Babe Dye – the best of the St. Pats.

One of the things that confronts every Leaf fan at some point in his or her existence is the oddity of the team name.  This usually comes in the form of some meathead who offers up a gem like “Hey, shouldn’t it be Leaves? Hur, hur, hur…”

As a result, Leaf fans learn at a young age the rules surrounding the plural form of proper nouns (two Maple Leaf players are Maple Leafs for the same reason that Julia Child and family are the Childs and not the Children – the first place I saw this actually spelled out in detail was in The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker).  This is a form of public service, then.  If grammar is not fully explained in our schools, we can learn it from our local sports teams.

Spelling aside, the question remains as to why this particular name was chosen.  Off the Leafs’ official website, we get the following:

In February of 1927, Conn Smythe, who had built the New York Rangers franchise but was dismissed in favour of Lester Patrick, raised enough money to buy the St. Pats and prevented the team from moving to Philadelphia. Smythe, a military man, immediately had the Toronto franchise name changed from the St. Pats to Maple Leafs, the name of a World War I fighting unit, the Maple Leaf Regiment.  He also switched the uniform colours to blue and white from green and white.

Conn Smythe fought in both world wars and was a fairly unabashed patriot, so the story rings somewhat true.  There’s just one issue with it: so far as I can tell, there was no Maple Leaf Regiment that fought in World War I.

It is very difficult to prove a negative, so I can’t say with absolute certainty that this regiment never existed, but I find no evidence for it.  The Canadian military takes its history seriously.  My great-grandfather was part of the 85th Nova Scotia Highlanders.  I can find his enlistment date, honours he won, places he fought, the date he was killed and where he was buried.  The photograph of him in uniform is readily available online.

This is equally true of other regiments.  When I was writing about Scotty Davidson, I was able to verify parts of the story by looking at military websites.  If you fought for this country, there is a record of you.

I find nothing when looking for the Maple Leaf Regiment.  The closest thing I found was that it might be considered an alternate name for the Princess Pats, but that’s an Edmonton unit.  Smythe was an Ontario boy.  He wouldn’t have named the team after a unit to which he had no ties.

I don’t find the lack of a unit completely damning for the official story, though, because I think the official story we have is actually a transcription error.  During the First World War, the overwhelming majority of soldiers serving in the Canadian Expeditionary Force wore a badge on their caps that looked something like this:

Image borrowed from shoulder-to-shoulder.net. Many fascinating military insignia to be found.

Each unit had something a little different, but the basic theme of the maple leaf was common to the majority of them.  My suspicion is that what Smythe actually said was that the team name evoked the maple leaf regiment badges worn in WWI.  In this case, “maple leaf” describes “regiment badge” as opposed to being the name of a particular regiment.  What was transcribed as “Maple-Leaf-Regiment badge” would thus have been “maple-leaf regiment-badge.”

I also suspect this story came out many years after the name change, and the person taking the quote had no memory of WWI uniforms.

Why do I think this story came out well after the fact (and isn’t necessarily the real story)?

I have a couple of reasons.  The first is that I’ve dug about old newspaper records from February, 1927, and while all note the sale and the name change, none (that I’ve found) carry the WWI angle.  It wasn’t something being noted at the time.  The second is that I don’t really think the military angle was really the driving force behind the change.

In Holzman and Nieforth’s Deceptions and Doublecross – How the NHL Conquered Hockey, the authors note that in late 1926, the exact same name change was being contemplated by the previous ownership group (this was reported in all the Toronto dailies).  The reason they were looking at rebranding the St. Pats as the Maple Leafs was to align themselves with the most successful sports franchise in the city – the local baseball team.

Pitcher Dick Rudolph of the 1909 Toronto Maple Leafs

The name “Toronto Maple Leafs” had an existence prior to February, 1927.  The professional baseball club in town had worn it for 25 years and had had no small amount of success with it.  The baseball Leafs played in the International League and had been a strong squad for a number of years.  Of the MiLB Top 100 minor-league teams of all time, four are Leaf teams from the first quarter of the century.

In 1926, the Leafs finally broke through and passed the mighty Baltimore Orioles to claim first place in the IL.  They hit .308 as a club, went 109-57 and swept the Junior World Series.  They were playing in a beautiful, brand new ballpark at Bathurst and Lakeshore.  They were setting attendance records.  Life was good.

A ball game at Maple Leaf Stadium c. 1930.

The St. Pats, for their part, were still mired in the lawsuits of Eddie Livingstone and were going nowhere as a club.  The owners thought that maybe they could grab a bit of the positive Leafs vibe for themselves.  Paraphrasing the viewpoint of the papers of the day, you could call the team a rose, but it would still stink.

