Byron McLaughlin on baseball cards

Byron McLaughlin pitched in parts of five seasons for Mariners and Angels. In 129 games (35 starts) he went 16-25 with 16 saves and a 5.11 ERA. After his playing career ended, he had legal difficulties and left the United States. Despite sensational claims on Wikipedia and elsewhere, he has been living in Vietnam for the past 25 years, working as a factory general manager for United Seafood Packers. He has recently started his own website to tell his story. He kindly answered my questions about baseball cards.

"Unfortunately I have not followed the baseball card industry since leaving the game in 1984, I have not signed any baseball cards since the close of the 1983 season. From my little league days to my early 20s I was a committed baseball card collector and I had many valuable  cards in my deck, but in 1984 when I was jobless after leaving the Major Leagues I was compelled to sell off my robust collection as I needed money."
 

Thanks!

 

Cake or gum? 1977 Tom Grieve

Last time was a 6-2 win for gum. Will this be closer?

Lots of activity behind the Oakland batting cage on these cards. Is that a pitching machine in the background of the Topps card?

Outfielder Tom Grieve played parts of nine seasons in the major leagues, mostly with the Rangers. He struggled with injuries and inconsistency, and was coming off by far his best year in '76, hitting .255 with 20 HR and 81 RBI. Overall in 670 games he hit .249 with 65 HR and 254 RBI. After retiring as a player he rejoined the Rangers in 1980 in their front office, and has worked for the team ever since. He served as general manager from 1984 to 1994, and since 1995 has been a member of the Rangers' broadcast team.
 

1964 Wheaties album

I won an 80% complete 1964 Wheaties album from eBay. It was not cheap by my standards, coming out to about $1.50 a stamp, but these stamps are pretty rare (I didn't have any before this) and to get them in the album is even rarer. 

This appears to have been an album that was complete and that at some point someone literally cut out what I guess they thought were the ten best players in the book (and therefore, make up my want list):  Aaron, Clemente, Kaline, Killebrew, Marichal, Mays, McCovey, Robinson, Santo, Yastrzemski. Santo is the big headscratcher there, considering there are a lot of better players who (fortunately) were left in the book, like Snider, Spahn, Cepeda, Bunning, Torre, and Whitey Ford. Ford is one of six Yankees all of whom were still in the book. No Mantle, Banks, Koufax, Drysdale, Gibson, Frank Robinson, Billy Williams either. 

The stamps are magazine quality paper, using photographs that were surely sourced from Topps, as some of them are similar or the same as on Topps cards from the time. However, the photos do show up nicely compared to their cardboard counterparts, clearer and in better detail. The square layout shows more of the background which I like too.

Here's the cover.  

The book starts off with the history of the All Star Game. I'm not sure if this was an All Star Game related promotion or just an example of how big the midsummer classic was at this time.

The parks and their dimensions. This is a fun feature. They repeat Dodger Stadium for both leagues as the Angels were playing there at this time.

Here's the first page of stamps, with the typical layout of the pages.

I'm not going to show every page (there are a fair amount of simple headshots) but there are a lot of really great photos like these too. The Torre photo is the same as his 1962 rookie card. You can also see an example of where a star's stamp was cut out.

Was Luis Aparicio blonde? Or is it just a trick of the light? His 1963 Topps card is probably from the same shoot and his hair is darker there, so probably just a trick of the sunlight.

Not much to say here except some really nice background on these cards - Nelson Fox (not Nellie?) at Yankee Stadium; Woodeshick and Gilliam at the Polo Grounds.

Whitey Ford sighting! Even though the cutout makes it look like he's a Red Sox. Pretty sure all three of these photos have cardboard counterparts.

Tom Tresh was the Yankees' big rookie star who never quite panned out. I really like all the background activity on Malzone and Pearson's stamps.

Another bigtime Yankee in a great photo.

The back of the book has the averages of all the players included.

There is also a history of baseball. Three pages of a brief history, followed by a list of Hall of Fame players (87 at this point, with Luke Appling the most recent), and finally a list of the World Series and their results. The back cover is just the General Mills logo.

 

Wood vs. Wood #360

Last time 1987 squeaked out a 5-4 win. What will happen here? 573 combined HR between these two.

Yogi Berra wields his big bat at Yankee Stadium, the centerfield flagpole and scoreboard in the background. If you ask any Yankee fan who watched the team in the 1950s and early 1960s, even those who idolized Mickey Mantle, and they'll tell you that with the game on the line, the man they wanted up at the plate was Yogi Berra. Berra, who owns numerous World Series hitting records, was widely considered the best clutch hitter in baseball. He hit for average and power in an era when most catchers contributed little with the bat. He had amazing plate coverage, probably the best-known "bad ball" hitter until Vladimir Guerrero. In only two of his nineteen seasons did he strike out more than he walked; in six seasons he walked two or three times his number of strikeouts! He even had more home runs than strikeouts five times. Berra's defense and pitch-handling abilities were somewhat underrated. He famously caught Don Larsen's perfect game, and doesn't get enough credit for the excellent pitching staffs during the height of the Yankee dynasty. During his playing days, Berra appeared in numerous advertisements and commercials, and opened a bowling alley in New Jersey with teammate and close friend Phil Rizzuto. Like Rizzuto, Berra's seemingly goofy personality overshadowed his playing skills in the public eye and somewhat obscured just what a fantastic ballplayer he was. After his career, Berra managed both the Yankees and Mets to pennants. He died at the age of 90 in 2015.

