Is you is or is you ain’t my player?

With apologies to Louis Jordan…

Just because baseball’s winter meetings are over doesn’t mean player transactions are, too.

Rumors are still swirling and let’s face it, it’s kind of fun when players switch teams (unless it’s your favorite who departs, one way or the other).

And it made me think of this:

When I was a kid the baseball card technology was for crap. The way they were distributed at the time, you could get one “series” every month or so from March through September (there were usually seven). The cards in the last group were considered more valuable and, IMO, always looked better than those coming out early in the year. And if a player in that later series had been traded over the course of the season, you could get something that looked like these:

“The blank hat”

“The air-brush”

“The underbill”

“The bare head”

It’s my understanding — and I’m sure the real story is out there somewhere — that the Topps photographers took one shot with the player in uniform and one without a cap, “just in case.” Airbrushing became more prevalent in the 1970s but as you can tell from the Lolich card, the results weren’t very artistic.

And remember, prior to the 1980s there was only Topps back them, aside from the attempt by Fleer to break into the industry. Nowadays there are multiple card companies, each providing more than one set. One thing that’s true for all, the photography has greatly improved. The same can’t always be said for the cards’ designs.

Here are just a few of the many great books on cards:

• Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession
• The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading And Bubblegum Book
• Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child’s Hobby into a High-Stakes, Billion-Dollar Business
• Sayonara Home Run!: The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card

Tagged as: Baseball Cards