Nonetheless, the first move Smythe made as new owner was to complete the name change the previous ownership was debating.  Why?

Clearly, part of the change was the desire to start a new era.  The Livingstone lawsuits were done (it was the damages he was awarded from the St. Pats group that forced the sale of the team) and he wanted a fresh start.  I suspect that being the patriot he was, the symbolic aspect of the Maple Leaf appealed to him.

A secondary aspect of the change is that the baseball Leafs were owned by a man named Lol Solman.  The person running the Arena Gardens (aka, the Mutual Street Arena) – the facility from which Smythe needed to rent ice?  The same Lol Solman.  By naming the team Maple Leafs, he was syncing his interests with those of the landlord of the building he was playing in.

It wasn’t unheard of for two teams in one city to share a name.  Pittsburgh had an NHL team at the time called the Pirates.  Sharing the name wasn’t that different from sharing a set of uniform colours (which most Toronto teams still do).

The name change did end up being a fortune-changer for the hockey team.  By the 1930s, it was the hockey Leafs that owned the city.  They had their own brand-new building they owned themselves (Maple Leaf Gardens), and the old Arena Gardens became a second-tier facility that eventually went bankrupt.  The ball club fell on hard times, too.  The 1930s and 1940s were decades of poor squads and bad attendance.  There would be a nice revival in the 1950s, but they would never again rival the hockey team, much less surpass them.

Charlie Conacher was one of the new-look Leafs that romped through the 1930s.

Once the hockey Leafs became the established team, the suggestion that they were actually named for a struggling minor-league ballclub would not have been all that flattering.  I think this is where Smythe made mention of the WWI angle.  It makes better-sounding history.  While I can imagine, again, that he liked this aspect of it at the time, I simply don’t accept it as the core reason for the switch.

In order for the reason for the name change to be anything other than what I suspect here, the following things have to be true: for a completely independent set of reasons, Smythe would have changed the name of the St. Patricks to the exact thing proposed by the previous ownership group – a name that just happened to be the same as the dominant sports entity in the city and just happened to be the property of the new landlord with whom he would need to arrange ice time and generally curry favour.

It just doesn’t pass the smell test.

The Leafs were named after the city’s baseball club, who they then surpassed in success and public profile to the extent that many forget the ball club ever really mattered or even existed.  The rest is spin and marketing.

Former Maple Leaf sparky Anderson – from www.baseballhalloffame.ca

I’ve been working on this off and on since the mid-1980s.  It’s a bit of a shock to the system to see some of these 1960s sets actually fall by the wayside.

1963-64 was the last season for Parkhurst, the company that reintroduced hockey cards to the market after the hiatus brought on by WWII.  They had had various licensing wars with Topps since the mid-1950s and from what I’ve read, they were making easier money on their other lines of business.  For 1964-65, they simply ceded the field and dropped out of sight.

The set has 99 cards and includes players from Montreal, Toronto and Detroit.  With a few exceptions (that I have no explanation for), each Montreal and Toronto player appears twice – once on a close-up portrait and once on a full-body image.  Detroit players appear once in portrait form.  Detroit players appear in front of the American flag, Toronto in front of what was then the Canadian flag and Montreal in front of a pattern of horizontal lines.  The card backs have the name, personal data (height, weight, etc.) and a single line of career stats.  The rest is dominated by one of three ads for mail-in rebates from Parkhurst.

This is a popular set.  The Gordie Howe card (#55) is widely considered one of the classic cards of all time.  I personally would rate it middle of the pack for Parkhurst.  I think that as their last effort, they largely mailed it in.  Gone are the great wordy backs that were so packed with information.  Even the stats are nigh-on useless.  If you don’t have last year’s card handy, there’s no way to tell just what anyone did in 1962-63.  The front design is nice enough, and they look nice when the set is all together.

As with almost all Parkhurst cards, age-browning is an issue.  It was possible to order a complete set from Parkhurst (or so I have heard), so high-end commons aren’t that unusual to find.

Being a little taller than Topps/OPC cards, they take the 8-pocket sheet typically used for early Topps baseball.

I’m breaking the set in half for the posts – this will actually allow me to post one of them today. 

Page 1 – cards 1-8

The players are Allan Stanley, Don Simmons, Red Kelly, Dick Duff, Johnny Bower, Ed Litzenberger, Kent Douglas, Carl Brewer.  This Leaf team would win its third straight Cup in ’63-64 and then have one last gasp in 1967.  Don Simmons was the other Leaf goalie prior to the acquisition of Terry Sawchuk.  He was actually in goal for the deciding game in 1962.  Dick Duff would be traded to the Rangers in the Andy Bathgate deal late in the season.

