Vintage Dodgers Lot Part I

I picked up a nice little variety lot of Dodgers off of eBay. It was $15 shipped for an interesting variety of stuff. Not everything was in good condition so that may have kept other bidders away.

The most straightfoward part of the lot was vintage Topps cards. I only needed the '63 Moeller, everything else here is available for trade. (Night Owl - I see the '71 OPC Willie Crawford on your wantlist, I'll save it for our next trade.)

The lot had two other very interesting parts. One was nine sheets from the 1990 Target Dodgers set. That's worth it's own post. The other was 20+ team-issued picture cards. All but one were Dodgers. The eBay seller described it as "adding in a Dodgers enemy just for fun".

The team issued photo sets can be very frustrating to pin down a date for. I couldn't find much on them online. They used the same photo for multiple years so it's virtually impossible to say for sure what year an individual card is from, but I figured getting a bunch at once, they probably came from the same year? Or at least close to it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most information on the sets overall that I could find online came from blog posts by Dodger card experts Night Owl and cards as i see them. However, even they didn't have a lot to go on.

I used TCDB to hone down years as best as I could. They call the sets "Danny Goodman" sets after the Dodgers' head of publicity, but that doesn't seem to be a highly used name for the sets elsewhere. Still, assuming the user submissions were accurate, I was able to hone down that most if not all came from 1970. Of the 21 Dodgers, TCDB had 15 of them in their 1970 set. Of the rest, all but one played for the Dodgers in 1970, with the exception being Don Drysdale, who retired after the 1969 season and started announcing for the Dodgers in '70. But who knows, maybe he was included in 1970 photos as well. I decided to consider them all 1970.

Fred Norman is an interesting one - this is not on TCDB at all. However, he came up with the Dodgers in 1970, beginning a rather remarkable MLB comeback, but was released towards the end of the season and signed with the Cardinals. So this one would have to be 1970.

This is the confounding Drysdale card. Could it be 1970? Perhaps. Either way it's a great dark shot, maybe at night. In this and several other cases, veteran Dodgers had the same photo used every year since about 1963.

From a veteran to a rookie, Bill Buckner looks so strange without his mustache. He's in his prime "let the ball go through your legs" pose. One thing I noticed going through each player in TCDB, is that the facsimile signatures change for a lot of players from 1971 to 1972, even though the photo stays the same. Buckner was an example of that.

Nice Dodger Stadium shot.

Awesome Steve Garvey photo, a year before his Topps rookie card. He played three games for the Dodgers in '69. The batting gloves steal the photo, they look like black leather motorcycle gloves.

Nice Maury Wills shot. This photo was from Wills's first stint with the Dodgers, he had returned to the team in '69 after three years with Pittsburgh and Montreal.

Interesting Dodger Stadium shot on Claude Osteen's card. Looks unfinished from this angle.

Willie Crawford looking his coolest.

Young, pre-perm Don Sutton.

This might be my favorite, with the car behind Billy Grabarkewitz.

So who was the Dodger "enemy"? Roger Maris! This was the card that convinced me to buy the lot. I thought it was from Jay Publishing but apparently another company called Sports Service also put out sets like these. This could be from either 1961 or 1963. I'll guess '61, why not? And calling him a Dodger enemy is a bit of a stretch. 1963 was his only World Series against the Dodgers, and he went 0-for-5 before running into a wall trying to make a catch, injuring himself and keeping him out of the rest of the series.