Also at MCNY

There was a lot of other stuff at MCNY besides Aids at Home. I spent the most time in the NY at its Core rooms familiarizing myself with the city’s history and the way it’s chosen to present itself.

It’s clear to me that in addition to the city’s myths the museum is actively addressing the blind spots in those myths. This is especially true in the first half of the exhibition which focuses on the growth of New York as a port city. So while I get to see all the big names I remember from my history books—Henry Hudson to Alexander Hamilton to Boss Tweed—I also get to read about the original Lenape inhabitants and how, by being a port city, New York was also integral to slave trading.

It’s also very interesting to see how small New York was—both geographically and by population—and how recent its growth and development into New York™ actually is. The exhibition chronicles the advancement of the grid across Manhattan, the transformation from farming to housing and skyscrapers, and the way that New York (before consolidation) wanted to emulate Brooklyn by building large public parks.

It’s good that the museum notes how New York only became THE American city after the Civil War and THE world city after World War 2. It’s important to be aware of how external events have benefitted New York, especially once we get close to the end of the 20th century and the museum gets to cover both New York’s decline and September 11.

Robert Gerhardt. Children Playing Cricket in the Park, Brooklyn, NY, 2011

There was a small exhibition of photographs around the subject of being Muslim in New York. These were good in how they reference a lot of the tropes of New York photography while updating them to reflect Muslims as everyday New Yorkers. Cricket instead of stickball. Halal street vendors instead of Hebrew National or Sabrett stands. These photos don’t challenge stereotypes as much as they treat Muslims as the everyday people they are, showing them working, praying, playing, and growing up.

There was also a gallery of World War I posters. I don’t have much to say about these except that, while I’ve seen many of them in books and online, it’s always nice to see them in person and get a sense of what their actual sizes and colors are.

I particularly enjoy looking at how these are printed. This information which was sadly lacking in the wall text but I really like being able to distinguish between lithographs and silkscreens and trying to figure out how many inks were used and how certain effects were achieved.

One wall was full of multi-lingual posters. It was weird for me to not see Spanish among them but the wall served as a reminder that, while one of the myths about America is that it’s an English-only country, we’ve had to deal with multiple languages for a long time.

Todd Webb. Mr. Perkin’s Pierce Arrow, New York, 1946.

The last room I checked out was a gallery of Todd Webb’s photographs. I’d seen these before as part of one of The Online Photographer’s book sales* but the photos, while nice enough, didn’t really grab me. I liked them much better the second time around because the museum did a wonderful job of locating them within the city.

*One I jumped on because of Dorothea Lange and George N. Barnard.

I’m not a New Yorker. I’ll never be a New Yorker. And for me, the appeal of most of Webb’s photos required a level of knowledge of the city which I just didn’t have. So it was great fun to get, in essence, a tour of the city through this photos.

Atlee

If you are not a straight, white, able bodied, Xtian, male... when did you first SEE yourself in media? That moment you felt seen by society

—
Amanda Deibert 🏳️‍🌈 (@amandadeibert) February 28, 2017

I'm 38 years old and Hiro/Tadashi in Big Hero 6 might have to be my answer to this. twitter.com/amandadeibert/…

—
nick (@vossbrink) February 28, 2017

Being mixed race means that I grew up constantly being put into different “what are you?” boxes.* Society likes to sort us and I often describe my maturation in terms of which box I was most-likely to be sorted into—my standard description is along the lines that I was “chinese” when I was in grade school, “mexican” as a teenager, and only became white as an adult. But I was never actually any of those things. I only use those descriptions as shorthand for being aware of how society types me, what triggers that identification, and what behavior I may need to modify for my safety in that situation.

*I’ve written more about my background but my thinking has evolved a bit on that in the past four years.

I preferred to identify myself as not having a box at all. Even though I was lucky to have many mixed-race friends in school I never really thought of them as my group. None of us had identical racial backgrounds and, so while we could discuss a lot of common ground in terms of experiences we shared, we all had very different identities.

