A Baseball Card Back with Tiny Type
OR - how to disappear in the limelight when you don't have your own candy bar
Today’s Lineup…
🎭 Card of the Day - Who is that masked man?
🔚 A hobby ending
🎄 Straggling Christmas cards
1980 Topps Roy White (#648) - Card of the Day
This card may not look all that special on the surface. After all, it’s just one of 726 pasteboards in the 1980s Topps set. And, while that issue isn’t exactly Junk Wax, it’s also not exactly scarce.
But flip this Roy White over, and you’ll start to get the picture:
Do you see it?
Topps hints at it by mentioning that time White switch-hit triples in a game. And you get a flavor for it in the home run column, another dash in hits.
A sprinkle in RBI and batting average.
Maybe the most telling sign of what’s special about this card is the run of “Yankees” in the “Club” column.
But if you pulled this card as a kid in 1980, you had no real way of knowing what was different here, not unless you were really tuned into the Yanks, or Japanese baseball, or baseball minutiae.
See, after playing 15 seasons in the majors, all for the Yankees, White headed to Japan for the 1980 season. He’d stay there in 1981 and 1982, too, but he’d never step foot on an American big league diamond as a player again.
That makes this card a career-capper, showing his entire MLB batting record.
And when you check out White’s full profile on a site like Baseball Reference, you remember — or find out — that he was a two-time All-Star who received MVP votes four times while holding down left field in Yankee Stadium for a decade and helping the Bombers win two World Series titles.
White was also a living, breathing bridge between Mickey Mantle and the glory days of the late 1970s Yankees.
White’s overall batting line included a .271 average with 160 home runs, 758 RBI, 964 runs scored, and 233 stolen bases, good for nearly 47 WAR (B-R version).
For those efforts, Baseball Reference tags him as the 29th best left fielder ever, a smidge below Jim Rice, a few slots ahead of George Foster and Matt Holliday (so far).
And yet, you hardly ever hear anything about White. At least I don’t, and it’s been that way the entire 40+ years I’ve been following baseball and collecting cards.
All of which makes White a fairly rare creature by my reckoning — an underrated Yankee!
Roy White turns 80 years old today, and if ever there were an occasion to celebrate the man and his career, this is it. Happy birthday, Mr. White!
Set Spotlight: 1983 Kellogg’s and Endings
As 2023 comes to an end, it seems fitting that we take a quick look at a set from 40 years ago that also represented an ending of sorts.
The 1983 Kellogg’s 3-D set was the 14th consecutive issue from the cereal maker. You could try to accumulate all 60 cards one at a time in boxes of “healthy” fare like Sugar Corn Pops, or you could send away for the full set. The price? Two proofs of purchase and $3.95.
But if you blinked or decided to wait ‘til next year — 1984 in this case — you were out of luck.
Because this would be the final Kellogg’s set, at least in this format and in this run. The writing was probably on the wall, even if collector’s didn’t notice it, as Kellogg’s reduced the size of each card to a wispy 1 7/8" by 3 1/4", down from 2 1/8" by 3 1/4" the year before.
You can find the full checklist for this set lots of places online — PSA is a good source with plenty of pricing information and pics.
Christmas Cards Redux
So did you give or receive any baseball cards for Christmas this year? It’s a question I asked over on Twitter, with some fun and interesting results:
I whiffed in both regards, but I’ve had my share of cardboard surprises under the tree over the decades. Some of my favorites weren’t (and aren’t) worth all that much, but treated me to something I’d never seen before.
Case in point, some empty 1985 Donruss Sluggers of the Hall of Fame bubble gum boxes that Santa brought that Christmas or the next.
Turns out, there were eight “cards” issued, each one forming the front (or back?) of a box of Super Bubble or Color Bubbles bubble gum. You can still find them on eBay all these years later, and they’re not all that expensive if you shop around a little.
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That’s all for now. What was your favorite part of today’s post?
Thanks for reading.
—Adam
Love the Roy White love . . . he was a favourite for many of us who came of age with the '70's Yanks - always calm, dignified and clutch. Roy led the AL with 104 runs scored in '76 as a 33 year old. Great fun to watch because of his pronounced batting and throwing follow through.