Enough To Drive You Battey

Oh, the wonderful items keep rolling in to the Topps Archives Research Complex! Today's bounty is the payment ledger cards for Earl Battey, who was a pretty fair catcher back in the 60's for the Twins.  A few of these cards covering disparate players were available and I chose Mr. Battey due to the fabulous variety of entries that reveal much of how Topps operated in the 50's and 60's.

The first thing that jumps out is that he originally signed with Bowman and that they had him locked up for ten years!  I have to wonder if deals like this were being made by their biggest competitor and with just a handful of exclusive contracts being signed with Topps, had Bowman's 1955 offerings sold well would the history of the hobby be vastly different?

Well, the Bowman cards sold poorly enough in 1955 and after Bowman's parent company's (Connelly Containers) CEO (John Connelly) decided he wanted buy buy Crown Cork & Seal instead of selling bubble gum, Topps jumped on their athletic contracts and confectionery assets and ended up with exactly what they needed to become the kings of bubble gum and baseball cards.

Meanwhile, Topps had to keep records of all the payments and merchandise selections made by their roster of players and came up with a typical pre-digital solution: index cards, in this case 5" x 8" purpose printed cards:

I like how they showed the series and card number for each season!

Color Televisions and Stereo Equipment were popular with a lot of ballplayers from what I have seen of these cards. Sy Berger even mentions in The Great American Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book (from 1973) that "We get this stuff wholesale from RCA and General Electric.  It's got everything in it but replacement pitching arms."

Breaking this down, the upper left corner had the player's option and team statuses. Battey had been with the White Sox for 5 games in 1955 as a September call up following three years in the minors and then for only 4 games the following year.  Since that was Bowman's contract, his call-ups and demotions aren't dealt with until after he was a Topps signee (March 5, 1957). You can see he spent most of 1957 with the big league club but got sent down in August for a month.  After another September call up he finally managed to stick for good and while I'm note sure what the "F-check 8-3-59" notation in red fully means, he got his first card with either Topps or Bowman in 1957:

His trade to the Senators in 1960 (with Don Mincher and $150K for Roy Seivers) is noted as is their expansion related move to Minnesota the following year. What intrigues me though is the notation in 1961 that he was a Sporting News All Star.  He didn't make the actual AL All Star Squad for 1960, despite some MVP votes and his first (of two ) Gold Gloves but SN thought quite highly of him. I just can't figure out if he got anything extra for that honor. He was, as noted, a Senator for 1960 but since they moved and became the Twins that offseason, the expansion Senators would not have been his team in '61.  Kudos to Topps for getting his new duds pictured in the high number AS cards though:

I can't see that his multiplayer card from 1963, his various inserts, or his Bazooka appearances were memorialized, so the contracts must have been pretty broad.

In the upper right corner you can see his contract with Topps commenced March 5, 1957 after he received his "steak money" payment of $5 a month earlier, which bound him to the company contractually. His extensions (which allowed him more purchasing power) started in 1958.  It's worth noting that the first Topps merchandise catalog dates to 1957-58 so the extensions were inextricably tied to it from this point forward.

Here is a sampling of the 1973-74 catalog (contemporaneous with Sy's comments actually); you can see how the extension got you a star!:

Let's take a look at the merchandise!

Item "b" is the first time I've ever seen a steam cabinet outside of a Three Stooges short!  That pool table looks sweet though.....

Continuing on to card #2 for Mr. Battey, Topps used a sticker to track his contractual status into the 60's. I guess most players flamed out quickly, so it was easier to just print up stickers for those who lasted more than year or two. Battey took merchandise most years but sometimes opted for extension checks. As is often seen on these cards, he paid Topps sometimes for more expensive items.  You can see on the prior card he must have been outfitting his den as he got "credit" toward a color TV and sleeper sofa in '62.  Nice dealio there Topps!

More color TV's for the Battey's!

