Burger King Cards -- Part 1 of 2

My collection has a bunch of Burger King cards, most of which are the 1980 Phillies team set.  The earliest Burger King card I have is a single card from the 1979 Topps Burger King Phillies set, Bob Boone. 

1979 and 1980 Topps Burger King cards of Bob Boone.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no indication on the card that it came from Burger King.  The picture of Boone is the same as the picture in the regular Topps set.  As you can see, I also am including here a picture of Boone's 1980 Topps Burger King Phillies card, mostly because I want to compare the card backs.

The back of the 1979 Boone.

The back of the 1980 Boone.

They improved the design for 1980, because on the 1980 cards, as you can see here, there is at least a Burger King logo on the back.  The only indication that the 1979 is not his regular Topps card is the number -- the 1979 Burger King Boone card has number 2, and his 1979 Topps card is number 90.

Burger King made a number of team sets from 1977 to 1979 (just the Yankees in 1977, the Yankees, Astros, Rangers, and Tigers in 1978, and the Yankees and Phillies in 1979).  Since they don't clearly indicate they're from Burger King, it had been possible that I might have had some Burger King cards mixed up with my regular 1977, 1978, and 1979 cards; I just checked, though, and the Boone is definitely the only such Burger King card I have.

1980 Topps Burger King Pitch, Hit & Run Dave Lopes.

The back of the 1980 Lopes.

I like the 1980 Topps Burger King Pitch, Hit & Run set for being much easier to recognize as Burger King cards.  In addition to having the logo on the front, the back is very different from the standard 1980 Topps back, being red instead of green, and having the Pitch, Hit & Run logo and another Burger King logo instead of the cartoon.  I considered collecting the set recently, but decided there are too many players that I'm not especially interested in.  So, I'll stick with the few cards I have already. 

1980 Topps Burger King Pitch, Hit & Run Jim Palmer.

1980 Topps Burger King Pitch, Hit & Run George Foster.

I'm not sure how I picked up the Lopes, Palmer, and Foster from the Pitch, Hit & Run set.  The Foster is rather beat up, but I'm still happy to have it, of course.

1987 Burger King All-Pro Ozzie Smith and Steve Carlton.

Burger King later produced more cards, but parted ways with Topps and lost the team logos.  These two, of Ozzie Smith and Steve Carlton, are the only cards I have from the Burger King All-Pro series.

I have a second post coming focusing just on the 1980 Burger King Phillies; I am separating that out because I have so many more of those, and because that set serves to commemorate the 1980 Phillies World Series championship team.

Recent Acquisitions: Tony Pena

One of the players I'm building a deeper collection of is Tony Pena, the Pirates All-Star catcher from the 80s.  In making acquisitions, I'm mostly not looking to get more of the main Donruss, Fleer, Score, Topps, or Upper Deck set cards, because while I may not have them all, I generally have a good representation of those already.  There are exceptions, though, and I had a few goals in mind with these Pena cards.

1985 Donruss Diamond King, 1986 Topps, and 1987 M&M's cards of Tony Pena.

This 1985 Donruss Diamond King and 1986 Topps are, obviously, from those main sets I just mentioned, but I hardly have any 1985 Donruss, and I like the action shot on the 1986 Topps.  This 1987 M&M's card is the first I have from the set.  I already had several Pena cards from his time with the Pirates, but these help round out that part of the player collection.

1987 Donruss Opening Day and 1989 Topps K-Mart Dream Team Tony Pena cards.

I don't recall knowing about the 1987 Donruss Opening Day set.  I remember Donruss Rookies, Donruss Highlights, and Donruss Traded from various years, but not Opening Day.  Anyway, I like the 1987 Donruss set, so I'm happy to have this variant of it.  I have a few K-Mart sets, too, like the 1982 and 1987 nostalgia varieties, and the 1988 Memorable Moments, but not the 1989 Dream Team.  These are good additions to my collection of Pena as a Cardinal.

