You May Take This Custom Card, But You'll Never Take Its Freedom!

There are plenty of trading card sets out there that feature big action movie stars of the '80s and '90s like Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator) and Sylvester Stallone (Rambo, Rocky). 

 

However, I don't think you can mention big stars like Arnold and Sly without adding this guy to the list.

 

Mel Gibson portrayed some of the most iconic characters of the era. Pretty good range, too, if you think about it.

 

And aside from the blockbuster films and memorable characters featured on the card, Gibson had leading roles in other solid films like Conspiracy Theory with Julia Roberts and Patrick Stewart. Then you had the more cheeky and fun action of Maverick, whose star-studded cast has almost no end: Jodie Foster, James Coburn, Graham Greene, Alfred Molina, and the "original" Maverick, James Garner. Here's one scene featuring a few of those actors:

 

 

 

Interestingly enough, there's a 60-card set out there for Maverick, But no cards at all for those three big films (and film franchises) above. So I thought a custom card would help fill the gap. The 1980 Future Stars template does the trick, as there's maybe just a slight wink to a film marquee with those little stars and the way the images are framed.

 

To tie sports into the conversation, did you know that Mel Gibson is trained in the martial arts? (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) He began training in the 1980s, to prepare for the filming of the first Lethal Weapon movie. 

So how about you readers? Do you have a favorite Mel Gibson film?

 

Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading.

A Tree that Grows Wax Packs

A collecting memory just crossed my mind.

When I was in middle school, back around 1990, I remember coming up with a hypothetical question for my stepbrother. He was a few years younger than me, but we had some common interests for sure, like watching baseball, playing Wiffle ball in the backyard, and collecting cards.

 

Here's the question I asked him:

Imagine you had a tree in your backyard that produced packs of trading cards instead of fruit. As long as you only took one pack from the tree each day, it would produce more packs indefinitely. But if you took any additional packs that day, it would turn into a normal tree, never to produce cards again. 

 

Would you be able to follow that one rule?

Waxpaxicus americanus (1978 variety)

Unfortunately I don't remember my stepbrother's exact answer, but I think the gist of it was that he would take as many packs from the tree as he could in one day, even if it meant he wouldn't get any more after that. (He was only about 7 or 8 years old at the time. Can't blame him for that response. After all, if it was a big tree in full bloom, there would have probably been hundreds of wax packs ripe for plucking.)

In any case, the question provides a fun little exercise in willpower analysis. And I suppose it takes on different flavors if you get more specific with the packs.

For example, if all the packs were 1956 Topps baseball, I think some collectors would be pretty tempted to grab as many as they could on the first day.

1991 Fleer, on the other hand? That tree might be flourishing for a lonnnnng time.

 

What if the packs first blossomed as junk wax, but as they "ripened", they became more and more vintage? Would you have patience then? I bet you would. (And I bet you'd see at least a few other collectors down at the local garden supply store looking for saplings.)

 

I haven't gone so deeply into all this until now, but it's definitely fun to expand on the idea.

So let's go back to the time when I asked my stepbrother that question. Baseball cards were having quite a boom. The Score company joined the scene in 1988. A year later the Bowman brand returned. And of course Upper Deck made a big splash that same year with their iconic 1989 set and the Ken Griffey, Jr. rookie card. 

Oh, and don't forget some of the famous (or infamous) error cards that had us all talking. 

 

I look back at that era with a tremendous amount of fondness. 

So how about you readers and fellow collectors?

(1) Which wax pack sapling (year, brand, and sport) would you buy and plant first?

(2) Could you maintain the "one wax pack per day" rule once that tree started bearing fruit?

Share in the comment section. I'm interested to read your answers!

Completed Set: 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey

This is what a Holiday Inn looked like in the early 1990s.

For businesspeople on the go, it represented a clean room, a parking spot for your rental car, and plenty of space for conferences and meetings on the lower level. 

For an adolescent Mr. Nine Pockets, it represented absolute peak hockey card collecting years. 

I'll explain.

