Nye On Impossible

Further to last year's lengthy post on the 1970 Cloth Baseball proofs, Friend o' the Archive Keith Olbermann sent along a shot of the elusive Rich Nye example, one of three subjects to appear in a different pose in issued form than on the proof sheet used to create these rare birds.  Topps got the correct team on the card following his trade from the Cubs to the Cardinals but he's still shown in his Cubs togs on the proof.  He would get a capless head shot in the regular issue:

See the difference:

Nye is one interesting cat.  He finished his civil engineering degree after being drafted by the Cubs in 1966 and then after pitching his last (for the Expos) in 1970, traded commodities on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and later became a veterinarian using his profits from that endeavor, specializing in exotic birds.  Frankly, he sounds like a polymath.   

Another tidbit: there are at least three different examples of the Lemaster known, including one without a backing where the color proof bars at the bottom of the sheet are folded up against the reverse. 

The known universe of cloth stickers is small but these are not one-of-ones. The multiple examples should not be surprising, Topps would run very small batches for their in-house tests at the time.

There are 11 "lost" stickers (they exist on checklists but I don't have scans) :

Davalillo
Gladding
Hall
Josephson
McCovey
Motton
Murphy
O'Brien
NL Playoff #1 (Seaver)
Reynolds
Wegener

The Padres Rookies is the lostest of the lost as it has not even made it onto a checklist I can find (and obviously not on the Trader Speaks checklist I detailed last time out), and while Tom Hall is also MIA from TTS he does appear on extant checklists.

I will gladly accept scans of the above MIA stickers if any of you out there have them in your own archives!

Cut From The Same Cloth

It's some almost 50 year eye candy to look at today kids.  I've covered the 1970 Cloth Baseball Stickers here before and while I can't really offer any new information, I can show a dozen examples that popped up in a Heritage auction earlier this month.

A brief recap is in order first. Topps used somewhere between 33 and 66 subjects to run off what I estimate to be between two and four examples of a second series proof sheet (66 subjects proofed) in a cloth sticker format, usually with backing, likely as a materials test.  Some subjects are only known as "partials" where just a portion of the sticker survived and there is at least one where it doesn't look like a backing could have been applied. They would repeat this process in 1972 (33 hard to find stickers that were never released) and 1976 (2 subjects, 4 different materials, in-house only) baseball subjects before they formally issued a 55 subject cloth sticker set in 1977.  While baseball was the experimental category, the tests may have also assisted with things like Flags Of The World (1970 saw a test issue with cloth stickers) and Wacky Packages Cloth Stickers (1973), not to mention the 1973-74 Baseball Action Emblems and sticker inserts in various sports sets of time that used similar material.

I'm not sure how the 1970 Cloth Baseball Stickers first entered the hobby pipeline but it's probable they exited the Topps premises in Brooklyn via the Bill Haber and Woody Gelman backdoor not long after they were made, as a July 1972 Fred McKie article in The Trader Speaks states "I understand that there are at least 66 in the set."

Stirling Sports Catalog, a price guide and reference that predates the Sport-Americana's by a couple of years, describes 66 subjects being known.  Those are the only references I can find with a count that high and there's been no evidence since to substantiate anything near that number. It is, however, theoretically possible based upon the uncut sheet array.

Twenty two of them were offered in a Card Collectors Company ad in the September 1979 issue of The Trader Speaks.  As we all know, numbers divisible by 11 are pretty normal fare for Topps issues due to this being their default row length on the production sheets but this time it may be an accident as the left and right columns of cards have not yet been seen as full stickers. This ad was the culmination of about a 16 month run where Card Collectors Co. and a couple of other sellers uncapped a string of Topps test and proof issues through TTS (and likely other hobby pubs of the time as well), a gusher of issues likely due to the death of CCC founder and all-around Topps MVP Woody Gelman on February 9, 1978.

What I can tell you is 30 subjects are presently known., 27 full and 3 partial and another (#262 Padres Rookies) is strongly suggested to exist as a full sticker due to the real estate used to carve out the stickers.  The below list details these 30 known subjects and identifies the twenty two offered by Card Collectors Co in '79.  The Heritage examples are all in this grouping as well, although they may not be the same ones as two examples of some are known. "VAR." means the sticker image differs from the regularly issued card image. However, as you can plainly see above the Fred McKie TTS article stated he owned a Higgins and that it matched the issued card.  I'm not sure what to make of that statement and have to presume it's a mistake unless a variant sticker of Higgins shows up that matches the regular issue.

