2014 Topps Archives

I'm not a real big fan of Archives but I'll buy some every year. Last weekend I bought 3 rack-packs, totaling 54 cards (50 base). If I see a blaster, I may buy it. I've got a bunch of Phillies cards from the set coming from eBay.  I wasn't planning to do a big review of the set and now that Night Owl has published an exhaustive (and exhausting) post on Archive, I'm resolved in my plan.

I found 4 of the 50 base cards to have reused photographs which I'll post later in a reprise of an earlier post.

What I want to do now, is show the 3 cards I got for which the players had an actual card in the original set (and which I own).

2014 Topps Archives #31 Steve Carlton

1973 Topps #300 Steve Carlton

I think the photo on the Archives card is from a later season than 1973. I don't think Carlton had that fu manchu 'statch in 1972-1973.

The catcher in the 1973 card is Tim McCarver. McCarver was traded to the Expos June 14, 1972, so this photo can only be from a handful of games early in 1972. Carlton only won two games at home with McCarver catching in 1972, April 19 and May 7. There aren't enough clues in the photo to narrow it down any further.

How do the designs match up? The type fonts look close but the colors don't match. The pitcher silhouette in the bottom right corner is a bit smaller on the Archives card. The 1973 card does not have a Topps logo on it.

2014 Topps Archives #31 Steve Carlton

1973 Topps #300 Steve Carlton

The colors don't quite match up. I like the 1973 cartoon "Steve likes to play billiards". On the 1973 card he is identified as "Steven Norman Carlton" instead of just "Steve Carlton". Also on the 1973 card his home town is listed as St. Louis. He'd just been traded to the Phillies in February from St. Louis so I guess he hadn't had time to move. Note all the fine print at the bottom of the Archives card compared to the 1973 card.

2014 Topps Archives #102 Goose Gossage

1986 Topps #530 Rich Gossage

The biggest difference is that in 1986, Gossage was a Padre. He had left the Yankees after the 1983 season and joined the Padres in 1984. Also note that on the 1986 card he is Rich Gossage. Looking at the Gossage cards I have scanned from this era, it looks like Fleer, Donruss and Topps weren't very consistent in what they called him. One Fleer card actually had "Goose" Gossage.

 2014 Topps Archives #102 Goose Gossage

 1986 Topps #530 Rich Gossage

 Except for all the fine print at the bottom of the Archives card, the designs match pretty well. Note that on the Gossage cards, they give stats through the 1986 season whereas an actual 1986 card would only have stats through 1985. The Carlton Archives card gives stats through 1979 for some reason.

2014 Topps Archives 1987 All-Stars #87-VC Vince Coleman

1989  Topps Glossy All Stars #17 Vince Coleman

 

This is kind of confusing. The set is called "1987 All-Stars" but the Archives card says 1988 on the top. Coleman wasn't actually an All-Star in 1987, but he was in 1988. The Topps card with "1988 All-Star" actually was released in 1989. Topps released these glossy sets from about 1985 through 1991. They had the same design each year. And they were very glossy. The Archives reproduction isn't glossy. The two cards look pretty similar.  The NL logo is smaller on the Archives card. There's no Topps logo on the 1989 card.

2014 Topps Archives 1987 All-Stars #87-VC Vince Coleman

 1989  Topps Glossy All Stars #17 Vince Coleman

The only comment I want to make is the background color. The original card backs were white when issued but they look yellowed today. I used a Photoshop tool to make the 1989 card look white again. The Archives card backs look more like a 25 year old white card would look.

1986 Bend Oregon Phillies

This is a set only a hard-core Phillies collector would buy. Guilty as charged. I actually came upon this set on Ebay when I was looking for something else, some mid-1990's Pacific set. Pacific apparently got it's start producing minor league sets, like this Bend OR Phillies set ,in the '80's.