1992 Donruss Triple Play Tony Pena.

1991 Topps Stadium Club Tony Pena.

I got these Stadium Club and Triple play cards from Pena's time with the Red Sox for a specific reason, as you might guess by looking at them.  They show Pena's unusual catching crouch (although the Stadium Club isn't really an action shot, I think).  I wanted to make sure that I had at least one card showing this, and the Triple Play captures it well.

1992 French's Tony Pena and Tom Pagnozzi card.

Finally, I love this French's card, mostly because French's mustard is a product that I didn't know ever had cards, and also because it's unusual for cards like this to feature more than one player.  So, here, Pena is paired with Tom Pagnozzi of the Cardinals.  I don't know if there's a theme to the pairings on these French's cards, but they are both catchers and in opposite leagues.

Tony Pena 1989 Fire Safety/Smokey the Bear card.

Finally, we have this 1989 Fire Safety card.  Like the similar one of John Candelaria I recently acquired, this is much too large to go in regular binder pages.  I'll keep it in a box with other oversize cards, like Topps Supers and Donruss All-Stars of certain vintages.

Pena played with other teams after the Red Sox, but my collection really only goes until 1994, and I'm not really planning to get cards after 1994.  So, his time with the Indians, White Sox, and Astros will remain absent from my collection.

I've said this many times in the two months I've been writing this blog, but until this summer, I hadn't bought any cards since 1994.  That means that I'm only still discovering what it's like to buy cards using the internet.  It's pretty great to have an idea, like, "I wonder what Tony Pena cards I could get," and a few minutes later, to see all the Tony Pena cards for sale and pick up a bunch.

From My Collection: 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes Cut-Outs (Mays, Brock)

Minor correction: in my post on 1987 Kraft Home Plate Heroes Cut-Out cards, I said that I also had a couple of Kraft cards from the 60s.  There were no Kraft cards in the 60s, as far as I can tell.  I had mixed up Kraft with Nabisco.  I have two cards from the 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes set.  Team Flakes was a cereal with which I have no familiarity; according to Cereal Graveyard, it was produced from 1963 until the 1990s, changing the name to just Team at some point; I don't remember it at all.

Lou Brock and Willie Mays.

I believe that I bought these at the consigment shop, Partners, at which I also bought my 1972 Frank Robinson Traded card.   I think I barely paid anything for these -- as I said in the Frank Robinson post, I think the owner had one or two boxes of baseball cards, and they were all the same price, like 50 cents or something.  Later, instead of having a consignment shop, the owner must have realized there was money in baseball cards, and she moved her store to a better location as just a card shop.  I think she had a good feel for the market -- I remember my last interaction with her, too, when I was in college and barely collecting anymore.  She told me she thought new cards weren't going to be worth anything, since they were making so many and everyone was stockpiling them.  I told her that my collection focused heavily on the 70s, and said she thought that was a good idea.  I don't know when her shop went away, like almost all the other card shops in town.

I have a couple of other Lou Brock cards from when he was playing, from the end of his career.  As I've said before, finding cards from Hall-of-Famers at the end of their careers was a strategy I had to get some of those players into my collection in an affordable way.  It didn't work for every Hall-of-Famer, though, and this is my only Willie Mays card from when he was playing.  I will seek to remedy that -- there is a Willie Mays card (1960 Topps) on the PSA-graded part of my want list.  Other than this, the other Willie Mays cards I have are what I would call nostalgia cards, like Pacific Legends, or Hygrade All-Time Greats, or Baseball Immortals.

I really like these cards despite the roughness of the cutting, the lack of logos, and the many creases.  That's partly because of the relative obscurity of the set, and also because I got a good deal on them.  As for the obscurity, I really had no idea for quite some time what these cards were.  Eventually, I got a book, the Great Book of Baseball Cards.  I looked and looked, and eventually I found a couple of pictures and a description of the black frame with yellow border in the 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes page of the book.  This was what research was like in the old days.

The Great Book of Baseball Cards.

The Great Book on the 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes set.

Cecil Cooper in My Collection

Cecil Cooper is a player I remember from the 80s from league leader cards.  I always remember him playing with the Brewers, which was a team we didn't see much of in the 80s.  We followed the NL almost exclusively (living closest to the Phillies), and the Brewers were in the AL back then.