This is the known checklist as of December 2018

	200		AL PLAYOFF #2	ORIOLES
TTS	167		BURBACH	YANKEES
TTS	256		DAVALILLO	CARDINALS
TTS	153		GENTRY	METS
TTS	208		GLADDING	ASTROS
	169		HALL, TOM	TWINS
TTS	216		HARTENSTEIN	PIRATES
TTS	257		HIGGINS (VAR.)	SENATORS
TTS	263		JOSEPHSON	WHITE SOX
TTS	238		LABOY	EXPOS
TTS	178		LEMASTER (VAR.)	ASTROS
TTS	210		MARICHAL	GIANTS
TTS	250		McCOVEY	GIANTS
TTS	158		McNERTNEY	PILOTS
TTS	261		MOTTON	ORIOLES
TTS	146		MURPHY, DANNY	WHITE SOX
TTS	179		MURRELL	PADRES
TTS	160		NIEKRO, PHIL	BRAVES
	195		NL PLAYOFF #1	METS
	197		NL PLAYOFF #3	METS
TTS	177		NORTHRUP	TIGERS
	139		NYE	CARDS
TTS	163		O'BRIEN	RED SOX
TTS	226		PERRANOSKI	TWINS
TTS	259		REYNOLDS, TOMMIE	A'S
TTS	212		SANTORINI	PADRES
TTS	193		WEGENER	EXPOS
	242		ALSTON (PART.)	DODGERS
	144		CULP (PART.)	RED SOX
	252		PALMER, LLOYD (PART.)	PHILLIES

(UPDATE 12/2/18: Nye is now shown with the Cards, he was inferred to be with the Cubs in the original post. Topps managed a team change although he's shown in Cubs duds on the proof and sticker.  More info coming in on this set, an update post will be made).

That's 28 full stickers if you factor the Padres Rookies in, a figure noted previously here as being the possible limit of full stickers.  In addition to the three partials shown above five others may exist, again based upon how the proof sheet was setup:

206		BOYER, CLETE	BRAVES
182		HALL, DICK	ORIOLES
136		HARGAN	INDIANS
211		WILLIAMS, TED	SENATORS
189		YANKEES ROOKIES	YANKEES

That's 36 potentially.  If you look at the way the full stickers were proofed, it's clear the two left-most and right-most columns of the sheet contain all the partials.  If you then take the remaining possible subjects from the four known rows the stickers copied from the proof sheet, you also can see how the following eight subjects could be extant, one way or the other:

201		AL PLAYOFF #3	ORIOLES
133		CARROLL	REDS
176		HART	GIANTS
150		KILLEBREW	TWINS
166		OLIVER, AL	PIRATES
202		ORIOLES CELEBRATE	ORIOLES
141		PIRATES ROOKIES	PIRATES
243		SPARMA	TIGERS

That gets us to 44 actual and potential subjects, in whole or in part, or the four bottom-most rows of the sheet.  My take is that is the figure to use when contemplating what proofs were stickerized.

Whew!  OK then, here's some scans from the auction-these all went for a small fortune: from $3,120 all the way up to $9,000 for the Ryan!  I guess a couple of examples below are "almost" full sized and a few seem to fit together-you can see how the McNertney fit above the Niekro due to miscuts. Enjoy!

And Then There Were Three...

...1957 Topps Baseball Paper Proofs.  Actually there are at least 32 known or identified but only three have ever popped up in scans that I can find.  Thanks to a recent eBay auction, two visuals were added to the existing one (#360 Groth), which was previously covered here.

The two latest additions are #373 Whisenant and #388 Daley:

There's a little bit of a foldover on the Daley (lower left corner) that shows the fragility of these proofs. You can also see the handcut nature of each.  Here is the previously displayed Groth for completeness' sake:

Groth now resides in the collection of Friend o'the Archive Al Richter but the above scan came from Mark Rios.  Mark had a copy of the 1979 Card Collectors Company ad from The Trader Speaks that sold 32 of these, along with a clutch of 1970 Baseball Cloth Stickers:

All known '57 proofs are on the sales list which covers the highs numbers from that year, which gives a universe of 55 possible subjects.  And those prices are INSANE!!!

Topps probably ran proofs like this off every year.  The 1957 examples have finished backs but others that are known from 1967 have blank backs.  I suspect the finished (with backs) proofs were the last to be run before the press sheets were printed. That '67 link also has a '66 Mantle paper proof shown by the way.

Bob Lemke had a nice post on these a few years ago, quite worth the look here.  I have to think most surviving paper proofs were retained by people present when they were printed, likely just the printer's personnel and whoever was there from Topps at the time.  It's believed the 67's came from Woody Gelman's collection and given his company was selling the 57's, all known paper proofs probably were the result of Woody's hoarding.  Woody passed away in 1978 so it looks like his personal copies of the proofs (and cloth stickers) were being sold off.

