Pujols Parade - 2009 Upper Deck Goudey

Upper Deck was really good at remaking other card companies' sets. It all started with their Upper Deck Vintage sets whose designs were borrowed from 1960s and 1970s Topps sets. That product eventually died out, but during their last few years of producing baseball cards, Upper Deck made a Goudey set. You are not going to believe this, but the sets were based on the 1930s and 1940s Goudey sets. The 2009 Goudey set is based loosely on the design of the 1933 Goudey set.  

Upper Deck was great at pushing the envelope on copying other sets without crossing any sort of lines. They are the Vanilla Ice to Goudey's David Bowie.  

You see, the border says "GOUDEY" and not "BIG LEAGUE", like the original Goudey cards. Just like Vanilla Ice wrote a song that sounds like a David Bowie song, but there is a little cymbal ting at the end of the beat.  

Everyone be cool. There is no need to call any lawyers. Let's just look at the baseball card.  

Even if Upper Deck stole the design, it's not a bad one to steal. I like the bright yellow background behind Pujols. The art work is fine, but I feel like his face is off, as well as the bat. Pujols has a look about him while he is hitting, but whatever is happening on this card is not that look. 

Albert does not squint while he is hitting and he frequently pulls his lower lip into his mouth. His bat on the Goudey card is also too north and south. Pujols starts with his bat high, behind his head, with a slight upward tilt. You can always see his bat knob looking at him from the side.  

I am sure the artist tried very hard. I am already over the inaccuracies.  

Back of the card.  

I cringe.  

The first sentence says, "people talking about him in the same breath as the greatest players to ever play the game". The second sentence mentions Nomar Garciaparra. 

Nomar is not even the best athlete in his house, let alone one of the greatest baseball players.  

Let's do a quick rewrite.  

Albert Pujols hits baseballs like Mia Hamm scores goals.  

I Like Your Board Game

I was a big fan of the board game All-Star Baseball as a kid.  My father introduced me to the game, and my older brother also played too.  It's does a pretty good job of replicating players' offensive performance, but there is no pitching element to the game.  It was the forerunner to games like Strat-O-Matic and APBA Baseball.  

I have been playing a couple games a week with my nine year old after I am done teaching, and he is done with his school work in the afternoon.  He has been going to baseball games for a few years and has played t-ball at the YMCA, but that has been the extent of his interest in the game.  Playing All-Star Baseball the last few weeks has taught him a lot more about the players and strategy.  

The game was originally manufactured by Cadaco, and while they are out of business, there are plenty of places online where you can still find the discs for the game board.  I have picked up a bunch of current players for him to use and learn about.  

He is really into power hitters and walks, sort of his own brand of Moneyball.  His line-ups can be something along the lines of a beer league softball team, but he is slowly picking up on how to mix his players.  Just today, he decided to jettison Paul DeJong's power hitting ability in favor of Jorge Polanco getting on base all the time in front of his parade of three outcome players.  

I do not own an Adam Dunn disc, but if I did he would be the third place hitter.   

At some point next week he is getting a few new players to use with the game that he learned about from reading the book Baseball Biographies for Kids.  If you have an elementary aged student in your house interested in baseball, this is a really good book.  

While searching out the discs on Ebay, I actually ran into an interesting older baseball card with a connection to the board game.  You have to read the small print at the bottom of the box.  Let me help with that......

The board game was created by former Major Leaguer Ethan Allen during the early 1940s.  Typing in "All-Star Baseball Board Game" on eBay gave me a whole bunch of listings for the board game and pieces, but also a few baseball cards of Ethan Allen mixed into the search results.  

One of the cards was an inexpensive copy of his 1933 Goudey card with the Cardinals.  The back of the card has some issues, but the front is in pretty good shape.  I liked the card, so I took the plunge.  

The corners are a little off, and there are some spots around the bottom of the card that are not supposed to be there.  You can see them clearly on his pants.  I have been looking at the card for awhile debating whether the marks were added by someone at some point, or if something happened with the print on the card.  It's something with the ink, but if you look at enough vintage baseball cards, you know people did all sorts of creative things to their cards long ago.  

Here is the back.  

You can see the ink splotches here too.  I think it actually from another sheet of paper that bled through the card stock.  The paper loss at the top did not scan very well, but there is an adhesive material that is surrounding those areas along the top of the card.  The adhesive did not show up well on the scan, but here is a picture I took with my phone. 

It's not the easiest thing to capture in a picture.  

The discoloration from the S in St. Louis to the top of the card is hardened adhesive, along with the discoloration running along the top of the card above the EN in Allen.  It's an almost 90 year card, so who knows everywhere this Ethan Allen has been, but I am guessing that someone glued this into a scrapbook.  It was a really common way to store and display baseball cards back in the day.  

Not a bad little find for something that popped up on Ebay while looking for pieces to an old board game.  

I leave you with some additional information on Ethan Allen from my factotum who assisted with the scans and pictures for this post.  After retiring from baseball in 1938, Ethan Allen took a job coaching the baseball team at Yale where he coached George H. Bush.  

Good night internet.  

A Doubleheader of Bulls

Continuing with the theme on several of the posts from this month, a few older cards with Durham Bulls players from before World War II.  One of the players is new, another has already been featured in a post this month.  Let's go.  