I never liked these backs.  One can see here all three promotions – the mini Stanley Cup replica, the autographed puck and the table hockey game.  Various degrees of age-browning are also evident.

Page 2 – cards 9-16

Players shown are Eddie Shack, Bob Nevin, Billy Harris (the elder), Bob Pulford, George Armstrong, Ron Stewart, John MacMillan, Tim Horton.  Shack scored the Cup-winning goal in 1963.  Nevin would join Dick Duff in New York in the Bathgate deal.  John MacMillan is not present in the second half of this set.  His place is taken by Dave Keon, who for some reason does not have a portrait card.  MacMillan was a role player – I’m not sure how he bumps Keon from this part of the set.

Click here for the image of the card backs.

Page 3 – cards 17-24

Depicted here are Frank Mahovlich, Bob Baun, Leaf coach/GM Punch Imlach, Leaf Asst. GM King Clancy, Habs Gilles Tremblay, J.G. Talbot, Henri “Pocket Rocket” Richard, Raplh Backstrom.  The ’63-64 Habs were almost done the retooling of the team that won five straight Cups between 1956 and 1960.  This group would go on to win four of five between 1965 and 1969.

Click here for the image of the back of the cards.

Page 4 – Cards 25-32

Players depicted are Billy Hicke, Red Berenson, Jacques Laperriere (RC), Jean Gauthier (RC), Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, Jean Beliveau, JC Tremblay, Terry Harper (RC).  There are a lot of Habs RCs in this set and they’re probably the most difficult team to collect because of it.  This is one of my favourite Beliveau cards (on the back, the “3″ in the card number “30″ is actually upside down – this is not why I like the card, just something odd).  Bill Hicke was once reputed to be the next Maurice Richard.  He became a good scorer, but not quite that.  His brother Ernie was traded to Oakland for the draft pick that became Guy Lafleur.

There does not appear to be much of a pattern to the colour banding in the background other than the fact that colours appear to come in blocks, save for the occasional blue one that appears out of nowhere.

Click here for the image of the back of the cards.

I was hoping to get through the set in two posts, but time is short and it looks like it will be three.  Hope everyone is still awake. 

I’d have posted this sooner, but after all, new baby….

Mom and baby are both fine.

Best line so far comes from our soon-to-be-four-year-old – “Mama, he’s so CUTE!  We have to keep him!”

Man, he was a kid here.

100 posts isn’t a huge milestone for most blogs, it’s just a bit of one here because I wasn’t confident I would even get to 10.  I only signed up for this account so I could comment over at Cardboard Gods and a blog came with it.  After ignoring it for a few months, I finally decided it could use it to post about non-Leaf things, the Leaf content living over at Pension Plan Puppets.

Over time, though, I just got tired of talking about the Leafs and didn’t feel like I was adding much new to the conversation.  So I sort of migrated over here without really noticing I was doing it.

For no real reason, the post that led me to believe I needed a separate place to write about alternate subjects is a post I never actually got around to writing, until now.

Years ago, we had an old betamax tape of “Bill Cosby – Himself” – a live show of his from the early/mid-’80s.  Out of 90 minutes of sketches, the one joke that has always stuck with me was from the bit about natural childbirth (“Natural!  Child!  Birth!” in Cosbyspeak).  The Cosbys, having successfully learned all they needed to know in order to do what should happen naturally anyway, have made it to the hospital and Mrs. Cosby is now under the watchful eye of the doctor, “sitting there like Johnny Bench.”  (See about 7:23 in the clip below.)

The humour is now the better part of 30 years old and people may like it or they may not as time and context tends to change what is considered funny, but that isn’t really what struck me.  What I found interesting was that the joke only works if the entire audience knows who Johnny Bench is, and most everyone clearly does, based on the response.  This wasn’t even a US audience.  The taping was in Canada.

That got me wondering whether there was anyone in baseball today who could be used in this kind of joke.  Does it work with Joe Mauer?  Pudge Rodriguez?  Somehow I don’t see it. Nobody else has that level of instant recognition even amongst non-baseball fans.

I wondered whether it was a reflection of a declining place of baseball in the national consciousness that would account for me being unable to replace Bench in the joke.  Was it just that he could count on most of his audience knowing the game in 1983-84?  Or was it more that Bench’s place in society transcended the game itself, much like a Gretzky was known even to people who weren’t fans of hockey and had maybe never even seen it played?