Halfs and Half Nots

About a year ago I posted on the ultra rare 1970 Topps Cloth Baseball Stickers. A bit more information on the players included has trickled out since then and I have had some time to think things through in the interim. This is an amalgamation of a couple of theories discussed to some degree on Net54 (a link is proved at then end of this post) but it's the first chance I've had to consider at length what is known and what is not concerning these elusive stickers.

If you click back to the prior post you will note the 1977 Stirling Guide mentions 66 stickers are known in the set and we know the extant examples are numbered within the second series of issued cards. I do not think there are necessarily 66 possible stickers at this point, though they all definitely come from the 2nd series. More on this in a moment.

At least three Cloth Stickers have a different player pose than in the corresponding regular issue, two of which (Higgins and Nye) were due to early December 1969 trades, so the Stickers came from an early proof run of the second series. Their issued cards show capless head shots, a classic Topps way of dealing with trades the occurred during a production run. Here is the Higgins sticker:



That is from the collection of Bob Fisk by the way, as are all individual shots of stickers in this post I believe. I can't find a scan of Nye right now.

Now, based upon the Stirling reference and the known checklist, the 66 card chunk I will show below (part of a series of sheets scans sent by Friend o'the Archive John Moran) reveals what I consider to be the possible universe of players in the cloth set. But let's first note the 1970 second series was printed on a 264 card master sheet that ran from #133-263 (plus 4th Series checklist #343) for a print run of 132 cards and featuring two similar 66 card blocks on each side. I would label this an A/A B/B pattern as each side has 66 double printed cards.

Here is the 66 card block that contains the Stickers; it is from the bottom half of the left sheet and has issued poses of three players whose stickers differ (and a possible fourth):



Note LeMaster in the seventh column bottom row. While a number of stickers are known with tasty Topps period brown backing paper:



Lemaster's shows a rolled over bottom with printer's color bars and shows why this type of rolling was possible on stickers taken from the bottom row. I ran this shot last time but it makes sense to show it again here to illustrate:



I am not sure why the Lemaster pose was changed for the cards as he did not leave the employ of the Astros from 1969-70. What I am becoming sure of though, is that some of the cards in the "block of 66" used to make the stickers are not known and that there is a pattern that shows why.

If you visualize the sheet with six letter rows (A-F) and 11 numbered columns, the A and B rows contain no known stickers. That brings us down to 44 possibilities I think.

Further investigation shows that no stickers are known from columns 1 and 11 (the left and right most columns) and that only three partial stickers (divided vertically down the middle) are known from columns 2 and 10. From Column 2, here is part of Ray Culp:



And from Column 10, Alston and, the coolest ball player of all time, Lloyd Palmer (so cool in fact, Topps dared not shear off his shades):





This means the entirety of all known, complete stickers come from rows C-F and columns 3 through 9, leaving 28 full sized candidates for the set (as likely constituted) and as theorized previously on Net54 by both Bob and John, who deserve the credit for the 28 card theory.

I do think it possible the partials could exist in full form but have no evidence yet of this so we have the likely 27 known full stickers to contend with and one (the Padres Rookies) highly probable example that remains unknown, at least to me, at this time.

Here is a list of the known stickers (Higgins and Nye with their former teams, the latter an educated guess with a high degree of confidence) with their numbers, as issued in card form, and teams:

200		AL PLAYOFF #2	ORIOLES
167		BURBACH	YANKEES
256		DAVALILLO	CARDINALS
153		GENTRY	METS
208		GLADDING	ASTROS
169		HALL, TOM	TWINS
216		HARTENSTEIN	PIRATES
257		HIGGINS (VAR.)	SENATORS
263		JOSEPHSON	WHITE SOX
238		LABOY	EXPOS
178		LEMASTER (VAR.)	ASTROS
210		MARICHAL	GIANTS
250		McCOVEY	GIANTS
158		McNERTNEY	PILOTS
261		MOTTON	ORIOLES
146		MURPHY, DANNY	WHITE SOX
179		MURRELL	PADRES
160		NIEKRO, PHIL	BRAVES
195		NL PLAYOFF #1	METS
197		NL PLAYOFF #3	METS
177		NORTHRUP	TIGERS
139		NYE	CUBS
163		O'BRIEN	RED SOX
226		PERRANOSKI	TWINS
259		REYNOLDS, TOMMIE	A'S
212		SANTORINI	PADRES
193		WEGENER	EXPOS
242		ALSTON (PART.)	DODGERS
144		CULP (PART.)	RED SOX
252		PALMER, LLOYD (PART.)	PHILLIES