It was only in high school when we had stars like Dean Cain and Russell Wong that the idea of a “hapa”* box became feasible. I wasn’t interested but I could see the appeal. There were people like us in mass media and yeah, while they had to play either completely-white or completely-asian roles, at least they sort of existed. By then though I’d also already embraced my non-categoriness and absorbed the idea that I would always have to defer to someone else who was more of whatever part of my identity I was partaking in.

*I’m using “hapa” in this case specifically because of its extremely-limited half-asian/half-white meaning which the multiracial asian community jumped all over in the late 1990s/early 2000s because of the gaping absence of any other term to self-identify as. It’s no longer a term I use to describe any group of people even though I do still use it to self-identify—with family from Hawai‘i, I feel like it does capture some of my specific story. But the fact that it all-too-often loses its Hawaiian context is a big problem. As is the fact that it all-too-often is limited to just asian/white people.

It’s not that being mixed-race means that I’m insufficiently anything. It’s that I’m aware of the limits of my experience of my culture. I know that there’s always more to learn and more family history to uncover. I know that my culture and experience is best described in terms of where my ancestors came from rather than who I am.

Sometimes though I wonder if things could’ve been different. I’ve seen my sons’ friends ask if mixed-race parents like me are the parents of his similarly-mixed-race friends. It’s not just that there’s a cohort of mixed race kids. Many of the parents are also mixed race now and, while kids are still grouping by type—it’s amazing how engrained that idea of what a family unit should look like is—I get the sense that much of my sons’ generation has a much different understanding of how culture works and that there is a benefit to being typed into a box which kind of fits you.

Representation is always good. But it’s more than that. What seems to be a lot of the driving force in this though is that they understand what they might grow up to be like. Which is really where the family-unit typing seems to come into play. Kids learn early on that they’ll grow up to look like their family. A lot of the “what about the kids” panic with mixed race couples stems from the fear that the kids won’t look like their parents. And while that’s bullshit, I have seen that as kids learn how race works really early and that, once that view is in place they see racial differences as overriding any other similarities.

So it‘s a good thing that my sons’ generation is growing up where mixed-race adults are common. I’m kind of jealous. I’m glad I had peers but I can see how different things are to just see what you could look like as a grown up.

It was only in getting back into baseball cards that I realized that there were a couple of years in the late 1980s when my classmates had accurately identified a mixed-race adult for me to look like.

When I was ~10 everyone started calling me Atlee. I was a Giants fan and I supposedly looked like our pitcher, Atlee Hammaker. He’d been a star, of sorts, a few years earlier but by the time I was a fan injuries had kind of derailed his career. As a result, he’d developed a bit of a reputation as being a headcase—specifically the type of pitcher who’s great when no one’s on base but loses his composure as soon as anyone reaches base.

I hated that nickname and being told that I looked like him—mostly because, in my view, he wasn’t that good. Looking at his stats now gives me a better sense of it. He was in the midst of going from a decent—albeit injury-prone—pitcher to a replacement-level one. A decent career with a few high points—just not the trajectory any kid wants to be associated with.

Getting back into cards though has involved me googling around about players whose cards trigger my memories. In Hammaker’s case, I discovered that he was mixed-race, specifically German/Japanese—very close to the same thing I am. I’d had no idea when I was a kid—no one else did either—but finding that out kind of softened my memories. Rather than seeing his cards and having a visceral “oh god I hated being called Atlee” reaction, I’ve warmed to him and begun to wonder how I would’ve reacted if I’d known as a kid.

Would I have latched on with the same sense of ownership that I latched on to Scott Erickson—who grew up a stone’s through from my house—a few years later? No idea. But I suspect I would’ve been more supportive instead of rolling my eyes each time he got the fidgets when someone got on base.