(It’s also possible that since that’s how I first heard the joke and given that I’ve heard it enough times in precisely that manner, I can’t imagine it working any other way.  I don’t think so, though.)

In the past year or so that I’ve mulled this over, I’ve talked to some older fans (Bench’s heyday came when I was too little to really get what he was doing) and I’ve been able to get a little bit of a sense of how big a deal Johnny Bench really was at the time.   The joke works because Johnny Bench equals “catcher” the same way Bobby Orr equals “defenseman,” even if you’ve never seen him play and even the better part of 30 years since he last swung a bat and meant it.  You didn’t need to have seen Johnny Bench to know what he was, and that’s why it worked.

So if Bill Cosby was trying to tell the joke again today and needed a name to make the reference work, there really isn’t a better name he could use than Johnny Bench.  Maybe that’s just my age and lack of imagination, but I find it pretty remarkable.

Of course it’s OPC.

Playing with Hedberg and Nilsson, Bobby Hull had the best statistical season of his career in 1974-75, leading the league with 77 goals. He had 142 points and was a plus-60.

It took three seasons for the WHA to merit its own set of cards from OPC.

In ’72-73, WHA players made up the high series of the regular set.  In ’73-74, OPC made a 20-player poster set, but no cards (leaving the field open for Quaker Oats).  Finally, in 1974-75, they were ready.

The 1974-75 WHA set was the first time since the late 1930s that OPC put out a hockey set that had no Topps equivalent.  I don’t know whether Topps even had a hand in the design – if not, this would be the first hockey set OPC had designed on its own since 1938.  (The 1939-40 set is really just an issue of full-sized glossy photos.)  The wrapper still shows the cards as being made under license from Topps.

I do have one of these, but it’s buried, so this is a borrowed image. Note that the goalie on the front of the WHA wrapper is a poorly-disguised Tony Esposito of the Chicago Black Hawks (NHL, just for sake of reference).

It’s interesting if Topps did in fact hold the WHA license, given that they never once produced a WHA set under their own banner.

The set is small – just 66 cards, one of which is a checklist.  They were released in wax packs – 8 cards per pack – with one stick of wonderful OPC gum (the way things should be).

Design/photography/feel

Gerry seems unenthused.

One of the reasons I tend to think that Topps wasn’t involved in the design of this set is that its execution is so incredibly boring.  The cards are landscape-oriented with a banner on the left that includes the team name (standard font) and a stock image of a hockey player.  It might be more interesting if the image was related to the position of the player depicted (like ’73 baseball) or even varied from card to card.  It doesn’t.  Every card has the same image.  At least they’re colour-coded to each team.

The pictures are all posed studio shots – a mix of portraits and full-body images.  There is a facsimile autograph on each photo.

The backs draw fairly heavily on the 1974-75 NHL set.  It uses the same basic layout (though they do away with the puck and move the cartoon to the top), colour scheme and card stock.  There is a single year of stats and career totals.  (WHA sets oscillated back and forth between offering combined NHL/WHA stats and WHA-only.  NHL sets never really acknowledged the WHA until it was gone.  In this case, players with WHA experience get their WHA totals.  Players without get their NHL numbers.)

Cheevers’ WHA back

The comparable NHL back

The cartoon, instead of relating to the player on the card, gives general hockey information.  This is kind of odd, given that while a lot of WHA teams were in new markets that may or may not have known hockey, this set was released in Canada, where collectors certainly weren’t learning anything new.

Significant cards

The thing that makes this set stand out from the ’73-74 Quaker Oats set is that the 65 player cards actually include a reasonable number of players that most people a) will have heard of and b) might actually want to collect.   The WHA was beginning to inherit a number of more significant names, so on top of Hull, Cheevers and Tremblay, there are cards of Paul Henderson, Frank Mahovlich and Jacques Plante.

There are also some rookie cards worth mentioning in the set, which is another departure from Quaker Oats.  They aren’t particularly high value, which is a shame because Anders Hedberg, Ulf Nilsson and Real Cloutier were really talented players and names worth remembering.  Nilsson and Cloutier both put up good numbers in short NHL careers.  Hedberg lasted the longest.

Vaclav Nedomansky, the first player from Eastern Europe to defect to North America, has his RC in this set.  Playing in Toronto alongside Frank Mahovlich, he’d score 41 goals as a 30-year-old rookie and 56 in his second year.  He’d later play in the NHL until he was almost 40, scoring 35 and 38 goals for Detroit in the late 1970s.

