Coloring By Canada

I kinda wish I had grown up in Canada like a few of my cousins. The baseball card sets may have been smaller, but boy did they know how to flash the colors! Take a look at the back of Gary Peters' card. The color just jumps out at you.

It's colors like these O-Pee-Chee card backs that make me think of the bright colors of my childhood. I take a look at the American counterpart and I immediately deflate my mood. The color is there, but it looks so drab in comparison to the Great White North's contributions to the hobby.

Even the fronts of the cards look just a little brighter. The pictures tend to stand out a little more. Is it sad that I now have four 1969 O-Pee-Chee cards in my possession, but only five 1969 Topps cards?
One look at Gary Peters Canadianized brighter face and the answer is clear. Yes. Yes it is. This year, I will try to work on my sixties sets. I do have 1968 Topps completed. That's something. I'm going to try to finish my eighties base sets too. I don't have too much more to go with the base sets in that decade. It's the oddballs that give me trouble.

At least I can use the lack of postseason trips by the White Sox to my advantage with some of the vintage sets. It's a lot cheaper to pick up singles of great players, like Gary Peters, when only a handful of people realize how great they were.

The Sandy Alomar Picture Show

OK, is it just my imagination or is this the same picture for the 1968 and 1969 Topps cards of Sandy Alomar? The 1968 card looks like the original picture and the 1969 card looks like it was airbrushed slightly to make it appear like a different photo. He actually looks like he was airbrushed younger in 1969.

I've heard many complaints that Topps reuses the same picture on the front and backs of their cards nowadays. This is just plain lazy compared to that! Granted they only really used posed shots for the cards at this point, it couldn't have been too hard to get Sandy to pose again or to use one of the throwaway shots from the original shoot. Then again, the photographer could've said, "Same pose this year. Go ahead and stand in the same spot. Try and look a little younger."

I kinda doubt that, but I wasn't around then. You never know. I do know that these are 2 of the 3 cards that I know about of Sandy in a White Sox uniform. The other was a 1969 team issue black & white card. That is the card I don't own. I own the two doppelgangers pictured above. For all I know the team issue card might be this shot, just in black & white. If it is, I'll be happy if someone airbrushed a Sox cap on him.