1974 Topps Cecil Cooper.

Although I remember him from the Brewers, Cooper started out with the Red Sox.  He was with Boston 1971-1976, and then with Milwaukee the rest of his career, 1977-1987.  According to Wikipedia, after being traded to Milwaukee, he altered his batting stance, leading to better results with the Brewers (.302 average over 11 seasons) than with the Red Sox (.283 average over 6 seasons).

1978 Topps Cecil Cooper.

1979 Topps Cecil Cooper.

My next cards of him are the 1978 and 1979 Topps cards, after he was traded to the Brewers.  Cooper was an All-Star five times with the Brewers, starting with 1979.  He led the league in various categories over the years while maintaining high batting averages.

1981 Topps RBI Leaders.

1984 Topps RBI Leaders.

You clearly see with these RBI leader cards that I'm not great at scanning.  It's somehow hard for me to always get the cards straight when they're on the scan bed.  I think I've improved at this, but I scanned these Cecil Cooper cards a while ago.  If you ignore the crookedness, you see that Cooper led the AL in RBI in 1980 and in 1983 (tied with Jim Rice in 1983).  The NL was led by Mike Schmidt in 1980, so the 1981 card now lives in my Schmidt player collection.

1986 Donruss cutout box bottom Cecil Cooper.

I don't know how Baseball-reference does its similarity scores for batters, but it rates Cooper as being most similar to Don Mattingly, Wally Joyner, Will Clark, Hal McRae, Kirby Puckett, and Keith Hernandez.   While there's only one Hall-of-Famer in that list, it's certainly good company to be in.

1987 Topps Highlights/Woolworth Cecil Cooper.

Something he has in common with Mattingly, Joyner, Clark, McRae, Puckett, and Hernandez is that they all amassed between 2000 and 2400 career hits (Puckett has the most among them, with 2,304, and Joyner has the least with 2,060).  This card, which I did show once before, is from the 1987 Topps Highlights/Woolworth set, commemorating Cooper's 2000th hit.

1981 Topps Super of Cecil Cooper.

It's out of chronological order, but I'll close with this 1981 Topps Super.  I have a handful of them, and will make a couple of posts with the rest of the ones I have in the next few weeks.  They're nice overall, but they do need to be stored separately because they're so much bigger.  I keep them with my Donruss All-Stars from 1987 and before, my Phillies team-issued oversized cards, and a few other larger odds and ends.

To sum up Cecil Cooper's career: over his career, Cooper received two Gold Gloves at first base, three Silver Sluggers, the Roberto Clemente Award, and joined the 2000-hit club.  He's in the Brewers Walk of Fame and the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame.

Sets in My Collection: 1990 Colla Collection Jose Canseco

Today we present the Colla Collection "Limited Edition Set" of Jose Canseco.  I gather that Colla was a sports photographer who wanted to get in on the lucrative baseball card market, so he put out some cards of specific players.  I went for it once, with this Jose Canseco boxed set. 

The Colla Collection Jose Canseco set box.

I was a fan of those A's teams with (off the top of my head) Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Dave Stewart, Dave Parker, Dave Henderson, Terry Steinbach, Walt Weiss, Dennis Eckersley, Storm Davis, Bob Welch, and Carney Lansford,  I didn't have perfect information at the time.  I think it's clear now that any achievements Canseco had are tainted by steroids, and he's a terrible person, too, but I didn't know any of that back then. 

Jose Canseco holding his bat.

There are a number of him standing around holding his bat.

Jose Canseco swinging.

There are a few of him swinging the bat.

Jose Canseco running.

Canseco was also good at running, having become the first to achieve the 40-40 club in 1988.

Even though I'm sure it didn't cost much, I regret buying this set.  I don't think this regret was attained over time, but was more or less instantaneous on opening the package.  It takes more than good photographs to make good cards.  Even if they're not great as cards, though, looking at these -- for the first time since about when I bought them around 1990 -- does take me back to those days when card shows and shops were plentiful, and the A's, as well as my Pirates, were contenders.