Come for the cards but stay for the

cheeseball cartoons.

Maybe it’s just the lighting, but the uniforms don’t seem as garish as in 1973-74 and a number of players seem to have located a comb.  With no funky action shots to speak of, the one standout element is the cartoon on the back of each card.  Cartoons had been a staple on the backs of cards for a lot of years, so that’s not surprising.  These, however, might be the worst lot I’ve ever seen.  Look at the fascinating information to be gleaned – remember that these are marketed to kids who watch hockey and quite likely play it, as well:

Ulf Nilsson’s cartoon – appropriate given he was part of one of the best lines in hockey.	Bobby Hull’s cartoon – do you think they were trying to tell us something? Nah.
Sounds like a great idea. Too bad almost nobody did this in 1974.	I can actually see how this might be considered a penalty.

Coolest card

This rocks. There was a similar poster a year earlier, but this is neater.  Note that “Les Howe” is French for “the Howes,” not an unphotographed fourth family member.

Card #1 in the set is the best card of the whole bunch.  Gordie Howe and his two sons skated together as professionals for the first time in 1973-74, and this card captures it.  It’s also the best-looking card in the set, bar none.  If there’s one particular reason I rated this set above the Quaker Oats release, it’s because of the Howes.

Conclusion

In terms of general esthetics, this isn’t much of a set.  There are designs I like less, but not by much.  What makes it worthwhile is that for a set this small, it contains a pretty good number of interesting cards and the family card of the Howes is one of the standout WHA cards ever made.  If you only ever get one WHA card, it should be this.  (The ’72-73 Hull would be right on its heels, though.)

You don't get this sort of thing with your breakfast anymore

I tend to be of the mindset that anything that I can’t really explain about why something was or wasn’t produced in cards is probably tied to licensing issues.  I have no other reason to explain why there was no OPC-produced WHA set in 1973-74.  They did produce a smallish poster set at some point during the season (that isn’t part of this list), but never got around to making actual cards.

That means that the sole WHA set for 1973-74 was a food issue produced by Quaker Oats.  (At least it was produced for Quaker Oats, I don’t know who it was produced by.)

This 1973-74 release wasn’t the first foray into hockey for Quaker Oats.  From 1946-54 you could order 8X10 glossy photos of NHL players in a program akin to Bee Hive photos (available as a mail-in redemption from the 1930s to the 1960s).  Parkhurst also produced a green-backed version of its 1955-56 set that was distributed by Quaker Oats.  That’s a great set to pursue if you win PowerBall, or Super 7, or whatever the local lottery happens to be.

The 1973-74 set was only 50 cards, released in 10 strips of 5 cards each.  These strips were sealed in cellophane and included in Quaker Oats products.  The cards were perforated along the edges and the strips folded to save space.

The first panel in the set, cards 1-5. Note Ted Hampson (ex of Leafs, Rangers and Seals) and Rosaire Paiement, original Canuck and brother of Wilf.

They are a touch tricky to find and are more desirable when they’re still sealed, which is a bit of a double-edged sword.  While it’s great to have them still in the individual packages they were released in, it means you don’t actually get to check out the cards.  You sort of need a second set for that.  In my set, 8 of the strips are still sealed, so I’ve scanned the two that aren’t.

This set is also significant as the first standalone WHA release.  WHA cards made up the high series of 1972-73 OPC, but this is the first solo appearance of the WHA in its own set.  (There are various team-issue postcard sets and the like from ’72-73, but they really aren’t cards and don’t count.)

Design/photography/feel

Notables - JC Tremblay was likely the best defenseman in the history of the WHA. He played for the Nordiques forever. Ted Taylor merits an on-ice shot, though it's not game action.

There’s not much to talk about by way of design here.  The cards are simply an round-cornered image with a white border and the player name and team along the bottom.  The backs are mostly stat-free, but do have the team logo and a fairly wordy bilingual writeup, given the amount of space they have to work with.  The cards are about 3/5 the size of a standard card.

We learn more about Pete Donnelly here than you ever see elsewhere.

40 minutes per night was not unheard of for top-end defensemen. Pat Stapleton did the same. Not enough depth.

There isn’t an action card in the set.  Most images are posed stills, though a handful were at least taken on the ice surface.  The most entertaining aspect of the photos comes from the wild hair and garish uniforms that clearly place this in the early 70s.

Significant cards

A scrounged Cheevers image. Mine is in one of the sealed packs.

