The Tale of the Topps Mexicans

Author: Matt W.

As I mentioned in my introduction, I am one of only a handful of people to have ever completed the 1977 Topps Mexican football set. And while that is quite a hobby accomplishment (as Slowdog kindly noted in the comments), it’s the story behind my quest which is much more interesting than the accomplishment itself.

The story begins in the year the set was issued, 1977. I was in first grade and was just starting to collect cards. One of my best friends was a kid named Charles, who lived just up the hill from me in San Francisco. We did all sorts of things together, among them opening our first ever packs of baseball cards. Towards the end of the summer, Charles told me that he had some bad news…he was moving. I asked where to, and he said Mexico. Turns out that his dad worked for the State Department, and had just gotten posted to the US Embassy in Mexico City. We said our good-byes, promised to write letters to each other (yes, people still did that back then), and prepared to start 2nd grade fifteen hundred miles apart. Letters went back and forth, Halloween and Thanksgiving came and went, and soon Xmas was upon us. I sent Charles a package of Topps Basketball cards for his Christmas present, and in return he sent me a package of Topps Football cards. It wasn’t until I looked at them carefully that I realized that they were in Spanish. Suddenly Roger Staubach was a member of the “Vaqueros” and Terry Bradshaw was playing for the “Acereros”. And who were those “Pieles Rojas” anyway? Interesting cards to be sure, but as soon as the 1978 baseball cards started to show up, the Mexican football cards went into shoeboxes with all the other cards I owned, and there they sat, gathering dust, for almost fifteen years.

Fast-forward to 1991…I’m twenty years old, just finishing my junior year of college, and my Mom’s arthritis is becoming much more severe. My parents decide to sell our house and move into a smaller one with fewer stairs. I spend a significant part of the summer going through boxes in the basement filled with stuff from my childhood, deciding what will be kept, and what will be donated to charity. I discover the box filled with these weird Spanish football cards.

By this time I had become fairly knowledgeable about the hobby, and am aware that these cards are pretty rare. I take them out of the box and count them up…just under 200 different cards. I decide that it would be a nice challenge to try and complete the set. Little did I know what I was getting into. I did a little research and discovered that while single cards were very hard to come by (this being four years before Netscape and eight years before Ebay), several people had substantial stashes of unopened boxes (Mark Murphy and a guy named Steve whose last name I don’t remember). Although some of these were boxes of the rarer 4-card packs, mostly these were the infamous 2-card packs (usually one of the two cards had a gum or wax stain). Two or three times a year I bought a new box to open, a pattern which would continue for the next few years until I realized that the law of diminishing returns was starting to take effect and that I was getting more duplicates than new cards. I’m not sure exactly when I decided that opening boxes was no longer the most cost-efficient way to proceed, but it might have had something to do with the box I opened that featured 17 Brian Sipe and 14 Ken Anderson cards out of the seventy-two cards in the box (yes, the distribution was sometimes that bad!). By this time I was at roughly 400 cards, constituting roughly ¾ of the set.

As the years passed and the Internet started to make it easier to meet other collectors, I started to find other people also working on the set with whom to trade. My wantlist slowly started to shrink, until by the turn of the century I was down to about twenty-five cards. Although by this point I was well aware of the huge number of cards owned by Michael Hattley at Touchdown Treasures, I realized that it would be far too easy (never mind expensive) to simply buy all the cards I needed from him. So I vowed to try to complete the set by either trading with other collectors or finding cards on Ebay. By 2005, my list was down to single digits, and by 2009 I was down to just one last card (of course one of the Dirty Dozen). Early last summer it popped up on Ebay as part of a lot from a seller in Mexico and I was able to win the auction at a very reasonable price. This was the final piece of the puzzle:

While it took 32 years and caused me much aggravation, it remains one of the most challenging and fulfilling things I have ever accomplished as a collector. I met numerous new collectors along the way and made several new friends, and although I was not the first to finish the set (several other people with the $$$ to buy cards at full price beat me to it), I can pride myself on having been the first to start it.

And if anybody else reading this is working on the set, I’ve still got several hundred duplicates looking for a nice home…

A Day of Fun at the Dania Card Show

Author: Mario Alejandro

For a collector of sports cards, there’s just nothing quite like attending a well-organized and active card show. As popular as collecting is on the Internet thanks to popular message boards and blogs, it just isn’t that huge in every state.

For example, in the early 90s I had four card shops within a 30 minute drive for me to choose from. Today, there is just one within 30 miles and 75% of the shop is dedicated to comic books. That’s why I absolute love checking out the monthly Dania Card Show run by Lou.

My only time attending the show was early last year. Unfortunately, it was under the worst of circumstances. For starters, I only had about $15 dollars to spend and thanks to the facilities’ awesome nachos, I was left with about $7 dollars to work with.

After hours of going through boxes hoping to find a Jose Canseco card I needed (I found one the entire day), I severely injured my back thanks to hours of crouching over short tables and ended up at a local hospital barely able to move all the while getting bitched out by my significant other.

