Salad Days

My post last month about the various Topps Baseball Stars Candy and Bubble Gum lid sets elicited a response from Friend o'the Archive Keith Olbermann. He asked what the basis was for dating the first, "green-starred" proof Baseball Stars Bubble Gum set to 1972.  The answer is: nothing!  I've usually put quotes around the year when referring to the set, as the dating seems to stem from early dealer attempts to identify the first run of proofs with the stars in green atop the lid, since the issued set switched the "star's stars" to red. 

Now, keep in mind that I soaked up tons of hobby knowledge from old price guides and reference books, bi-weekly and monthly hobby publications and many old time dealers, especially from 1981 to the early Nineties. In fact, I have several bookcases and cabinets full of them (well, not old dealers, they would collapse my shelves). So when I type "1972" in regard to the green starred set, it occurs to me that many people don't know why I do that. Related to this, when looking through numerous posts and comments in various collecting groups on social media, it's easy to see there's a big knowledge gap between people of an "uncertain" age (say those born after the Millennium, and those of a "certain" age (old coots like me but generally those born before 1975 or so) with a middle group that has some grasp of the old, paper-driven hobby eco-info-system. 

I fell this is not the fault of the younger folks but rather the fallout of the migration from books to screens that is very much still ongoing.  Now I realize not everybody has the space, time or means to accumulate a library of hobby books and publications and that it is, more and more in the digitally driven world, a luxury in a way. I've been accumulating printed hobby material for forty five years, a solid chunk of which was never published in any kind of quantity or widely circulated.  I also saved and organized clippings from old hobby publications and auction catalogs from roughly 1981 to 2007, some of which are outdated, some of which are not. All of that stuff is pretty much entered into my brain at this point and if it isn't, I know where to look.  But that's because it's all on paper (although I've been scanning and digitizing a lot of it as I have time).  How then, does the younger collector of vintage items (vintage being pre-1981 to my mind but let's say pre-Millennium to be fair) today figure things out? We were all green once (that's Shakespeare kids, look it up) but it seems harder and harder to study up these days, at least to my way of thinking, and I'm hardly a luddite.

Well, there's various websites such as Trading Card Database, PSA and Sports Collectors Daily, plus old auction house online archives, eBay, subscription sites like Beckett and Card Ladder plus all the groups on Facebook, Instagram and the like.  And this doesn't even get into things like Tik-Tok, vlogs and podcasts.  Many of these are fine and informative sites or entertainment but it's all getting dispersed to the point there's no way to efficiently corral some of the more esoteric information on non-mainstream sets, which is not something that seems easily solvable. So I'm thinking on all of this and invite this blog's regular readers (and casual looky-loo's) to weigh in.

Meanwhile, I never really looked at the "1972" roster of Baseball Stars Bubble Gum to decode if there was, in fact, any way to date it to 1972, or nor.  Mr. Olbermann has helpfully weighed in, allowing me to avoid any heavy lifting.  And so...

"We all saw it, new, at the first New York card shows (1973) and that proof sheet was a thing of horrific beauty - with hockey team photos and other detritus serving as an impromptu background for the oddly positioned baseball shots.

But most importantly: Willie Mays is on the proof sheet, in a Mets uniform. He wasn't traded to the Mets until May 11, 1972 and nobody turned new Topps photos around in less than months then."

This is the proof sheet in question and it's always been seen as an oddity; here's an ad from the much missed U-Trading Cards in Seattle, circa 1995 (with bonus goodies described):

Everybody calls them Candy Lids by the way, even though they are not, as after 1970 they held bubble gum!

Keith has sent along some illustrative scans (red circles by KO), noting:

"I love the idea that Esposito is in the debris behind Sanguillen"

"Mike Epstein was traded to Texas on November 20, 1972. That sheet was NOT produced in 1972"

"Pretty sure that's a '71 Yankees team card peeking up from under Barry Bonds and Lee May"

I'm not sure anyone has ever figured out why the underlying matte for the candy lid proofs looks like it does, maybe the fumes from mixing up Bazooka that day were too overpowering or something.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of both years, showing Dick Bosman, "1972" first, of course:

That bright ring of color is the big difference of course, but the backs, as noted in the U-Trading ad, reduced the size of the "Baseball Stars Bubble Gum" copy, albeit quite subtly. The smaller green stars without photo insets also remained for the issued version.

The proofs of the issued 1973's are seldom seen, which is too bad as they are kind of glorious:

Christie's auctioned off an uncut proof sheet in 1992, according to quite wonderful Post War Cards website; taste the rainbow:

I'm not sure why there were so many yellow lids!  Here's the color breakdown:

 8  Red

 8  Blue

26 Yellow

 6  Purple/Pink (you decide)

 7  Green

--- 

55 

== 

"Oddball" status aside notwithstanding, the 1973's have never really caught on with collectors, although they have their adherents among HOF and team specialists. I feel like that's the case with any almost any kind of set issued without the additional licensing needed from Major League Baseball Promotions Corp. allowing the use of team names and logos.