Billy Martin in My Collection

I have a few Billy Martin cards that I thought I would share.  This 1972 card, the infamous middle finger card, has been in my collection for a very long time.  Martin managed the Tigers from 1971-1973, winning the division in 1972.

1972 Topps Billy Martin.

If you read about his time in Detroit, there are some stories, including giving a try-out to future base-stealing champ Ron LeFlore, who was in prison for armed robbery at the time (according to Wikipedia), and encouraging his pitchers to throw spitballs.

1978 Topps Billy Martin.

Of course, while he has managed other teams, and played for a few, he's famous for being the manager of the Yankees, over and over again.  This 1978 card reflects the fact that Martin managed the team in 1977, even winning the World Series.  The next year, he feuded with Reggie Jackson and eventually had to resign; the team went on to win the World Series without him.  His replacement, Bob Lemon, didn't work out, and Martin came back at the end of the 1979 season.  He was fired again during the offseason.

1982 Donruss Billy Martin.

Martin moved on to the A's, his hometown team in a sense (he was from Berkeley, right next to Oakland, although the A's wouldn't have been in Oakland when he was growing up there).  He did well in 1981, although the A's lost the ALCS to the Yankees. 

1983 Topps Billy Martin.

He had less success in 1982, and was fired as A's manager after the 1982 season.

1986 Topps Billy Martin.

Martin returned to the Yankees a few more times.  I remember when George Steinbrenner announced Martin would be manager again for the 1988 season.  It was like a joke that had gone on too long.  He didn't last, going 40-28, a good record to be sure, before being fired mid-season.  He died not too long after, in 1989.

Hygrade All-Time Greats Billy Martin.

I don't have much in my collection to represent Martin as a player, but he is featured in part as a player on the above 1978 Topps card, and I have this Hygrade All-Time Greats card of him.  He won four World Series with the Yankees in the 50s, and seemed to be a competent second baseman for them.

From My Collection: Topps Rub-Downs

I have no idea where I got these 1984 Topps Rub-Downs, except that I must have bought some sort of "grab bag" at a show in the late 80s or early 90s.  I had never heard of these when I bought them, and I think never had seen any except these 4.  I didn't know they were called "Rub-Downs" until searching online about a month ago.  Without further ado, here they are:

A 1984 Topps Rub-Down card.

I've said before that Lance Parrish is appearing way more than I would expect in this blog.  Jack Clark is probably over-represented in my collection, but I think this is his first appearance in the blog.  Hal McRae I remember from the Royals when they played the Phillies in the 1980 World Series, and he won with the Royals a few years later in 1985.  I don't have much memory of Damasco Garcia.

Another 1984 Topps Rub-Down card.

Like Damasco Garcia, I have little memory of Chris Chambliss.  Dwight Evans, though, like Jack Clark, shows up many times in my binder, and is probably over-represented there.  I remember Julio Franco as an All-Star and an excellent hitter, but he played in the AL (which I didn't pay as much attention to) and for teams which didn't really challenge for their divisions.

A third 1984 Topps Rub-Down card.

I remember reading about John Denny; I wasn't paying much attention in 1983 (I was 7 years old), but the Phillies went to the World Series and Denny won the Cy Young.  By the time I paid better attention to baseball in 1987, he was history.  I was a big fan of the late 80s Oakland teams, and Carney Lansford was an integral part of them.  Lou Whitaker of course I remember, and I have read some articles about whether he should be in the Hall of Fame.  Mario Soto I don't know anything about.

My fourth and final 1984 Topps Rub-Down card.

Buddy Bell I remember as a perrenial All-Star; I think I have a Topps Super of him.  I also remember him getting fired as manager, of the Tigers I think, just before the end of the season once.  Lloyd Moseby I think I liked in the 80s, although I don't know why particularly.  I must have read an article about him and had some of his early cards.  Ray Knight featured in my recent post from a 1987 Topps boxed set, Woolworth 1986 Highlights, as he was the World Series MVP.

Overall, I'm sure I ended up with these because someone was getting rid of them because of the lack of marquee stars.