On the first Friday of every month, my hockey-loving friend and I would meet up after dinner and walk over to the card show at the local Holiday Inn. We'd go around the rows of tables a few times, take note of which products were available, gawk at the prices of the vintage cards under glass, and privately poke fun at some of the dealers. 

But the prime target of our modest stack of paper money was packs of hockey cards. A couple of times we even split an entire box! After the show, we'd walk back to my house, open some packs, turn on the TV and the Sega Genesis, and hunker down for a few games of NHL hockey. (E . . . A . . . Sports . . . It's in the game!)

The memories are strong. And it was a strong time for the NHL. They'd been celebrating their 75th anniversary, and players were lighting it up. Ten of them would end up scoring more than 100 points by season's end (including defenseman Brian Leetch!) Brett Hull led the league with 70 goals, Wayne Gretzky led with 90 assists, and Mario Lemieux beat everyone with 131 points. A whopping 17 players hit the 40-goal milestone. 

As for me and my friend, we weren't only playing video game hockey. We were young high-schoolers playing on the same ice hockey team. We meshed well out there, so much so that our coach was reluctant to ever split us up.

So those packs meant a lot to us. The players we found inside were the guys we looked up to. The guys we marveled at. The guys we tried to emulate after we saw their highlights on ESPN. 

It goes without saying, then, that we opened all sorts of hockey packs that year. But none more than Upper Deck. 

And we needed to. 

The low series consisted of 500 cards, while the high series added another 200. For the era, it was an absolutely enormous amount of hockey cards. 

Here's a table showing the major sets that season, and their card totals.

It's a remarkable thing, because just a few years prior, the largest set of hockey cards would have been O-Pee-Chee's flagship offering, which totaled 396. If you were in the States, the Topps equivalents had half that much—198.

So you'd be right to think about those 700 cards and wonder if it was too much. After all, that's a lot of content to create—especially for a company that had just entered the hockey card market one year earlier. 

If the set was designed poorly, or contained sub-par photography, those negative aspects would be evident 700 times over. But if the set was designed well, the sheer number of cards could be a good thing. 

The question is, Did Upper Deck make it a good thing?

Yes.

Yes they did.

And those five cards were far from the only fantastic ones.

I don't know if any set captured the brilliant intensity of hockey battles more than 1991-92 Upper Deck. Look here.

Flip through the set and you'll also see some shots being fired.

Which can lead to some exuberant goal celebrations.

And that wasn't all. 1991-92 Upper Deck provided some captivating camera angles that hockey fans had never seen on cardboard—or maybe anywhere else!

They also showed players in practice, wearing practice jerseys. That was different.

The overall design was pretty good, too. That "NHL 75" logo was present on all the cards, swooping across the bottom. Team names got the same font treatment, set in team colors. Simple, effective, and cohesive. 

And don't forget the card backs. Consistent with the other early Upper Deck sets, these cards contained just a few rows of stats in order to make room for the full-color image. Sometimes you'd have room for a one- or two-line blurb. 

But what about the goalies? You ask. 

Don't worry. Upper Deck didn't forget about them.

The photographers seemed to understand how important these guys were to their teams, and how dynamic and acrobatic the position could be. They even understood that such great action shouldn't be restricted to vertical layouts.

 

Images like the ones you've seen so far played a big part in launching Upper Deck to the top of the hockey card mountain.

The whole thing made me so nostalgic that I decided to do something I'd never done with a non-vintage set:

Put it in a binder.

That's right. Over the years, I've always reserved binder space for completed sets that were printed on vintage-style cardboard (i.e., 1980s and older). But recently I've found myself becoming more nostalgic about some card sets from the early '90s. So the "newer" Upper Deck cardstock gets a pass on the rules.

Here's the thing, though. Putting this set in a binder actually revealed a few disappointments.

First, the set led off with a few "Soviet Stars" cards, which felt odd. There was no accompanying checklist, and each card front featured Cyrillic writing with no real explanation. Although it's important to note how huge it was to have the wave of super-talented Russian players joining the NHL at that time, I think Upper Deck would have still been better off starting the set with some Star Rookies, like they did for their inaugural baseball release.

