Sticking Close to the (Terry) Puhl in the Heat
Grab a bowl of Cheerios and just chill
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1985 General Mills Stickers Terry Puhl - Card of the Day
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One of the really fun parts about being a card-collecting kid in the 1980s was that you never really knew where your next “hit” would turn up.
You could usually count on the candy counter, sure, but you dared not sleep on the toy aisle…or the local 7-Eleven…or the hardware store…or the drugstore. Blue light specials were not unheard of, either, nor were cards that helped you wash down your hot dogs, potato chips, and pop (I’m a Hoosier).
The 80s were no snobs when it came to continuing hobby traditions, either. By then, the cereal aisles of America’s grocery stores had been providing surprise baseball joys for young collectors for decades — Wheaties boxes, Post cards (not to be confused with postcards) that might have come from Jell-O boxes, psychedelic 3-D magic motion Corn Flakes…all of them served up as hobby delights over the years.
So in 1985, when General Mills unveiled a series of baseball sticker panels in (the always heart-pounding) specially marked boxes of Cheerios, well, no one was really surprised.
Forty years later, though, the set probably packs a few modest surprises for at least a few collectors…me included. Among the unusuals…
Stickers? Yes, stickers, issued in some Cheerios boxes, with two players per panel and blank backs.
Team logos? Nah — who wants to go through the hassle and expense of acquiring an MLB license??
Chock full of stars? Well, yes, but also Terry Puhl.
Now, to be fair, Puhl had hit .301 in 1984, and he had been an All-Star for the Astros back in 1978. But he looked a bit out of place sharing a sticker with Reggie Jackson in 1985, especially when Puhl was battling a pulled hamstring that would limit him to 57 games that summer.
The complete lineup of stickers featured 26 different players across 15 different two-player panels. Obviously, that meant some guys appeared on two panels. Neither Puhl nor Reggie was one of them.
But Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, Steve Garvey, and Dave Stieb were four of them — all four of them, in fact. Which makes you wonder if Garvey had/has some Canadian connection no one knew about. (Puhl, born in Melville, Saskatchewan, certainly has one.)
As for Puhl, another injury (to his ankle), limited him to 81 games in the Astros’ 1986 division-winning season, and he never did play more than 121 games in a season again. But, though he may be somewhat anonymous to today’s collectors and fans — and even to collectors and fans of his day — he was often a denizen of “underrated” and “unsung” lists during his prime.
And, of course, a denizen of cereal-card checklists everywhere (or at least one-where).
Today, Terry Stephen Puhl, turns 69. Dude.
So, how to celebrate? Grab an old box of Cheerios and head for the Puhl, naturally.
Happy and Sunny Breakfast with Pedro Guerrero
Collectors of the Puhl era will no doubt remember scanning the cereal aisles in 1984, too, where we found Cookie Crisp and other specially marked packages of Ralston Purina cereals ready to feed (ha!) our card habit.
Read more about that set, and the sunny Pedro Guerrero you see above, right here.
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