C.A.: 1978 Topps Manny Mota

(Happy National Bird Day! On this day, I think someone like me should have the day off. And I do! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 347th in a series):

 

 

The 1978 Topps Manny Mota wasn't the first Mota card I ever saw -- that would be the '71 Topps Mota that I spotted in the street -- but the '78 was pretty prominent during my younger collecting days.

That Mota card was one of the double-prints in the 1978 set. Topps graduated to 726 cards in '78 and that caused some of them to be printed more often (I don't know the printing math behind this but every year that Topps totaled 726 cards -- 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981 -- some of the cards were double-printed).

So since I was pursuing Dodgers, the Mota was easy to find. So were the Mike Garman, Steve Yeager and Tom Lasorda cards -- all double-prints. But Mota showed up most (though not quite as much as Jose Baez and Barry Bonnell).

Multiple versions of the same card was still a novelty for someone who couldn't afford many packs. So '78 Mota stood out. Many years later, three months into starting a blog, I obtained the 1978 Zest set -- just five cards -- from then-blogger JayBee. One of those terrific cards was Manny Mota and it looked just like the '78 Topps Mota.

 

 You need to turn it over to the back to notice any difference.

 

The '78 Zest set features Spanish and each of the players in the set are Latin-American. Heck I was just stunned that the card number was different.

So that was another '78 Mota that looked like the other ones.

 

Around seven years later I acquired my first autographed Mota card -- on the 1978 Topps design, naturally. Manny Mota has always had a grand signature and I liked how it angled across the card.

 

A few years later, I received another autographed '78 Mota card, this time in black ink. I thought owning a second signed card on the same card was a little silly. But I gradually grew proud of the fact that there were two signed '78 Motas in my collection, each with a different color ink.

So, a little more than a month ago I was searching ebay for some card that I don't remember. I spotted something completely unrelated but I couldn't turn away.

 

It was a signed 1978 Manny Mota with green ink! I wasted little time in purchasing it and now I have three of the same card signed very similarly but in different colors.

 

That is wonderful fun and I'm enormously pleased about this. But I automatically knew that I needed the card autographed in red to complete the project.

I've been searching ebay ever since but have come up empty so far. It's not that there aren't any signed cards of Mota in red ink because there are:

It's just that none are the right card (and some the wrong team).

So the search continues. I just know there is a red-signed 1978 Topps Manny Mota, signed in the same spot and a similar angle.

And only red will do -- not silver or purple or any other color. I thought about why that is and it might be because of this:

 

The four-color Bic pen was everywhere in the '70s (maybe it still is, I don't know, the obsession is long gone). I really wanted the pen because it had four colors of ink -- blue, black, red and green!

I remember finally getting it and searching for any instance where I could use the green ink, there weren't a lot of them. Fussy teachers never wanted you to write in green ink.

But now, thanks to a card signed in green, I can pursue a collection goal that I didn't even know existed two months ago -- get four 1978 Topps Manny Mota cards each signed in the four colors of ink in the original Bic 4-color pen!

Is this hobby great or what?