This is kind of a funny set in terms of the checklist.  There aren’t any big-name rookies (and I’m not sure they’d really count, anyway) and most of the other big names that would eventually be associated with the WHA aren’t here yet.  The Howes had arrived and were part of the OPC poster set, but not Quaker Oats.  Parent and Sanderson had headed back to the NHL, so the two keys in this set are Bobby Hull (#50) and Gerry Cheevers (#8).  There are a lot of names that are familiar if you collect hockey from the late 1960s and early-mid 1970s, but not a lot that are household names.

Bobby is scrounged, too, but at least this image was bigger. I can't tell whether he's got a bandage on his nose or it's just lighting.

Come for the cards but stay for the:

wild hair, crazy uniforms and wordy writeups.

Does it get louder than the neon-orange Blazers? I don't think it does. (Scrounged again)

Now, wild hair and loud uniforms are true of a lot of 70s sets and NHL expansion teams, but nothing’s louder than the early WHA.  By the time you get the larger, more robust WHA sets later, the colour schemes have become more muted and a number of these early teams have simply disappeared.

The writing on the back has a bit of a Parkhurst feel to it.  The cards actually tell you something about the player other than the usual platitudes and you can actually learn a little something from them.  In an era of full-stats and cartoons, this isn’t all that common and it’s kind of a nice touch.  They don’t make them like this anymore.

Coolest card

Now that's a big Shark. San Jose should use this as their third. (Image scrounged again)

One would expect this to be either the Hull or the Cheevers, but I just get a kick out of JP Leblanc.  He’s got the big hair happening to an extent that he never does later and you simply never see LA Sharks cards anywhere.  Talk to a Sharks fan (v2.0 in San Jose) and ask whether he knows that JP Leblanc scored the first goal in Sharks history.  Bet he doesn’t. 

Conclusion

It was a tough call between this set and 1977-78.  While ’77-78 OPC is clearly the superior production, the comparative scarcity of the Quaker Oats, its significance as the first WHA release and the fact that it’s simply so odd made me rank it a smidge ahead.

It's mostly legible.

This was my favourite card of my favourite player for a long, long time.

This is a little project I’ve been wanting to tackle for a while.  I just needed to build up a better scan library and get through the ranking process in my head.  I’ve seen a number of different attempts to rank sets of the 80s, determine which sets give the best value for money, etc.  I wanted to take a kick at the 1970s because it often seems underrepresented to me.

There are 17 different sets that I decided to include.  OPC made 10 NHL sets and four WHA sets, plus there were three food issues I thought merited discussion.  I left out the sticker and stamp issues and Topps sets that basically mirrored the OPC sets but were simply smaller.   1971-72 Topps is different enough to probably warrant inclusion, but I don’t have enough of it (read any) to make any real assessment.

The ranking process was tougher than I thought.  The top four or five are pretty easy, but sorting out the balance was pretty nasty.  I weighed things like number of significant cards, design, photography, rookie class, etc.  Ultimately, if I couldn’t make a call, I went with “If I could only buy one of these, which would it be?”

One thing I notice is that the sets that are “better” also tend to be the most expensive.  I couldn’t really work “value for money” into the equation in more than one or two instances.  The sets near the bottom all offer pretty good value if you’re into vintage cards of hall-of-fame players.  They just aren’t rookie-laden sets.

It pains me to put 1977-78 OPC at the bottom of the list because I have a real soft spot for this set.  It was the first hockey set I ever had cards from.  My first favourite cards came from this set, as did my first favourite players.  I’d love to put it higher just on nostalgia alone.  If you were looking at a comparatively inexpensive set to jump into the 1970s with, this isn’t a bad one at all.  It’s relatively easy to find and there aren’t any really expensive cards in it.  Unfortunately, that lack of big cards helped put it where it is in this ranking.

Design/photography/feel:

1977-78 is one of a number of ’70s sets that would most charitably be described as “minimalist.”  There really isn’t much of a design to the front.  You have a square image dominating the whole front over top of a scripted team name and a logo in the corner.  It’s a slightly-updated version of 1970-71.  Still, a page of them looks not half bad when they’re in good shape.

The trend by this point in the 70s was toward more action shots, though more than half of this set is still made up of posed portraits.  Many of the action shots aren’t cropped all that well.  Too many are at a distance.

The back isn’t half bad either, though the text that landed on the blue sections can be a bit hard to read.  There are full stats, a little design in terms of the stick, a cartoon and a blurb – typical 1970s fare.