Next, it seems like the cards weren't numbered with 9-pocket pages in mind. Here's one example. 

The San Jose Sharks were the exciting new kid on the block, and Upper Deck gave them 8 low-numbered cards in a row. If they'd only added one more, it would have made a cool page for young Sharks fans. But instead you have a checklist for the 1991 Draft Choice subset in that last spot. A little weird.

A third let-down is the amount of times multiple players from the same team end up on the same binder page.

Four different Oilers, plus two Kings. This kind of thing seems avoidable.

They're all minor disappointments, I know. But putting this set together and looking through the cards brought back so much collecting energy for me that I guess I was expecting everything to make sense in 9-pocket pages.

Regardless, I'm keeping the set in the binder. It's absolutely one that I want to slide off the shelf every once in a while and flip through. 

Nostalgia and good vibes. That's what this hobby is about, right?

And now we've got to get back to the set as a whole, outside of the binder issues. There was a lot more to 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey.

It's about the subsets. 

Oh man, were there subsets. (I count 11 of them!) 

More than 200 of the 700 cards in the set belong to a subset. In fact, if you were to start at card #1, you'd have to get all the way to #46 to find a regular ol' base card!

As mentioned earlier, the Soviet Stars led off the set. Directly after that was the Canada Cup subset, which featured big-time stars playing for their home countries.

In the high numbers, the World Junior Championship subset did the same thing for up-and-coming stars. These kinds of subsets were extra-cool for a young hockey collector who was learning just how international the sport was.

 

The high numbers also contained the All-Stars.

 

And a nice little tribute to some Hockey Heroes.

Bloodlines cards showed how the sport of hockey could sometimes be a family affair.

And of course we wondered which Star Rookies would pan out.

 

Even if they didn't, you had the All-Rookie Team.

 

Oh, and let's not forget about the Draft Choices . . .

 

. . . Or the Young Guns! 

It's pretty clear to see that Upper Deck was all-in on the rookie craze. And guess what? The Young Guns series is still going strong to this day, which I find quite cool.

Overall, thanks to all the subsets, Upper Deck managed to hit some big names in the rookie department. I tried to show some of them above, but here's a more complete list of incredible talent:

Vladimir Malakhov, Alexei Zhamnov, Viacheslav Kozlov, Ziggy Palffy, Martin Rucinsky, Teemu Selanne. Nicklas Lidstrom, Peter Forsberg, Dominik Hasek, John Leclair, Doug Weight, Tony Amonte, Darius Kasparaitis, Alexei Yashin, Nikolai Khabibulin, Alexei Kovalev, Alexei Zhitnik, Sandis Ozolinsh, Sami Kapanen, Keith Tkachuk.

Back in 1991-92, I would have had quite a few of those studs in top loaders.

Speaking of studs, the artist behind the team checklists (Steven R. Cusano) did a terrific job.

 

There were also a couple of inserts we all hoped to pull from packs.

Award-Winner Holograms made up a 9-card insert set.

These were wayyy better than the previous year's holograms, which you could hardly make out.

The Brett Hull Hockey Heroes checklist was also 9 cards deep. Mr. Hull was big man on campus at the time. Here's card number 7.

 

You even had a chance of pulling an autographed version of the 9th card in the set, serial numbered to 2,500!

Finally, here's an example of a base card checklist (it's probably the only plain thing about 1991-92 Upper Deck), plus the front and back of an all-star fan ballot that was included in every pack. 

Fold open the ballot and you'll find a big list of players from the Wales and Cambpell Conferences. Just call that 1-900 number and key in your selections. ($0.95 for the first minute, $0.55 for each additional minute. Ouch!)

And look at the back of the ballot, toward the bottom: The fan voting was sponsored by CCM and Starter. Remember those 1990s Starter jackets? You just couldn't beat 'em.

So that's 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey. I'm very happy to have the entire set in a binder now. Maybe the next step is to buy a Sega Genesis system and a couple of the EA Sports hockey games, set it up at home, and see if I can get in touch with my old hockey buddy. Talk about a dose of nostalgia!