The Phillies teams of the late 1980's and early 1990's were not good teams. The Bend Phillies may have been part of the reason. Bend was the home of one of the Phillies single A farm teams. There are 25 cards in this set. Of the 25, only 2 could be said to have had major league careers. Many of the rest never made it to the majors. Many of them never even made it to AA ball. Here are the players who made it to the majors and a few more for fun.

Andy Ashby was by far the best player to come from this team.  He  didn't make it to the majors until 1991 and then only spent one and a half years with the Phillies. He went on to have a 14-year career and a 2-time All-Star, with a 98-110 record. He even pitched in the 1998 World Series with the Padres.

Scarsone was the Phillies 2nd round draft pick of 1986 and went on to have a 7 year career but only a few months of that was with the Phillies. He was mainly a utility infielder with not nearly the impact of Ashby.

Garland Kiser appeared in 7 games (4.2 IP) for the Indians in 1991 and was never heard from again.

Chuck Malone was 1-0 in 7 appearances with the Phillies in 1990. Malone must have missed team photo day and got his photo taken on a much nicer looking day. I think the background sky perfectly matches the dismal careers most of these players had.

Brad Moore pitched 5.2 innings for the Phillies in 1988 and another 2.2 innings in 1990. What is he doing today, I wonder? And that's it, only 5 of the 25 made it to the majors.

Bubba (aka Jesse) Allison was the Phillies #1 draft pick for 1986. Ever hear of him? Neither had I. He was 0-8 with a 6.39 ERA for Bend in 1986 and that was his whole professional career.

Another guy who missed the original photo shoot. Glen Anderson, according to baseball-reference.com, never played anywhere professionally, not even for Bend.

John Guanukakis looks like he just got out of bed. His career consisted of one year in Bend.

This is Elvis Romero. Elvis was 0-2 with 4 different single A teams in 1987 and then vanishes until 1997. He played for two independent teams in 1997-1998 and lost two more games.

The very serious-looking Leroy Ventress played in the minors from 1986 until 1995, making it all the way to AA ball at Harrisburg with the Expos.

1995 Topps Cyberstats - Phillies

The 1994 baseball season ended in mid-August due to the failure of the owners and players to reach a new contract deal. I don't want to dwell on the reasons for and the effects of that work stoppage except to remark on one of the least important effects,  Topps attempts to produce a set of baseball cards to take advantage of the situation. They produced two in fact, the Topps Cyberstats Parallel and the Stadium Club Virtual Reality Parallel sets. I'm going to deal with the Cyberstats set as I recently acquired the Phillies cards from this set.

Here's what the regular 1995 Topps cards looked like:

1995 was, in my opinion, a nice set. The deckle edged border on the front was something different. By now gold foil was commonplace even on base sets. I really like the backs. The managed to fit full career stats, a portrait in "Diamond Vision" and a small player figure.

Here's the front of the Cyberstat parallel.

The front uses the same photograph but with a foil dufex background. The logo and the player name are holographic foil. The back is radically different.

Topps, according to the back of the card, used a computer simulation to play the remaining games of the season. For the Phillies that was 47 games. The 1994 stats given are the total of the players actual stats for the season plus the stats from the simulated games. I have no idea how sophisticated baseball computer simulation was in 1995. I've checked for several players and the stats are different than just extrapolating out to 162 games. Note also that the stats are displayed in a simulated computer window. Windows 95 I guess had just been released.

There were only 396 cards in the set. They were inserted one per pack of Topps. They are all straight player cards, no All-Star, rookie, or any of the other subsets in 1995 Topps.

In 1993, Dave Hollins, like many Phillies had a great year. In 1995, if I remember correctly, he broke a small bone in one of his hands which severely limited his playing time for several years. No wonder his simulated 1994 stats look so different than in 1992 and 1993 stats.

Danny Jackson could have had the second best season of his career. He'd already won 14 games by the premature end of the season. Jackson played 3 more years after 1994 and managed to only win 7 more games.

Topps projected Jones to save 33 games. He'd already had 27.