This card is from the 1941 Doubleheaders.  The Reds held an affiliation with the Bulls during this time, but only Koy made an appearance in Durham.  Joost did not play long in the Minors, and it appears that he skipped past the Bulls.  Koy was mainly a fourth outfielder in the Majors, but he is in the Hall of Fame at the University of Texas along with his two sons who played football there in the 1960s.  

They have football cards.  

Not my card, not really into the Horns. 

Next.  

This is my second Mace Brown card.  Earlier this month I picked up a 1940 Play Ball card.  This is from the 1936 Goudy set.  The colors look a little weird, but I like adding another Goudy card to the collection.  Mace Brown really deserves his own post one of these days.  Next time I get one of his cards I will give it a solo post with a little more information about his career.  Important player and person.  

Project Durham Bulls Part 53 - Monte Weaver

1928 - 1929 Durham Bulls 

Background- One of the more interesting characters in the history of the Durham Bulls.  The "Prof" played for the team in the late 1920s on his way up to the Washington Senators for 8 seasons, along with one year with the Red Sox. In 1932, he enjoyed his best Major League season with 22 wins.  The rest of his career was fairly average, ending with a total of 71 wins and an ERA of 4.36.  Now, on to the interesting stuff.  

While he was playing in the Minors, he also was attending the University of Virginia as a grad student.  He taught class there, as a grad assistant, and earned the nickname "Prof" by the other players.  Weaver was supposedly in line to become a Rhodes Scholar, but a paperwork snafu prevented him from earning a spot.  

A few other oddities.  The Sporting News did a profile on him in 1933 after his best season where he pointed out that he liked spending time alone on beaches, or hanging out in his hotel room rather than being around other baseball players.  Weaver was also a hypochondriac and a vegetarian.  In another profile, the Sporting News made mention of his addiction to spinach.  The Washington Post noted that he ate too many peas and carrots. Weaver eventually started eating meat, and the D.C. press was apparently thrilled when he gained ten pounds during Spring Training.  

In the end, his baseball career did not last past the late 1930s, and he ended up in the Navy for World War II.  Eventually he would settle down in Florida and bought a bunch of orange groves.  

Card- How could you not want a card out of the 1933 Goudey set?  My copy of this Weaver card is a little rough, but these are pretty pricey cards.  Even the ones with creases and rounded corners.  The background colors are usually a lot brighter than this powder blue.  Yes, this copy has some fading, but it is still not as bright as many of the other cards in this set.  Happy to add this Pre-World War II card, tricky to track down the Durham Bulls players from this era.  Always a plus when you can find one in a great set like this one.  

Project Durham Bulls #46- Charlie Grimm

1917 Durham Bulls 

Background-

There were not a lot of statistics kept for the Minor Leagues back in 1917, but Charlie Grimm played one season for the Bulls while the team was in the North Carolina State League.  The prior season he had played for the Philadelphia A's as a 17 year old.  He would play a handful of games for his hometown St. Louis Cardinals in 1918 before settling in with the Pirates in 1919.  Grimm was known as an elite fielder, Bill James rates him as the best fielding first baseman of all-time, while playing 20 years in the Majors.  The majority of his time was spent with the Pirates and the Cubs.  He played on two National League Champion teams with the Cubs in 1929 and 1932.  Grimm ended his career with more than 2,000 hits, a .290 batting average, and more than 1,000 RBIs.  

While Grimm was a good player, his contributions to game as a manager were even more important.  His managerial career started when he took over as a player/manager for the Cubs.  Grimm finished the second half of the 1932 season at the helm of the team, which lost in the World Series to the Yankees.  After his retirement as a player, Grimm stayed with the Cubs as their manager and led the team to two more National League titles in 1935 and 1945.  Both World Series were lost to the Tigers.  

Grimm eventually was fired by the Cubs and ended up working as the manager of the Braves in the early 1950s.  While he never won a pennant with the Braves he made some significant personnel contributions to the franchise which helped the team after he was dismissed.  The most important decision he made was to replace 35 year old outfielder Sid Gordon with a 20 year old Hank Aaron at the beginning of the 1954 season.  Aaron had shown a lot of pop the prior year in the South Atlantic League.  Grimm would eventually pair Aaron with young third baseman Eddie Matthews and catcher Del Crandall to form the core of the Braves 1957 World Series winner. 


Card-
All of the Project Durham Bulls cards that I have posted over the past two years have been autographed.  These cards have been fun to post, never a problem with adding more autographs to the collection.  However, the Bulls are an old franchise that have been around since 1902.  There are a lot of great former Bulls players who have no certified autographs, but that does not mean that I am not interested in their cards.  At some point, I knew I was going to have to just start finding cool cards of players, especially the older ones, that were not autographs.  Grimm was in Durham for one year, but he was a good player and manager.  Certainly worthy of a spot in my collection. 

Like all things vintage, if you go for something that is really clean and pristine, you are going to pay a pretty penny for it.  I had the choice of trying to find a 1950s manager card of Grimm with the Braves, or go with an older card, see more expensive, to find him as a player with the Cubs.  I split the difference and picked up a 1934 Goudey, which would have been the end of his playing career, but he was managing the team at this point. 

It's got some creasing in the middle of the card.  It's not perfectly centered.  The corners are round.  The borders have a gray hue.  I love this card and I am glad that I finally added an older, non-autographed card to my collection that was added for this series of posts.