Topps Baseball Cards

I only bought them for the bubblegum.

One of the tools I have used over time to embrace Rule No. 3 (What? You don’t remember which one is Rule No. 3? Geez! You can visit the Rule of Three archives right now to reinforce the importance of Rule No. 3 - the inaugural column, dated August 8, 2020, entitled, “Welcome to Rule of Three” clearly elucidates Rule No. 3’s place in the universe - and then you can rejoin the rest of us. Go ahead, we’ll wait for you.), is to indicate that one of the first baseball cards I ever owned was a Ted Williams card. Since “Teddy Ballgame” performed brilliantly for the Boston Red Sox from 1939 to 1960, this claim has rightfully astounded some people I have encountered, inasmuch as Williams retired from the game a scant nine months after I was born.

But, as you can see from the card pictured atop this column, Ted resurfaced as the manager of a 1961 expansion team, the Washington Senators, in 1969 - this 1970 card was in fact one of the cards in the first pack of Topps baseball cards I purchased as a ten-year-old.

Packs of Topps baseball cards included ten cards, plus a flat, rectangular, pink, stale piece of bubblegum, which magically sprinkled sugar-dust on the adjacent card in the pack. This gum, which if wielded as a weapon could cut glass with its sharp corners, was truly awful-tasting gum. The subhead to this column notwithstanding (I was attempting irony), the prize for me was the cards themselves, not the truly awful-tasting gum.

The sharp-eyed among you have probably already discerned that I intended to evoke the memorable, similarly-ironic phrase, “I only read it for the articles,” which was weakly proffered by readers of Playboy magazine, when questioned about their perusing a magazine containing pictures of naked women. Although I’m told that Playboy, particularly in its early days, featured world-class writing, I can assure you that the great majority of men reading Playboy were not “reading it for the articles.”

Cracking open that pack of Topps baseball cards was truly a sublime experience for me; freeing a prized card from that pack which I did not already own brought the satisfaction of achievement, and completion, as I mentally checked-off the box for that player on the list of those not yet secured. For me, the cards I most eagerly sought were players from my local team of choice: the Chicago Cubs, including: Billy Williams, Ernie Banks, Randy Hundley, Ferguson Jenkins, Kenny Holtzman, Ron Santo, Don Kessinger, Glenn Beckert, Ted Abernathy, Phil Regan, and even utility players such as Nate Oliver, Paul Popovich, and Willie Smith. I also highly valued the cards of star performers on other teams, such as: Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Willie Mays.

I didn’t have a copy of Topps’ 1970 baseball card marketing plan on hand, but it seemed to me that the cards I have detailed above were not readily available in the Chicago area, suggesting to me that distributing local player cards sparingly in each market was a brilliant tactic designed to increase sales of baseball cards, as local youths continuously chased the elusive cards (similar to the strategy devised by that marketing genius, Willie Wonka, with his “Golden Ticket” promotion).

Ironically, although I mentally checked-off boxes for cards I desired, I wasn’t a fan of the checklist card, which occasionally appeared amongst the ten cards provided in each pack - I didn’t use those checklists, and considered them to be wasted opportunities in the game of card-collecting.

Nor did I deploy baseball cards in other ways you may have heard about, such as inserting them in the spokes of my bicycle, in order to make ersatz motorcycle noises. My reticence wasn’t due to a desire to keep those cards in pristine condition, and later sell them for ridiculous profits; that business came much later, long after my card collection had been discarded.

In fact, I remember specifically harming the resale value of my cards, by creating a deck of playing cards from my baseball cards. Using a black magic marker, I assigned values from ace through king for each of the four suits to cards from each of four different teams - likely, teams which I didn’t much care about, and which weren’t terribly good teams. I know that the Cleveland Indians and the Kansas City Royals were two of the teams I utilized; I don’t remember the other two - I may have used the California Angels and the Oakland Athletics - all four of those teams were pretty weak back then, although Charlie Finley’s Athletics, and the Royals came on strong later in the 1970’s. And, no, in case you’re wondering, I have no idea which card received the honor of becoming the ace of spades.

Using that deck of cards in a card game provided a (admittedly convoluted) shortcut for card-counting cheats: on the back of Topps baseball cards appeared the player’s chronological statistical history, including such things as the name of the team he played for each year, number of hits, runs-batted-in, wins and losses, and number of homeruns, as well as cartoonish illustrations of something related to that player, such as, “Ted likes to fish in the off-season,” beneath a picture of a fisherman. If you possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball statistics, or if you knew who liked to fish in the offseason, and could connect that information to a player, and, you had a memory which enabled you to recall which playing card that player represented, you could conceivably find a way to identify cards by seeing only the back-side of them, and use that for your own nefarious means in a card game. That is likely only one of many reasons why my personally-designed deck of cards has not been adopted by Las Vegas casinos, whose mantras can best be summarized with:

• “We provide air-conditioned space in which you can lose all your money, because it’s 107-degrees outside.”

• “The aisles in our casino are wide enough to enable you to easily wheel your oxygen tank along.”

• “The house always wins.”

Perhaps it’s interesting to note that the four teams whose cards I chose to spoil in this way were each American League teams. There were National League cities (e.g. Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati), and there were American League cities (e.g. Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland), but there were also those cities which featured clubs in both leagues: New York, and Chicago are examples. Geography plays a significant role in developing team allegiances in Chicago; typically, those who live north of Madison Street in Chicago are Cubs fans, and those who live south are White Sox fans. There are exceptions, of course, notably my mother, who favored the White Sox over the Cubs, even though she never lived south of Madison Street, as far as I know. Plus, it’s the White Sox, right? C’mon!

If you were a hands-on fan of the 1970 Cubs, as I was, you may believe that I have omitted a key player from the above list: Jim Hickman, who was a congenial, homerun-hitting right-fielder, originally from Tennessee. This card proved to be particularly elusive for me, even though I was able to secure such heavyweights as Ernie Banks, and Ferguson Jenkins. I negotiated a purchase of Hickman’s card from a friend, John DeLong, paying ten-cents for the card. Mind you, a complete pack of ten Topps baseball cards, plus that crappy slab of gum, cost ten-cents at that time - that was quite a premium I paid, indeed! Of course, the postscript to this episode is that DeLong’s mother insisted a year or so later that he dispose of his significant baseball card collection, at which time he gifted the entire inventory to me - that’s ten-cents I’ll never be able to retrieve. And, within the next year or so, my mother made the same demand of me, and my entire baseball card collection disappeared, including DeLong’s bequest.

Noting recent trading frenzies involving Bitcoin and GameStop stock, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see vintage Topps bubblegum emerge as the next hot currency play; my only regret is that I didn’t have the foresight to stockpile those crappy slabs of gum, with an eye toward making a killing someday - in the market, I mean, not literally killing somebody, although as I have suggested, that gum was equally-equipped for that task.