How about you readers and collectors? 

Any good memories of 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey, or any of the other sports that Upper Deck released that year?

Did any of you have a Starter jacket back then? 

When I was a teenager I had a satin bomber—Minnesota North Stars version. It was all black, with green, white, and yellow trim around the collar and cuffs. Wish I still had it.

Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading!

 

A Smorgasbord! 1988 Domino's Detroit Tigers

From the 1970s through the 1990s, it seemed like you could find your favorite baseball stars on food product packaging everywhere you looked: supermarkets, corner stores, restaurants, and beyond. This past year, in an effort to capture a little more nostalgia, I set a goal to expand my own collection of these "food-issue" cards. In this series I'll show the specific examples I've acquired, and share a little bit of history about the food or beverage sponsor as well. 

Previous entries can be found here.

 

 

Wednesday, October 19, 1988. It's been getting a little cold here in Detroit.

But it's also World Series time. Game 4. And as a young Little-Leaguer, you're deeply immersed.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are up 2 games to 1 against the Oakland A's. You're still thinking about Kirk Gibson's amazing home run from a few nights ago.

Dad has been letting you stay up late to watch the games, which is amazing enough. But tonight, there's an added bonus.

Domino's pizza!

Oh man, pizza and a World Series game. Good thing you've finished your homework.

But before the scent of fresh, hot pizza becomes completely intoxicating, you remember something. It was a baseball card trade you made with one of your friends this past year. Quickly, you run upstairs to your bedroom, open up some shoeboxes full of cards, and find the card you were wondering about. And it turns out you wondered right.

You have a Domino's Pizza card in your collection!

Your buddy brought back a whole set of these cards from a game he went to at Tiger Stadium a couple of months ago. The players are before your time, but they won the championship in 1968, and you respect that. When your friend offered one of the cards from the set in a trade, you chose Jim Northrup—mostly for the action on the front. You get a great shot of the metal wire fence and built-in lightbulb scoreboard, and it looks like Mr. Northrup is about to make a highlight-reel catch with all the fans watching along.

You flip the card over to remind yourself what it looks like.

There's lots of great information about your hometown team, and it looks like Mr. Northrup had a more than decent World Series performance!

But now you've got to get back to the pizza, while there's still some pepperoni left.

Domino's was founded in 1960, when brothers Tom and Jim Monaghan bought a Michigan restaurant called DomiNick's from the original owner, Dominick DeVarti. The brothers added a couple of pizzerias over the next few years to make it a total of three locations, and that's what the dots on the logo represent.

As Domino's grew throughout the 1960s and '70s, their locations became known for local pizza delivery—something that wasn't all that common at the time. The business plan was an outrageous success, in part because the company added locations near college campuses filled with hungry students.

Domino's remained popular throughout the 1980s, when this Tigers card set was released. Around this time they also introduced a wacky mascot some of you might remember:

Avoid the Noid.

Then, at some point in the 1990s or early 2000s, Domino's pizza lost some of their luster. The quality of ingredients declined, and sales dropped. I do remember this time, when it felt like Domino's was a last resort for your pizza needs. 

Thankfully, in more modern times the company has reworked its menu, and it seems like Domino's is no longer the "cardboard with jarred tomato sauce on it" that it was during those down years. I haven't had Domino's in more than 20 years, so I couldn't tell you.

How about you readers? 

What are your thoughts on Domino's pizza? Any good childhood or teenage memories? Have you ordered from Domino's recently?

Do you have any cards from the Commemorative Detroit Tigers baseball card set in your collection?

Share your thoughts in the comment section, and thanks for reading.

Reuschel Brothers

It's 1975. 

And here you are, pitching at Triple-A Wichita, pushing hard to get to the big leagues. Your little brother Rick made it to The Show a couple of years ago, and is pitching pretty well for your hometown Chicago Cubs. He's put out lots of good energy into the baseball world for you lately, and combined with all your hard work, it finally brings you the news you've been waiting for. The Cubs are calling you up. You'll be sharing a big-league locker room with your brother! 