And no, I didn’t grow up to look like him. That’s not how any of this works. But as someone who rarely smiles in photos, I am enjoying looking at his cards from the 1980s and being amused at how he never smiles and always has the same deadpan expression on his face. I’d like to think that his special 1984 All Star card is a reflection of his disastrous appearance in 1983 but it’s just the way he always looks.

My First Box Break; My First Relic

Continuing from yesterday. I was expecting a package from Peter at Baseball Every Night. I’d sorta-hesitantly joined his box break—I’m new in baseball card twitter and don’t want to be that guy who just takes without having contributed anything. But he convinced me to join and I’m glad I did.

Getting a batch of over a dozen Giants cards in the mail is always fun. And I’m still a bit in awe of the print quality of modern cards. Yes I agree with the complaints about the TV-style graphics and the over-cropped ACTIONACTIONACTION photographs. But at a pure technical level these even blow the original Stadium Clubs out of the water.

It’s nice to get a bunch of long-time franchise favorites. Cain’s been scuffling for a while but when I see his cards I’m still reminded of the first half of this decade. Pence is basically the team mascot now. And I don’t need to say anything about Posey. When I grew up I loved Will Clark. Posey has been the same kind of a guy since his rookie year.

A few other key names, some of whom I’m only just getting used to. It’s been a weird season so far and I’ve had a hard time keeping track of how far off the rails we’ve gotten. I can’t catch a lot of the late games on the East Coast so it’s nice to get photos to match the names.

Also, the Nunez card is a great example of both how the horizontal format works well and how it fails in this particular design template. Sometimes the action just has to be displayed horizontally and a sliding picture is one such play. At the same time, the weird fade-out Topps is doing at the bottom of the cards gets super distracting and noticeable here. Rather than being a fade it looks like the entire photo’s been deleted—only badly.

And some people who I’ve just not heard of. This is both exciting and also a reflection of how this year has been going. We’re doing so badly that it seems like we should just be churning through the complete 40-man roster looking for players who might stick.

Anyway, very nice variety in the break and the kind of team set which, as a team set collector, leaves me feeling super satisfied. It’s important to have some stars but it’s also great to have a good cross-section of the entire team. This break does that perfectly.

Peter also threw in a couple Series 1s thrown in as a bonus. I didn’t get any Giants in my first packs so it was nice to get them this way instead. Thanks Peter, this was a lot of fun and I need to put together a thank you package to send your way in return.

My First Relic

The good news is that I “won” the break. That’s also the bad news. I’m kind of sheepish about this since I’m not big on chase cards and feel like the prize is wasted on me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy to have gotten a relic card. It’s just that my reasons aren’t what Topps is going for.

When I was drifting out of the hobby in the early 90s, relic cards were only beginning to appear. I was intrigued by them then but the idea of chase cards also directly contributed to my disillusionment.* At this point I can’t see myself ever actively acquiring one so getting one from a lucky pack or box break is the only way I’d ever own one.**

*I just found all my 1994 cards. I never bothered to put them in albums at all and, once the strike occurred, they just ended up in a shoebox.

**This is true with most chase cards. The only ones I can see myself acquiring are the printing plate ones which I’m interested in from a purely craft point of view.

It’s certainly an interesting object. I knew they were thicker than the average card but I never realized exactly how thick.* But aside from the cleverness in how it’s made there’s little in this that I find appealing. The patch is a small square of cream CoolBase and there’s literally nothing else of interest on the card. The photo is nice enough—especially if you’re into the cut-out player look—and I enjoy the spot UV coating. But that’s about it. There’s not even anything interesting on the back.

*What the hell do you do with these, just keep them in the toploader and find a box to store the toploader in?

And without the card itself having any interesting information, I’m left holding a small square of fabric and thinking whether I’d be excited about such a thing if it didn’t have the cardboard frame around it.

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be.

I understand the point of these relics but they’re not for me. At a certain point the small square of cut fabric becomes too abstracted from any emotional meaning. It’s explicitly not from any specific game. And there’s no context to suggest that it’s even from an actual jersey—for all I can tell it’s from a bolt of fabric.* I have to take Topps’s word for it.

*The relic cards which include cuts of patches or numbering are better in this regard.

Holding this card in my hand left me feeling underwhelmed and disappointed about what the hobby has turned into. That pack searching for this kind of card is a thing makes me sad. That hobby packs cost more per-card than retail packs because of this kind of thing makes me sad.

Still, I’m happy to have gotten a relic card because I had no idea how I would react to actually owning one. I did enjoy looking it over and really examining it and thinking about how it’s constructed as a product. I also enjoyed thinking through my reactions to it and trying to figure out why . I even plan to keep it so I can remember why it’s not for me. It’s a rare thing for card to evoke that many different thoughts and emotions.

An unexpected bubble mailer

Okay this is fun. I returned from vacation last week and found two bubble mailers waiting for me. Yes, one was in New Jersey while the other was in California, but it’s still an exciting thing to find waiting—especially when one of the mailers was unexpected.

Before I left for vacation I sent CommishBob a couple cards to help him with his 1970 set build. My current collection focus* has been pretty efficient so far. What duplicates I do have are typically junk wax from my childhood collection. But for whatever reason I’d accumulated a bunch of Giants dupes from 1970—including two that Bob needed. So I sent them out and, once I learned that they arrived okay, kind of forgot about the whole thing figuring that some day an envelope would arrive with a couple early-70s Giants cards that I needed.

*San Francisco Giants team sets as I suggested would happen a few months ago. I’ll have to write a proper post about this in the future.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about what would arrive and I’m kind of bummed that my wife* got to open the package instead of me. Thankfully she sent me photos. I’d’ve been happy with just the 1957 Sauer card let alone a 1957 and a 1958 card. As a kid, my oldest cards—aside from the 1917 Zeenuts which I discovered late and belong in their own category—were from 1960. Anything from the 1950s was unfathomable for me. And getting a card from before the Giants moved to San Francisco? Amazing.

*Stuck in New Jersey for work reasons.

But Bob didn’t stop there. There were also three 1959 cards. Aside from the age factor, there’s something about the 1950s designs which are especially evocative for me. Where Topps in the 1960s defined and refined what baseball cards are supposed to look like, the 1950s cards are a little more all over the place.

The best thing is that many of the 1950s designs seem to polarize opinions.* Some people will love a given year; others will hate it; there’s rarely any in-between. 1958 and 1959 are two designs which exemplify this. Some people love the colors. Others hate the small photos.

*Yes there are some gems like 1956 which everyone likes.

I love them as artifacts of their time but I also feel that they need to be left there. I’ve never really liked baseball cards which paint over the photo background with a design—whether it’s a solid color or all that refractor stuff going on today. I like that this particular 1958 reminds me of the Cracker Jacks cards with their red backgrounds. And I appreciate the 1950s-ness of the lettering.

The 1959s are pretty similar. As with the 58s, I can appreciate the colorfulness of them all. And I like the way the font is hinting at what’s to come in the 1960s.* But good lord those photos are small and feel like the secondary photos that Topps would later use.

*Typewise the design evolution from 1958 to 1960 feels very natural.

But wait there’s more. The 1960 rookie is a nice bridge between the 1959 design and the circus colors of the 1960 design. And the 1962 is one of those sets which, as someone who really got started in the hobby in 1987 when Topps had another wood-grain background design, just scratches all my nostalgia buttons. That the Giants went to the World Series this year is a bonus.

And yeah. Super generous from Bob and I have no idea how to properly thank him. It’s very cool to be back to trading cards again. It’s going to be immensely fun to see these all in person.

Also at The Met

The main reason I went to The Met was to see Irving Penn. But once I was inside and after I finished with the Penn show I wandered around and checked out a few other exhibitions before I got too tired. This isn’t a comprehensive round-up but rather listing a few of the other highlights of my trip

The Burdick Collection—specifically the baseball cards—is the first place I head in the museum. It’s still off in a remote corner of the American Wing where it gets very little traffic. This is both disappointing and wonderful. I want more people to see these but I also enjoy having the whole gallery to myself.