Significant cards

1977-78 was a season dominated by Montreal, who were in the middle of their last big dynasty.  All the big names are there.  There’s an ascendant Islanders team, the Roger Neilson Leafs, strong teams in New York and Boston.  This set has the last cards of Hall-of-Famers Johnny Bucyk, Rod Gilbert and Ed Giacomin.  The last player card of Bobby Orr has him airbrushed into a Chicago uniform for the second year in a row.  Topps/OPC never got him playing for Chicago.  He’d have a retirement card in 1978-79, pictured in the Team Canada uniform from the 1976 Canada Cup.

Other things that aren’t really significant but are nonetheless interesting/fun about this set include some nifty action shots of goalies in kickin’ 70s masks,

the first picture of a player in a visor,

team logo cards with team records on the back

and a pair of insert sets that featured the same players but existed in two different formats.  I have no idea whether one was Topps and the other OPC or it was a mid-season change.  They’re both represented as OPC glossy inserts.  There were 22 star players represented.

What really hurts this set is the rookie class.  It’s one of the weakest of the decade.  Willi Plett (who I actually quite liked) was the Calder winner.  The rest of the bunch includes the RCs of Mike Milbury, Don Edwards (above) and Mike Palmateer.  It’s kind of interesting to see them and the Plett shot from inside the penalty box is pretty neat, but there isn’t a single “must-have” card in this set, and that’s the biggest reason it rates where it does.

Come for the cards but stay for the:

Cleveland Barons.  This is really the only set where the Barons are represented as a proper team in their actual uniforms.  In 1976-77, the players are either airbrushed Seals or non-airbrushed Seals tagged “team transferred to Cleveland.”  By 1978-79, the Barons are gone – merged with the Minnesota North stars.  There are still a number of painted Seals in this set, but the only time you ever get to see Barons as Barons is 1977-78.

Coolest card:

From the day the team joined the league, Washington was the stop where Topps/OPC got their action photos.  This was true throughout most of the 1980s, as well.  One result of this is that there were a lot more opportunities to photograph Capitals players and you can generally expect at least one interesting Capitals card in each set.  For 1977-78, that was popular defenseman Yvon Labre – he of the flying hair and generous moustache.  In this card, he’s darting between Bryan Watson and a Capital I don’t recognize.  That appears to be Marcel Dionne in the background, which means this picture was about three years old at the time.  Dionne left Detroit after 1974-75.  Still, it’s a pretty remarkable shot for this set.

Conclusion:

In terms of overall esthetics, I really don’t mind this set.  There are at least three sets I can think of that will be part of this series that I think are significantly less visually appealing than 1977-78.  What does it in is that weak rookie class and lack of really significant other cards.  As an introductory set for the 1970s, it’s relatively inexpensive and a good way to pick up a card of basically every significant 70s star.

Here's something you don't see every day....

One of my favourite things in the card collecting universe is the seller who significantly discounts an otherwise NM card because it’s off-centre.  I like this because, as I’ve said before, off-centre is the normal state of being for someone who collects OPC.

Perfectly-centred OPC cards look somewhat odd, even artificial.  Sheet cuts and forged cards are always well-centered.  That’s why they’re so readily recognizable.

This card has a recognizable border, front and back (front moreso than back), and given the price, that’s more than enough for me.

OPC only ever produced one regular Koufax card.  The first set in 1965 didn’t include the series that Koufax was in (though the leader cards are there and some of those include him).  For 1967, there was no regular Topps card and OPC didn’t even include the leader cards.  This means that the ’66 is it, and ’66 isn’t that easy a set to find.

When I was first thinking it would be interesting to pick up a vintage player from the pre-OPC era, it was between Jackie Robinson and Koufax.  When I settled on the Robinson, I then decided that the Koufax I really wanted was this one.  It took a long time, but it’s here and in the binder.

John doesn't look anywhere near as dangerous in this card as he'd seem on the ice. You didn't mess with John Ferguson. Not more than once, anyway.

When I last looked at it, the 1963-64 Parkhurst set was down to five cards that were missing (and a pair that needed upgrading).  An opportune pickup has dropped the number of missing cards down to two.  It could have actually been just a single, but the other Ferguson RC had a big print line down the centre that I’ll wait and see whether I can avoid.

The first card here is the close-up RC of legendary Habs tough guy John Ferguson.  In order to fill out a 99-card set based on only three teams, every* player for Montreal and Toronto got both a head shot and a full-body shot.  Detroit players only had the head shots.  This means that any star or RC from Montreal or Toronto has to be acquired twice, once in each format.  Fun.

(*There is an asterisk after “every” because there always has to be an exception.  For whatever reason, Leaf Dave Keon only has the full body picture.  His place in the head shots is taken by John MacMillan, who correspondingly has no full body shot.  Leafs assistant GM King Clancy is also lacking a full-body pose.)