As exciting as that is for your family, it gets more memorable on the afternoon of August 21st at Wrigley Field, where your Cubs are hosting the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

Rick starts the game off well. In fact, through five innings he hasn't allowed any runs, and only 3 hits. That's when the call comes in: 

Get on the warm-up mound in foul territory and start throwing. 

How cool. Your brother is getting ready for the 6th inning on the main mound, while you're warming up about 200 feet away! With a mixture of adrenaline, joy, and nerves, you say to yourself, Try and stop us. 

The top of the 6th starts and ends quickly, with little bro allowing nothing more than a single across 4 batters. But at that point one of his pitching fingers is showing the signs of a blister, and in the 7th he goes back out on the mound and immediately gives up a single to Steve Garvey. After that, he does manage to induce a ground ball from Willie Crawford, forcing Garvey out at second base. But that looks like it.

A mound visit is underway. 

You watch your manager take the ball from Rick. And now they're pointing over to you. 

You're going to relieve little bro. And as much as you don't want to think about it, a shutout is on the line! 

Thankfully, you finish the rest of the 7th unscathed, and in the 8th you retire Bill Buckner, Davey Lopes, and John Hale without a whole lot of trouble. 

Shutout still intact. 

Back in the dugout, you don't have much time to be nervous. You watch as your team goes down, 1-2-3, in the bottom of the 8th. The top of the 9th is here. 

You get out there and immediately give up a line-drive single to that darned Steve Garvey. But it's just a single. You muster up some courage and get Willie Crawford to fly out to José Cardenal in left field. 

One away. 

Next up is Ron Cey. You induce a grounder to third baseman Bill Madlock. Could this be it?? 

Madlock throws to Manny Trillo at second base to force Steve Garvey out, but Garvey breaks up the double play. Argh! So close! 

But still, it's two away. You're down to the last out. 

Steve Yeager comes up. You check the signs, rear back, and throw one. Yeager connects. The ball flies up into right field, but you realize soon enough that it's going to stay in the park. Jerry Morales gets under it, puts his glove hand up, and squeezes the ball. 

Game over. 

You and little bro combined not only for a win, but for a shutout! And what's more, you're the first pair of brothers to do this in MLB history! What a moment for Rick and Paul Reuschel. 

Here they are, just a few years later:

And here are some numbers:

 

 

CAREER TOTALS

 

	RICK (19 seasons)	PAUL (5 seasons)
WINS	214	16
LOSSES	191	16
ERA	3.37	4.51
STRIKEOUTS	2015	188
WALKS	935	132
SHUTOUTS	26	0
COMPLETE GAMES	1002	1
INNINGS PITCHED	3548.1	393.0

 

 

 

BEST SEASON (career highs in bold)

 

	RICK (1977, CHC)	PAUL (1977, CHC)
WINS	20	5
LOSSES	10	6
ERA	2.79	4.37
STRIKEOUTS	166	62
WALKS	74	40
SHUTOUTS	4	0
COMPLETE GAMES	8	0
INNINGS PITCHED	252.0	107.0

 

Paul pitched in the big leagues for 5 seasons, mostly in middle relief. Over those years, he suited up for the Cubs and Indians. In 1977 he had a very solid season for the Cubs, appearing in 69 games, which placed him in the top 10 for the National League.

Rick was a three-time All Star and two-time Gold Glove winner. For comparison's sake, he had very similar career numbers to Joe Niekro. Over the course of his 19-year career, Reuschel pitched for the Cubs, Yankees, Pirates, and Giants. In 1977 he led the entire majors in WAR with 9.5, and he finished third in Cy Young voting behind Steve Carlton and Tommy John. He was a pretty decent hitter, as well. (1115 AB, 82 R, 187 H, 35 2B, 4 3B, 4 HR, 79 RBI, 3 SB, .168/.202/.217, 135 sacrifice hits)

 

So let's hear it for the Reuschel brothers. Two big dudes from Illinois who got to pitch for their hometown team together, and set a pretty special record in the process!