Night Owl Cards

Mention "1973" to someone who lived through it and a number images may come to mind: Watergate, gas lines, the Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia. I was a kid in '73, as blissfully unaware as I could be, watching cartoons and Sesame Street and eating Spaghetti-O's. I missed out on the '73 "angst," and instead remember it as that time immediately before I became aware that the wonderful game of baseball was also played by men on television and you could collect picture cards of them. I am now aware of just about everything '70s when it comes to cards. And the 1973 Topps set is a special look into the decade that is as unvarnished as anything issued back then. There is no wild design to divert from the photo. We get a front-row seat into exactly what was going on in baseball that year. And every element is delightfully obvious. I recently received a handful of '73 cards for my set from Mark, who is on Twitter. They arrived in exchange for a...

Today, when we talk about Topps and it not being up-front with its customers, we talk about "the gimmick," in all of its various forms of sneakery. But Topps isn't new to the deception game. Back in the day, sneakery came in the form of the photo on the front of the baseball card. I'm not talking about mere airbrushing. I'm talking about Topps creating photographs for cards of events that never happened . Take two examples from a year in Topps history that features countless examples of bizarre photography, 1973. Many of you know some of these beautiful disasters by heart. There's the Frank Robinson card ... ... In which the only finger Topps lifted in order to celebrate Robinson's arrival with the California Angels was to white-out the word Dodgers across his jersey. "They'll never be able to tell!" the graphics people chortled, forgetting that the Dodgers wear one of the most recognizable uniforms in baseball and that their stadium ...