Extra bases ...

I chose that blog title because whenever I read a baseball notes column in a newspaper, they often throw some short, one-sentence items at the end with a catch-all title like "extra bases" or "foul tips" or something. That's what this is post is: a bunch of foul tips.

First, I displayed a bunch of 1972 Topps because I just found out last night that there is a new 1972 Topps Blog up and running! It's operated by MMayes, who was a frequent commenter on the now-defunct 1988 Topps and 1978 Topps blogs. As sad as I was to hear that Andy wasn't continuing the '78 Topps blog, I'm glad someone has decided to take up another card-by-card blog challenge. MMayes says he doesn't have Andy's statistical background (who does?), but he's going to try to make each card as interesting as possible. Check it out.

Speaking of '72 Topps, here is a card from that set of Game 4 of the 1971 World Series, which I mentioned in this post as being the first night World Series game. I thought this card was definitely a night card (and definitely shows some runner's posterior rather prominently), but it's possible it's not.

While Cardboard Junkie and Wrigley Wax were both kind enough to find night cards that were even older than the '72 Stan Williams card I displayed, I thought there was a little bit better chance that this Clemente card was the first live-action night card. But Wrigley Wax says the background of the Clemente card looks more like Baltimore's old Memorial Stadium than Three Rivers Stadium (where the first night game was played). I don't know enough about early '70s baseball to determine whether the Pirates' uniforms are road or away unis (and I'm too busy to look it up right now!).

So the search for the first live-action night card continues (maybe the '73 set).

Along those night card lines, I also enjoyed dayf's post on the '53 cards last night enough to dig up the old Baseball Cards Magazine from August of 1984. It had a couple of feature articles on the 1953 set.

The article I was especially interested in was the one in which they talked to the artist who painted a lot of the portraits for those 1953 Topps cards. His name is Gerry Dvorak. You can see on the first page of the story ...

... the night card of Dick Brodowski, which dayf featured in his post. The night background on the card isn't necessarily from the photo that Dvorak worked from (Topps would give Dvorak 8x10 black-and-white photos, which he would use to paint his portrait). Dvorak said he would do his own backgrounds for the portraits and implied that they didn't come from the 8x10s he was given. He said he did a couple of night game backgrounds, but he didn't mention specific players.

Another thing I found interesting from the article is that with a couple of portraits, Dvorak just inserted a plain background to save some time. Topps saw those backgrounds and told him he couldn't do that anymore.

One of the plain background cards was Bobby Morgan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. This is an archive card, not the real '53. But I think it's neat that Morgan is one of the few '53 cards with a plain background (although I agree with Topps, the backgrounds are better when they feature a field or sky or something).

Finally, something completely unrelated. I am echoing a question that Dan of Saints of the Cheap Seats asked on his blog earlier today. I am also struggling with Blogger in my bid to have my blog link to the correct new address of Boxbusters. It is now: http://boxbusters.net/, but Blogger refuses to point to that in the blog links list. Instead it points to the old address. I ended up putting Boxbusters in the "After Hours Haunts" section of my sidebar (don't ask me why it links correctly there but not in the blog list), which is where it will stay unless I figure out a way to get it back in the blog links. Any ideas?