Kruk really had 5 home runs in 1994. The Topps projection gives him 4 more. In 1995, Kruk went to the White Sox and retired the day he got his 100th home run. He could have retired a few days sooner.

Munoz already had 7 wins, the best by far of his career when play stopped. I doubt he'd have won another 7. He played 5 more years after 1994 and only won 1 more game.

I don't remember why but Schilling was having a terrible year in 1994. He was only 2-8 with only 13 starts when the season ended. In '93 he'd been 16-7 in 34 starts. Topps projects him to have been 5-9 with a career worst (as a starter) ERA of 4.89.

2014 Bowman Photoshop Twins

A few posts ago, I document a number of cards where Topps used the same images on different brands. What I haven't seen in awhile is what I call I Photoshop Twin. Where a player is featured on a card in one uniform and the same photo is used on another card but in a different uniform.

One of the Bowman Prospect cards I pulled was this:

Nothing particularly special about this card, expect it is a purple parallel. I noticed, however, that Burns was born in Marietta, GA. I have a friend who lives there and has been collecting cards of players born in Marietta. So I went on eBay to see what I could find for his birthday and came up with this:

It has everything: on-card auto, chrome, refractor, and serial numbered. And a good price for an auto and well within what I was willing to pay.

Since I had just scanned the Purple parallel, I noticed right away that Burns was in a different uniform. And the different uniform was photoshopped. I'm guessing that the original is the Nationals uni. There must be a longer lead time on publishing on-card autos since the cards have to be sent to the player, signed and returned. It looks like Burns was traded to the A's sometime after the end of the 2013 season. He doesn't appear in an A's minor league game until this year.

I also found this:

Which I decided to keep for myself. This was real cheap for an auto card, only $3.34 with free shipping.

1996 Pro Stamps - Phillies

While I was trolling eBay looking for 1996 Phillies cards I found this odd ball item.

This produced by something called Chris Martin Enterprises. Each team sheet has 5 players (numbered) and one team logo stamp (which is not numbered). Not including the logo stamps, there are 140 players in the set. The stamps feature the players name and USA in gold foil. I am planning to leave the sheet intact, rather than cutting it up into individual stamps.

On the back is a complete checklist and a coupon. For $5 and 10 proofs of purchase you could join the Pro Stamps Club and get a "cool" membership card, a team stamp poster and a newsletter. I'm sorry to say that the prostamps.com web site is defunct.

Googling for Chris Martin Enterprises indicates that they made other baseball related items in the 1990's. There appears to be a Chris Martin Enterprises in Kansas City, MO, but I couldn't tell what they do.

1996 Leaf Signature Autograph

The 1996 Leaf Signature base set didn't have much going for it. I don't actually own a card from the set although I do own one of the Gold Proof parallels. In the mid-1990s the card companies were all crazy for 'proof' cards. Here's that card. I acquired this on eBay in 2004.

It's pretty drab. The foil seal is the only thing that distinguishes it from the base card. What the set did have however, was a 251 card autographed insert set. I believe that it is the first large scale autographed set. These came in three flavors, the base set, a silver foil set and a gold foil set. I just acquired 2 of the 10 autographed Phillies cards in the set. The design is completely different that the non-autographed cards.  And the autos are on the card.  I don't think sticker autos had been thought of yet.

The cards are not numbered but Beckett.com numbers them in alphabetical numbered. Although they are also not serial numbered, the cards are a limited edition, with only 3,500 of each base card printed. There are a few short printed (to 700 cards) featuring some of the bigger players of the day, such as Derek Jeter. Here's the other one I just got.

The only thing distinguishing the base, silver and gold cards is the color of the foil seal. The gold cards (when seen in person) are pretty easy to tell from the base cards (I have one gold and one silver). The silver cards are limited to 1000 (or 200 for the short prints). The gold are limited to 500 (100 for the short prints). In case you were wondering, the Jeter gold parallel is currently available on eBay for $2,295 (or best offer). The shipping is free.