I stand by my comments in last year’s Met post in that it’s especially interesting to look at print ephemera as art. While many of the baseball cards on display didn’t fit into last month’s photography history through being more paintings than photographs, they’re still part of our visual culture and language.

Baseball cards in particular are fascinating in how they represent a direct connection from the early days of cardomania to the modern trading card. The cards in the current hang cover the first half of the 20th century—from ~1910 lithographed tobacco cards to offset-printed Topps cards from 1959—which represents a period where many of the other subjects of cardomania disappeared* and the modern standard trading card format developed.

*Yes there are obviously non-sports trading cards for this entire time period, but the rise of movie and movie-star memorabilia resulted in a very different kind of mass-culture ephemera collecting. Instead of trading cards we had posters and lobby cards and promotional stills related to specific films and releases. Also, while I get hives from the current Allen & Ginter retro-revival brand, I have been finding myself intrigued by its non-sport choices and what those say about our national myths and nostalgia for other kinds of collecting.

As fun as it is to see cards from Topps series which I own, it’s the weirdness between the World Wars where cards became more and more kid-focused and tied in with gum and candy instead of tobacco which fascinates me. No standards—the sizes and artwork are wildly variable—yet there’s a certain “baseball cardness” to all of them. Only the rise of good color photography really puts and end to all of this and, while I enjoy the photography, I do kind of miss the wild-west nature of things which came before.

The big fashion show this year was Rei Kawakubo. I liked it, but for all of its cleverness in blurring categories and dualities in fashion, it all felt a little too similar to me. Still, it’s always good to be reminded at how the entire point of fashion is to mess with the human silhouette. And recognizing the dualities in how we approach any art form is a great exercise in questioning and being aware of what our assumptions are.

The standout items for me were the clothes which were intended to be worn by multiple people at once and her approach to the male/female duality. I don’t have much to say or add to the multiple-person clothing except that I wish there were a video of it on the runway.

The male/female clothes though were very interesting—especially in how they were displayed. Kawakubo’s male clothing for women includes extremely wide-legged trousers. Looking at the catalog it’s apparent that these were intended to be worn as shorts* but in the exhibition, the dress forms suggest that they could also be worn as a miniskirt with the other leg kind of behaving like the front panel of a kilt.

*the last photo on The Met’s image page.

The Early Photography in Italy exhibition, while small, was also a lot of fun. I’ve not see so many salt prints in one place before and this show was fascinating in the mix of different photography techniques. Paper negatives, glass negatives, salt prints, albumen prints in all possible combinations. And that’s not even getting into the daguerrotypes and colorized cartes de visite. I wish there was more about the processes in this show because I really wanted to note and compare the differences.

As much fun as albumen printing is, there’s something even more evocative in salt printing which feels less like a photograph and more like an illustration in terms of how certain details and contrasts get fuzzed out. This also holds with the negatives as the glass collodion negatives hold a lot more sharpness and detail (at the cost of being a lot more work to travel with).

But the photos themselves also represent a very important moment in history. It’s tempting to view these as being tourist prints and imagery from the early days of casual tourism. And they are. But the fact that tourist imagery is inherently tied up with national identity is important to remember. Where tourists travel and how a country markets itself are intimately connected and feed off of each other. That Italy at this point is uniting as a single country means that many of these images—especially the Gustave Le Gray photos of Garibaldi and the “new ruins” resulting from his campaigns—in addition to selling “Italy” to the world are also selling it to Italians themselves.

3D

In looking at early photographic baseball cards I found myself wondering whether stereographs should also count as trading cards. I never see them mentioned in baseball card discussions but they fit the bill in terms of being photographs which were intended for mass consumption and trading.

