really bust much ’07 because I didn’t really get back into card collecting until the following year. Because of that, I’m much more familiar with the ’08 insert cards, such as the Hit Parade of Champions set.
This was a 30 card insert set that was based on the 1951 Hit Parade of Champions set put out by Berk Ross. According to the SCC:
Entitled “Hit Parade of Champions,” the 1951 Berk Ross set features 72 stars of various sports. The cards, which measure 2 1/16″ x 2 1/2″ and have tinted color photographs, were issued in four boxes containing two-card panels. The issue is divided into four subsets with the first ten players of each series being baseball players.
Here’s an example of the original (swiped off of the most excellent site Old Cardboard).
Looking at the 2 cards together, I’d have to say that the Gretzky suffers a bit from the lack of hand tinting, but that’s just personal opinion. Also, without that patina of age, the glaring white borders on the 2008 version are a little distracting, but again, personal opinion. I guess the thing about these retro sets is that you can’t always just take a photo of a more modern player and plunk it into an old design and expect it to work. Yeah, putting Wayne Gretzky on it makes it somewhat cool, but it’s still just a very basic design that’s not very visually stimulating. It’s not like the Berk Ross design is particularly ground breaking or even cool looking. This particular Berk Roos example is cool because it’s Joe Dimaggio, but it’s not like the design itself can carry the card. What makes it cool is that its old and it’s not a set that you see too often (or at least I don’t). If you look at the base cards from the 2008 Goudey set, they work really well because the design that Upper Deck copied was an interesting looking design. It made me want to see modern players depicted in that way. These Hit Parade cards don’t accomplish that.
There’s also not too much going on on the back.
Although, there wasn’t too much going on on the back of the original, either (again, swiped off of Old Cardboard)
In my opinion, the ’51 is a little more interesting, just because of the way the type was laid out and the use of different fonts and all that designery jazz. I also happen to think its nicer because they kept the legal mumbo jumbo to one nice little copyright line, as opposed to the Upper Deck version where it takes up about a quarter of the real estate. I also understand that you’ll never see legal copy that compact on any baseball card ever again so I can kind of overlook that.
All in all, I thought these 2008 Hit Parade of Champions were an interesting idea for an insert that fell a little flat. I guess the lesson for today is that if you’re going to rip off an old card design, at least make sure it’s an interesting design.
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