Battey was a solid and productive catcher for a half dozen years and his last year in the bigs was 1967, even though he made the 1966 AL All Star team (his fourth election):

He was a tough dude (read up on him here) but it looks like an illness finally did his career in. Hopefully his plethora of Color TV's kept him in good stead during retirement-too bad he never made it on to a 1955 Bowman "TV" card, it would have been ideal!

Leisure Suits Them

Topps had all sorts of creative ways to save money in the golden olden days, from repackaging unsold product and reselling it to having the Card Collectors Company sell overstock and returns that even the most wonderfully designed repackaging couldn't move. Topps even continued to use up stationery items with old logos and x'ing out information on their letterhead.  But one of their best ideas in this vein involved letting their athletes under contract select merchandise from a catalog instead of getting a check each time they signed or renewed.

After Sy Berger was hired in 1947 he used connections he had from his Army days to start procuring cheap trinkets for the Bazooka premiums Topps would unceasingly offer on their comics. Topps took that practice and just extended it to the athletes that comprised their sports offerings. Originally just offered to baseball players, likely beginning in 1957 (more on that in a New York minute), the process would become quite robust in later years. Thanks to a recent spin through eBay, I can give you a peek at how it all worked.

Here is the 1973/74 Gift Catalog that Topps gave to all their subjects:

The dating of this one (by the way, nice graphics!) and the fact this was the 17th edition allowed me to guesstimate the first year of the catalog. Counting backwards you get 1957/58 as a starting point, a date which makes a lot of sense. In their earliest years of signing ballplayers to contracts (beginning in 1950) cash was king. Things must have changed with the assimilation of Bowman. Since Topps purchased their main competitor from Connelly Containers in early 1956 it would have taken them a little time to get the first catalog going. Topps was producing football cards by this time (and would dabble with basketball before relaunching hockey) but the first two or three years of football were procured by a deal with the league and not the individual players. I suspect it was the same with the NBA (and NHL two years prior).

As a bonus we also get a glimpse of the payments athletes could expect in 1973: $250 when they signed and an extra $75 as an "extension bonus", which must have functioned like the soon-to-be obsolete reserve clause in Major League Baseball contracts.

Some of the offered merchandise is a hoot:

I especially like the Deluxe Nusauna and the Diving Lung!  The former strikes as something from a Three Stooges movie and the latter would be used for a type of activity that must have scared various team executives to death. But back to the money saving part-Topps could use retail prices when they probably got things at wholesale (or less)! Pretty sweet deal, no?

Topps had a system to keep track of the payments that also gives us a little more insight.  This Jim Palmer file card I swiped from Jon over at the the Fleer Sticker Project blog tells the tale:

There is a ton of good information on here.  You can see how Jim reached his initial milestone to be paid by Topps (30 days on the roster had to go by first) during the 1965 season and he was dutifully immortalized in 1966.  You can see his card number and how he pooled his earliest "points" to buy a console TV (a big deal back in the day) but was filling out the den with a pool table by 1974. And perhaps most intriguingly, he was actually giving Topps money to complete some transactions! So Topps had a wholesale cost basis that would be "topped out" at retail if a player was short on time and wanted a big ticket item.  Nice!

In The Great American Baseball Card, Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, there is a great section in the front about operations at Topps right around the time the above gift catalog was issued. Sy Berger is quoted as saying "This year each guy will end up with about $400." There was also a royalty agreement described that sweetened the pot a little which I guess is how he got to $400 a man.

In 1973 or 1974 you were dealing with roughly 600 ballplayers and assuming most of them were on an extension, Topps would have had to shell out around two hundred and fifty grand at a time when wax packs went for a dime. According to Sy though, most players liked the process. He went on to say in the book "Richie Allen took a new refrigerator this year....Dick Green bought some farm machinery with his. And Al Kaline just bought his kid a new car."

I would love to know what kind of car was offered but I don't have any more interior pages to look through right now. Boy, times were different back then, huh?.