The only difference is that stereograms tend to be about locations or events rather than people. Doing a quick search of large online repositories doesn’t turn up a lot of baseball, just some team photos—such as the one above from 1909—or special events such as the 1929 World Series. And while these are both subjects which come up time and again on baseball cards, they’re always supplements to the set of individual player photos.

Still, this got me thinking both about 3D photography and 3D baseball cards. If stereograms don’t feel like cards, what about Viewmaster? I didn’t remember any Viewmaster baseball sets but I figured they had to exist. They do. As with the stereograms, this doesn’t feel like a baseball card to me. But it’s closer in how it’s about individual players and, if these were sold cheaply in packs and were a collectible set, could very well have become part of the baseball card collecting world.

Viewmaster rubs a lot of the same nostalgia feels that baseball cards do. It’s a simple concept we all loved as kids—my kids still love it. The only problem is that you need the gadget to see the photos. At least with stereograms you could view the photos in 2D without needing a device. But requiring the 3D viewer and having that viewer limit the experience to a single person viewing a single image at a time means that it’s hard to share and display your collection.

I did some searching for anaglyph baseball cards but found nothing. This surprised me since, even if the cards would look awful, anaglyph 3D and its red/blue glasses is the iconic 3D look even today.

Instead what we have is lenticular 3D cards. It seems like the first versions were the super-limited-release Topps 3D set in 1968. I’ve not seen these but I have seen the more-common Kellogg’s 3-D Super Stars from the 1970s and 80s. These were always cool even with the cracking and bending issues.

The lenticular effect is less 3D and more more of just a layer of depth in the card. But it’s still a fun technology* which was much more accessible than stereograms or Viewmasters. A whole batch of these cards could be viewed at once by many people and, if in a binder sheet, the entire sheet would have depth rather than each one needing to be looked at individually.**

*As a 1980s kid I grew up with Sportsflics which used lenticular printing as a way to show motion. These were also super cool but belong in their own discussion.

**I also need to flag 1985’s Topps 3-D which are actual textured card surfaces rather than an optical effect and so in my view belong with the various die-cut cards as something distinct from 3D photography.

By the 1990s hologram technology was no longer the parlor trick it was when that first National Geographic came out with the eagle on the cover.* Where it was initially part of how Upper Deck branded its logo, their Denny’s sets in the early 1990s were entirely holographic cards.

*March 1984. I still remember it blowing my mind and expecting to find something, anything, hidden in the magazine because it couldn’t just be on the cover.

I haven’t looked at mine in two and a half decades but I remember them as being similar to the lenticular cards—not true 3D but rather multiple flat layers which still gave the card depth. I suspect that this is because they couldn’t take a proper holographic image of the player and instead had to use an existing photograph and layer it with other images.

They weren’t as easy to look at as the lenticular cards. There was no real color and your viewing angles were kind of limited. But I still remember them fondly and kind of want to acquire more of these. They’re cheaper on eBay than buying a Grand Slam was 25 years ago.

I also googled around to see if there were any Magic Eye baseball cards but, as opposed to my dissappointment in finding no anaglyphs, I was relieved to find no autostereograms.

Am I doing this right?

So I’ve been on ebay buying baseball cards. It was coming. But I’m trying my hardest not to go too crazy and limit my bids to the $5 range. It’s hard, every week there’s a lot or two that comes up and looks very tempting. But I don’t have the time or space or money to jump on those and besides, I really do need to go and look at my old collection to remember what I have already.

What I’ve been doing instead is running down specific items of personal interest which I wouldn’t have cared about at all as a kid. For example, Masanori Murakami. He used to be a non-story. There’s one entry about him making his debut in September 1964 in the Giants Diary and while it mentions him being the first Japanese to play in Major League Baseball, it’s mainly an aside. Not a big deal at all. Nor, really, should it have been.