Pedro Guerrero hits one a long way during a spring training game. A lifetime .300 hitter, Pedro Guerrero played fifteen years in the major leagues for the Dodgers and Cardinals. A five-time All-Star, his best season was 1985, when he led the National League in both slugging and on-base percentage as he hit .320 with 33 HR and 87 RBI to lead the Dodgers into the playoffs. Once popular on social media, he has kept a low profile since a serious health scare in 2017. He shared his thoughts on baseball cards with this blog in 2013.

Food set profile: 1988 Bazooka

Next up alphabetically is Bazooka. I have cards from Bazooka sets from 1988-1990, again in the mid-1990s, and also from the early 2000s. It seems that Topps kept trying to reinvent it as a card brand. Since by the end of the run it wasn't really a food set, and because most of the sets are a bit on the bland side, I'm just going to profile the first (modern) Bazooka set, 1988. It has the best design of any of the Bazooka sets, with the minimalist border spiced up by the pack of gum with the player's name and team.

I have 12 of the 22 cards in the set. Some nice photographs in there; I think I like George Bell's the best. None of my Bazooka cards are complete, so if you have any to trade let me know and I can whip up a want list.

When Bazooka Gum was first introduced in the years after World War II, the slogan was "The Atom Bubble Gum". Atoms are small, and the smallest player that I have in the set is the 5'8" Kirby Puckett. Later on they called themselves "Young America's Favorite", and that would have been accurate for Puckett coming off a World Series win.

 

 

UD Yankee Stadium Legacy: September 18, 1923

Here's the next YSL card that I own:

This was a matchup of the first and second place teams in the American League, but the Yankees had a 16.5 game lead on Cleveland, and would clinch the pennant two days later. Therefore it mattered little that Cleveland led throughout, breaking the game open with five runs over the last three innings to knock off the Yankees, 8-3. 

Hall of Famer Waite Hoyt had beaten Cleveland two days earlier for his 16th win of the season. However it was Bob Shawkey who started for the Yankees this day, allowing five runs over seven innings to drop to 16-11. Hoyt and Shawkey were two of five Yankees starting pitchers with 16 or more wins on the season. Shawkey would go on to win probably the most important game of the Yankees' season, holding off the Giants in Game 4 of the World Series to tie it up at 2-2. The Yankees went on to win the next two games and their first World Championship.

ChatGPT had a lot harder time rendering Shawkey accurately than it did Babe Ruth. This isn't a perfect likeness but it's pretty close.

New Yorkers didn't get to read about this game as a newspaper strike began on the 18th and didn't end until the 21st. In other news, a tornado in Oklahoma and an earthquake in Malta caused damage but not deaths, and Mongolia named a new prime minister.

'67 Philadelphia follies

 Q.

A. Nothing.

Actually, Stovall was also the team's punter. In the 1960s it was still common for one of the regular players to take on punting duty.

Q.

A.

The correct answer is the most boring one possible: he was drafted by the team.

Q.

A.

According to the Google AI, the biggest day of 1966 was when England won the World Cup.

This is an error card; the question ends with a period. The actual answer was October 23, when Scarpati recorded three interceptions. It doesn't matter what team it was against; don't bother looking it up. 

Wallet Card in Toronto: Acme Carbon & Ribbon

I still have plenty more photos from my time in Toronto last month. In my last post, I showed two ghost signs on Richmond Street, and eagle-eyed Canadian reader Derek noticed that he could see the CHUM building in the background. In Canada, radio stations start with C, and while CHUM headquarters do have a great sign, though that's not why I took the photo.

(Incidentally the station was blaring out its music from speakers outside of the building, and it was just generic American pop music, not even Canadian. And though I guess the call sign is supposed to make you think "friend" I just think "dead fish".)

In the dark it's hard to see the sign above the CHUM building, but the ACME there is for Acme Carbon & Ribbon, a manufacturer of typewriter ribbon that operated in this building in the 1930s and 1940s, before being bought by a rival in 1949. 

 

1981 Topps Ellis Valentine

 

The front: One of the most famous photos in the set, this was taken after Valentine's July 1980 return from being hit in the face by a pitch in May. Valentine wore the half of a football mask to protect bones that were still healing.

The back: According to the 1982 Topps Blog, Valentine still likes funkadelic 70s music.

The player: Valentine was perhaps best known for his throwing arm but was also a strong hitter who had three-plus seasons of 20-plus HR. He was well on his way to stardom before the beaning, but was never nearly as good afterwards. The next season he was traded to the Mets, where he struggled, and ended his career with brief stints with California and Texas. Overall in 894 games he hit .278 with 123 HR and 474 RBI.

The man: Valentine struggled with addiction throughout his playing career. After his playing career he entered rehab, and upon concluding rehab became an addiction counselor, and has done that work ever since. He is also co-owner of a memorabilia company called PastPros which sells autographs sourced directly from the players.

My collection: I have 24 of his cards, from 1976 to 1984. I would be interested in trading for 1979 Hostess #50.
 

1976 SSPC Larry Hardy

 

The card, in brief: The best look yet at the Shea Stadium Parking lot clearly visible before the left field bleachers were constructed.

Playing career, in brief: Larry Hardy pitched parts of three seasons in the majors, with the Padres in '74 and '75 and the Astros in '76. In 94 games he went 9-4 with 5 saves and a 5.29 ERA.

Post playing career, in brief: Hardy was a coach for several minor and major league teams from 1978 through 2001. He is now retired.

My collection: I have two of his cards, this one and 1975 Topps. I would be interested in trading for 1974 Dean's Photo Service San Diego Padres #NNO.