I said I'd be supplying updates on my progress working toward a "100 Greatest Cards of the 1980s" countdown, so this is one of those.
I've reached 1985 in my search for the greatest cards. That's about halfway, although really it's not, since the latter half of the decade is when the amount of cards exploded and why this countdown will be so much more difficult than the 1970s Greatest Cards one that I did a couple of years ago.
I dutifully marked down the cards that were candidates for the countdown, but as usual, I came across other things that I found notable.
Specifically donuts.
What the heck happened to baseball donuts?
Now before you accuse this of being another "everything was better before" post, please know that I don't really care whether baseball donuts exist or not. With the exception of night cards, I don't have idiosyncratic collections like "baseball donuts on cards." So it doesn't matter to me much.
But they certainly are charming.
The baseball donut was a component of the game that was always there when you flipped on the TV to a game. A broadcast would show a player warming up in the on-deck circle and then they'd do the same thing every time: as the batter walked toward the plate, he'd remove the donut from the bat, swinging the bat one way and flipping the donut the other way to the ground.
There is no shortage of batting donuts on 1985 baseball cards.
Heck, there's no shortage in the mid-1980s, period.
I assumed that the closer we move toward the present the fewer examples of batting donuts I would see on cards. There are more action cards now and that's been the case for the last two decades. Nobody is swinging a bat with a donut between the lines.
But I haven't done much research on this so I can't come to any conclusions.
I found two donut cards in 1991 Topps.
And one in 1991 Topps Traded.
But 1975 Topps features just two bat donut cards and that is a far less action-oriented set than 1991 Topps.
In fact, 1976 Topps doesn't have a single bat donut card!
So, obviously, this is something I'm going to have to explore much more obsessively. Expect to see the usual exhaustive rundown at some point.
Just a couple other things before I go.
The batting donut was devised by Elston Howard, former Yankees great, during the 1950s.
It remained a popular way to "speed up" a batter's swing for decades and decades. Batting donuts come in all kinds of forms. My favorite -- the ones that resemble a half dozen from Krispy Kreme -- are the most fun to spot on cards. But there are those "sleeve" weights that have been around for a long time and fall under the "batting donut" label. Also, there are those tiny donut things that batters use during batting practice.
Batting donuts have fallen out of favor in recent years since a study was released about nine years ago that found that using weighted bats actually decreases bat speed rather than enhances it.
This may be another reason why you don't see batting donuts on cards as much anymore.
That will not stop me from researching this.
I will be researching this, too.
I was watching a baseball game from the 1980s about a week ago. The number of players choking up on the bat was astounding. Rusty Staub, a slugger, choking up on the bat.
That was reflected when I was looking through those 1985 cards, too.
All right, all this research talk is making me hungry. Where's that donut?
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