This was all before Hideo Nomo became a sensation in 1995 and opened the pipeline of Japanese talent to the US. Murakami wasn’t just the first Japanese Major League player, he was the only Japanese player. An oddity before we figured out how to deal with translators and not part of any legacy. Post-Nomo? Now he has a legacy and the Giants can claim to have been the first, three decades before anyone else. And as a nikkei Giants fan, this makes me happy.

Learning about Murakami also takes me into learning more about how players move from Japan to the US. I also really enjoyed learning about other Japanese players in the Giants’ farm system during the same era. As someone who’s followed international soccer for a couple decades, it’s interesting to me how different everything is with baseball. As baseball gets increasingly international with professional leagues abroad where the quality is at least as good as American minor leagues it’s going to be very interesting to see how these rules develop.

All this made me curious about whether Murakami had ever appeared on a baseball card. When I found out that he had appeared on only one I felt compelled to track it down. I’m a little sad that he doesn’t get his own card, but the photo is good and the 1965 design is fantastic so I can’t complain.

I’ve also learned a lot about baseball’s labor history since I was a kid. When I was little I found the contract holdouts and concerns about money to be absurd and frustrating. I eventually came to realize that my sympathies should be with the players even while the strike in 1994 broke me of both my baseball habit and my card-collecting habit.

I was surprised to discover that Topps had made a Marvin Miller card in 2005. I’m even more surprised to learn that it’s part of their Fan Favorites line. This speaks very well of baseball fans since Miller ushered in a lot of things which, on the surface, fans love to complain about.

Still, aside from the moral issues of treating labor fairly, fans have a lot to thank Miller for too. For all the complaints about contracts and mercenaries, the flip side is being able to fantasize about free agent signings and the idea that any player can move to whatever team he wants to play for.

I found it interesting that Topps chose to use its 1970 design for Miller card. Miller had already taken it to Topps with a player boycott in 1967 and 1968 so any of those years could’ve worked. But going with 1970 means that Topps is referencing the Curt Flood issue.

Which meant that I found myself checking for Curt Flood cards. Specifically for 1969 when he has traded. I couldn’t pass up the 1970 card because of how wrong it is to show him playing for a team that he not only never played for, but which he refused to play for and went to the Supreme Court to avoid playing for. And the 1971 card completes the set since it’s the team he eventually chose to play for.

I wish the 1969 card had a better photo. I know that 1969 was hampered as a set because of aforementioned player boycott of Topps so it’s possible that Topps just didn’t have a good photo of Flood on hand. Though given the nature of what happened to Flood, the eyeroll/no fucks given expression is also appropriate. The 1970 and 1971 photos are typical “hide the hat logo in case he changes teams” shots. I like that in 1971 he looks somewhat relieved even though he has about to retire.

It’s a shame how little this side of baseball history gets covered. Ball Four* touched on it but the timing is off in that it occurs before the main conflict and then all the afterwords are more about Bowie Kuhn and Marvin Miller and the concept of how the owners could’ve avoided free agency by being slightly more generous with salaries and meal money.

*Now there’s another theme for card collecting I might run down some day.

And that’s kind of the thing. Flood was objecting to being bought and sold as if he were a piece of property. This wasn’t exactly about free agency—which Flood eventually got by sitting out all of the 1970 season—but it signaled to the players where that fight would have to be fought.

So on to Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally and the Seitz decision in 1975. The courts turned out not be the best place to fight labor issues but the National Labor Relations Board was. It still amazes me that none of this history is really mentioned anywhere. In soccer, free agency is named after the player who fought for it. In baseball, there’s no similar reference that suggests how things changed to become the way they are today.

Something about the spring-training glow in these photos perfectly complements  the garish card design. We’ve got foliage and palm trees in the background. Process colors being run at 100% by themselves for maximum brightness. These are cards which are very much of their time.

I’ll eventually get 1976 and 1977 Messersmith cards. Unlike with Flood where the card the year after the fight tells part of the story, the 1976 Messersmith card is kind of redundant to the 195 one. His 1977 card though features him with the Braves, the team he signed for as a free agent in 1976.