I would add the Padres Rookies #262 to that list obviously as the odds are overwhelming that it exists in sticker form. So for the sake of good order:

262

PADRES ROOKIES

PADRES

The following five should likewise exist as partials:

206		BOYER, CLETE (POSS. PART.)	BRAVES
182		HALL, DICK (POSS. PART.)	ORIOLES
136		HARGAN (POSS. PART)	INDIANS
211		WILLIAMS, TED (POSS. PART.)	SENATORS
189		YANKEES ROOKIES (POSS. PART.)	YANKEES

The Yankees Rookies feature Thurman Munson but the partial would only show his name, not his portrait. Here is a shot of a 1972 Cloth Sticker sheet that shows the same type of vertical short cutting:



That leaves 30 possible "no prints" from 1970 although I think it somewhat probable they could exist due to the notation in Stirling. Those 22 from the top two rows are less likely since we have no evidence these rows made it to sticker form:

199		AL PLAYOFF #1	ORIOLES
227		ASTROS ROOKIES	ASTROS
172		BRAVES ROOKIES	BRAVES
152		BROWN, IKE	TIGERS
149		CHAMPION	PHILLIES
135		DIETZ	GIANTS
235		EPSTEIN	SENATORS
156		FISHER, EDDIE	ANGELS
147		HERMOSO	EXPOS
186		JOSEPH	PHILLIES
155		MENKE	ASTROS
198		METS CEL.	METS
157		MOTA	DODGERS
196		NL PLAYOFF #2	METS
223		OLIVER, NATE	CUBS
260		OSTEEN	DODGERS
151		ROBERTS, DAVE	PADRES
191		ROMO	RED SOX
222		ROOKER	ROYALS
188		SANGUILLEN	PIRATES
161		SCHEINBLUM	INDIANS
148		WEAVER	ORIOLES

I feel the eight cards from the extreme left and right columns of cards in rows C-F are more likely to be found as stickers than the 22 cards from the A and B rows since rows C-F are where the action is. These eight are:

201		AL PLAYOFF #3	ORIOLES
133		CARROLL	REDS
176		HART	GIANTS
150		KILLEBREW	TWINS
166		OLIVER, AL	PIRATES
202		ORIOLES CEL.	ORIOLES
141		PIRATES ROOKIES	PIRATES
243		SPARMA	TIGERS

Of those, #243 Sparma would likely show his old team, the Tigers, as he too was traded (to the Expos) in early December of 1969. It's odd all four potential pose variations feature pitchers!

You can also go here for more details and scans from the original Net54 posts. It would be great if the Padres Rookies sticker surfaces!

A Sticky Situation

I just received in the mail not not one but two copies of an old card catalog I have spent an eternity searching for. Feast or famine one would think but no, merely a misspelled search term on my part. I won the first in an online auction and found the second literally the same day once I straightened out my search. In 1977, this was the state of the art in the hobby checklist and price guide (a series of errata pages) category, pre Sport Americana:



I wanted a copy as Mr. Stirling had created his own coding system within, essentially a modification of the ACC system; something I had known about since the early 80's and wanted to take a gander at. Finding a copy of the book was nigh on impossible in the pre-internet days but we live in wondrous times. Mission accomplished times two!

After availing myself of the Stirling system nomenclature, I was leafing through the book (as I am wont to do) and found a few references that will lead to further posts here in short order. The most amazing entry though, was one concerning the very rare 1970 Topps Cloth Baseball Stickers and I thought a quick look at this esoteric set was in order.



(from the collection of Bob Fisk, as are all of the stickers shown here today)

Almost certainly undertaken as a materials test, these stickers are taken from a second series (#133-264) sheet. Most mainstream checklists over the past 10-15 years had the set checklist at about 15 stickers. It then went to 22, with another 22 possible, then more and more of the possibles were uncovered. It was thought 44 would be the upper limit but the Stirling book had 66 known as of 1977. That is far more then have been checklisted.

Some of these are partials:



I must say it is unusual for something this close to Topps printer's scrap to have entered the hobby but this set has a number of partials known, not just ol' Smokey.

The backs sometimes look like a standard sticker back:



While other backs have been seen with printer's proof bar colors "rolled" around onto the backing.



I'll keep digging for the full checklist on this set. There is a Net54 thread on this set here and it has probably the most current checklist around. It's well worth a look. I would guess no more than 2-3 copies of each sticker can be found, if that.