This time around, I was fortunate enough to have a fresh C-note to work with just in case by some miracle someone brings along a box of Jose Canseco cards I might need. I also went sans the significant other and while that may be just a little depressing, at least I can take comfort in those nachos.

Show Review:

Atmosphere – B+

Lots of collectors, young and old and a surprising amount of females made their way to the Dania Card Show. Some of the dealers seemed less than thrilled to be there, though.

Variety of products – A

Tons of new, unopened box and “junk” wax to be found, as well as modern and vintage cards. There were even unexpected items like G1 Transformers and original GI Joe figures, as well as sports related books and signed memorabilia.

Overall – A

This show was much bigger than the one I attended in May of 2008 and had plenty of collectors buying and selling. As expected, new wax was overpriced but there were plenty of deals to be found on autographs and game-used relics. If you collect popular guys like Ripken Jr. and Pujols, you could have spent thousands of dollars.

Below is a few of the pictures snapped by my trusty camera. Thanks to Lou for putting on another awesome show for South Florida collectors. You can expect some much better photos from the 2010 Marlins Fan Fest next week.

The Five Elements of Good Card Design

Author: Matt W.

So here’s the question. What makes you want to buy a card? Obviously, if you are a player or team collector, the player or team featured on the card will be significant factors in guiding your decision. Giants’ fans like myself generally don’t have too much interest in buying cards of Dodgers (unless it’s an old Steve Garvey card to stick on the dartboard). But those factors aside, I would argue that the overriding factor, at both a conscious and subconscious level, is the design of the card. Simply put, does the damn thing look good?

One of the more noticeable trends over the past decade has been the rise of retro-themed sets. While more than a few collectors deride retro sets, there’s a reason for their popularity. Quite simply, the older designs which these cards are based upon are generally far superior from a purely graphical standpoint than most new designs. Topps Heritage didn’t just take the hobby by storm by accident. It has been successful because many of the early Topps designs belong in the graphical design Hall of Fame. Even today, sixty-five years later, the 1954, 1955, and 1956 Topps baseball sets are probably the three best-looking baseball sets ever created, and why the 1955 Topps All-American, 1955 Bowman, and 1956 Topps football sets are among the most popular football sets of all time.

So the real question is what these designs all have in common:

1. The player image dominates the appearance of the card

2. They use bright and vivid colors

3. The cards have defined borders (although the 1954 design works just as well as a full-bleed design because the background is a single solid block of color)

4. The player and team names are easily readable, and two of the three designs (1954 and 1955) also incorporate team logos

5. The card numbers on the back are easily readable

And as you might guess from the title of this post, these are also what I consider to be the five principles of good card design. Now before you say to yourself “oh, he’s full of it”, ask yourself this. Which do you like better….1955 Topps or 1955 Bowman?

1967 Topps or 1968 Topps?

Why do you think that 1975 Topps is by far the most popular Topps set of the 70’s? Even looking more recently, why do you think that 2009 Topps was so much more popular than 2009 Upper Deck?

I’ll bet that every time, you chose the design that best adheres to the five principles.

Now, while principles #1, #2, #4, and #5 are pretty straightforward, some of you may take issue with principle #3. Do cards really need to have borders to look nice? Well, my response would be to wonder why it is that people frame photographs. The answer is that for some unknown reason, our visual cortex likes the idea of having a defined boundary. This is why we think most images look nicer framed. That said, full-bleed designs can look good, but generally only under one condition, namely when there is a large amount of contrast between the player image and the background, such as with 1954-55 Topps Hockey, the first series of 1969 Topps football, 1993 Fleer GameDay football and the 1993 Score Franchise inserts.

One area where this is been most apparent is in the design of Upper Deck cards. Up until 1993, Upper Deck cards featured both borders and gorgeous photography. However, 1993 was the year in which Richard McWilliam forced out the original founders of Upper Deck, the result of which was an immediate switch to full-bleed designs and an increased use of foil (which should never be used for lettering unless against a high-contrast background like in 2009 Topps), the result of which has been fifteen years worth of cluttered and garish designs with difficult to read lettering (note to Upper Deck, as anybody who has dabbled in photography or graphic design can tell you, the key to good design/composition is simplicity, not clutter).

Now although I feel that the industry as a whole is struggling mightily, one aspect that I find promising is the renewed emphasis on good design by collectors. Gellman, over at Sports Cards Uncensored, routinely slams poorly designed relic and autograph cards, and many other bloggers have become increasingly critical of lackluster designs such as 2009 Goudey (whose artwork was a pale shadow of the 2008 version), or Topps’ 2010 National Chicle.

Or think of it another way, consider which sets and cards have remained the most popular over the years? It’s the well-designed ones which people still enjoy looking at. There aren’t too many people with a 1970 Topps card on their mantelpiece, but I bet that there are more than a few with a nice 1956 Topps sitting there.