Making Up for Bad Blogging, Part II
April 27th, 2012 by slangon

Last week, I started to try and make up for my lack of recent posts by showing some cards that I recently picked up. Of course, after just one post, I fell back into my bad habits. This is my second stab at a new start. Here are some more Condition: Poor gems that I got in that recent pick-up. These all come from the 1968 Topps sets.

First off, let me start by saying that the ’68 offering is not exactly my favorite set. I don’t know what it is. I guess it’s the burlap. Maybe? I will admit, though, that it has grown on me a little bit over the last few month, although I’m not sure why. Anyway, here’s some cards.

The first thing that drew my eye on this card was Rene’s blacked out hat. I guess a blacked out hat on a 1960’s Topps card is not a strange thing in and of itself. They airbrushed hats and uniforms all the time to cover their asses in the event of a player switching teams. What I find weird about it is that although they blacked out the cap, they didn’t bother to do anything to the uniform, which is clearly an A’s uniform. Also, the card lists him as a member of the A’s and a quick check of his baseball reference page shows that during his brief Major League career, he never played for any other team than the A’s. So why bother blacking out his cap? Then it dawned on me that the Athletics moved from Kansas City to Oakland during the 1967-68 offseason, so I would assume that he was wearing a “KC” cap even though he’s a member of the “Oakland” A’s. My question is, wouldn’t it have been far better to show him in a Kansas City hat than to show him with such a crappy cover up job? I mean, it looks like someone just took a sharpie to the photo.

I almost didn’t want to show this card, just because I’m kind of pissed at the Giants right now for sweeping my Mets in the double header yesterday. Then I realized that I’m not really pissed at the Giants. I’m pissed at the Mets. Then I also realized that I was making the same face as Ollie throughout the majority of the games yesterday, so it really is an appropriate card. Then I further realized that his nickname was “Downtown” Ollie Brown and I knew there was no way that I couldn’t show this card.

Although I’ve gone on record as saying that I like my cards with action shots, this one is a pretty nice one as far as posed shots go. The sunshine. The exceedingly blue sky. The green batting cage. The white knuckle grip on the bat. Beautiful.

One thing that I’ve always wondered about with the ’68 Topps set, and this might be something that I’ll eventually expand on for another edition of What Were They Thinking, is why they apparently used 2 different “burlap” backgrounds. I mean, the burlap on this here Dalton Jones card is clearly not as tight a weave as that on the preceding 3 cards.

I don’t think I had ever seen this card before I bought it, but it has instantly become one of my favorite cards, despite the fact that it’s a ’68. There’s just something extra awesome about a posed catcher-going-for-a-pop-up shot. Plus it’s Manny Sanguillen’s rookie card.

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