I talked about John Ferguson before.  John was the baddest guy around, yet had the skill set to play on the same line as Jean Beliveau.  That represents quite the package.

The other two cards that arrived with the Ferguson were the body pose of Terry Harper (also an RC) and the head shot of long-time defensive forward Claude Provost.  Terry has a ding in the centre of the top border that looks factory to me.  Claude is in good shape.

Terry Harper also had a write up already as part of the Tall Boys series.  The Habs must have decided at one point that they needed a serious upgrade in toughness because in fairly short order they added John Ferguson up front and Harper and Ted Harris on the blue line.  They weren’t the Big, Bad Bruins out there, but I don’t think anyone was taking liberties with their star players in the back half of the 1960s.

Claude Provost was one of the unsung heroes of those teams – the checker and penalty killer who did a lot of the spadework and permitted the stars on those teams to shine.  That said, he did manage to put a fair number of points on the board while staring down Bobby Hull, Frank Mahovlich or whatever other great left-wingers he faced.

He played his whole career – 1955-56 through 1969-70 – with Montreal and hit a high of 33 goals in 1961-62.  A 27-goal, 64-point performance even got him named to the 1965 NHL All-Star team at right wing, ahead of a person by the name of Gordie Howe.  He was awarded the inaugural Bill Masterton Trophy in 1968.

Claude died of a heart attack in 1984 at the age of just 49.

With these three down, all that remains is #27 – Jacques Laperriere (head) RC and #92 – John Ferguson (body) RC.  Numbers 30 (Beliveau head) and 58 (Stasiuk head) need upgrading.  This set might happen yet….

Knucksie making life difficult. Note this picture is from a home game for NY and the record was set in Toronto.

On Oct. 6, 1985, I went to my first big-league game (I’d seen a number of minor league games in Calgary).  My best friend had gotten tickets and his dad was going to bring us down to Exhibition Stadium to see the Blue Jays take on the New York Yankees.

The day was chilly – only a handful of degrees above freezing.  Jacket weather for sure.  I had a new Jays cap I was wearing and my friend had – of all things – a tan ball cap emblazoned with a large logo promoting Ontario Pork.

We discussed how to stay warm and he pulled a bun from our lunch and stuck it on his nose, quipping (in his best Jays announcer voice)  “Now there’s a young man with an Ontario Pork hat and a bun on his nose.  Hmm.  Must be a Yankee fan.”

The Jays had clinched the AL East the day before, so almost all the regulars sat this one out.  The roster we saw looked a lot more like the Syracuse Chiefs than the Blue Jays.  The outfield had Lou Thornton in right, Rick Leach in left and Ron Shepherd in centre.  A kid named Cecil Fielder was at first.  44,422 fans watched a young John Cerutti making his second or third career start.

On the mound for the Yankees was Phil Niekro.

Our seats were a handful of rows back near third base.  “You’ve got to keep your head up here,” my friend’s dad said, “a foul ball can come in really hard.”  Almost on cue, Don Mattingly crushed one that hissed right over our heads and crashed into the seats about 5 rows back.  I’d never heard a sound like that.  I had a glove, but decided I probably wouldn’t use it except in self-defense.

Cerutti got knocked around by the Yankees and Niekro was at his best.  The knuckleball was dancing and the Jays/Chiefs weren’t doing much with it.  The most memorable Toronto hit of the afternoon was a Jeff Burroughs single for which he seemed to run to first without lifting either foot off the ground.  He stood on first, chuckling as a cloud of dust settled around him.  “The high-powered shuffle,” we dubbed it.

The bullpens at the Ex were along the foul lines and at one point Ernie Whitt went out to warm up a pitcher (likely Jim Acker).  My friend called something out and Whitt looked at us like we had two heads.  We blamed the Ontario Pork hat.

Cerutti only lasted four innings, pitching three scoreless after giving up three runs in the first.  The Yanks got to Jim Acker for a pair in the 5th, and when Bill Caudill gave up two in the eighth to put New York up 7-0, my friend’s dad decided it was time to beat the traffic out.

We heard the last of the game on the radio – New York got one more and Knucksie pitched the 9th, recording his 300th win and a shutout to boot.

And we were there – for most of it, anyway.

OPC didn’t have the record-breakers in their 1986 set and it was a couple of years before I saw this Topps card.  I think it’s the only card I have from any sport that references something I actually saw in person.  The fact it was my first big league game makes it all the better.

and for old times’ sake: