A Box of 833 Steve Carlton Cards

 

833 more Steve Carlton cards! Woo-hoo!

Carlton's 1983 O-Pee-Chee card, and his 1984 O-Pee-Chee All-Star card, or "Etoile" card.

Lots of French on the back of Steve's 1984 O-Pee-Chee card. Steve is a wine collector, or an "oenophilie." This has to be the only baseball card that mentions wine collecting on the back.

A while ago, I bought a lot of 833 Steve Carlton baseball cards from eBay. I know, more Steve Carlton cards? But these were too cheap to pass up. All of the cards were from the 1980’s, and there were some fun oddities included, like some O-Pee-Chee cards. O-Pee-Chee was a Canadian candy company that had an arrangement with Topps to sell Topps baseball cards in Canada under the O-Pee-Chee name. O-Pee-Chee cards can usually be distinguished from Topps by the thinner, cheaper cardboard they were printed on, and the lighter backs of the cards. Also, from 1970 onwards, O-Pee-Chee cards had text in French! It’s thanks to O-Pee-Chee that I know a pitcher is a “lanceur,” and an outfielder is a “voltigeur.” I hardly ever remember buying packs of O-Pee-Chee during my childhood, or even seeing them for sale, but somehow I’ve ended up with some random O-Pee-Chee cards here and there. I also bought the complete set of 1987 O-Pee-Chee, because the 1987 Topps set is the most beautiful set of cards in the history of baseball cards.

Two extremely similar pictures on Carlton's 1985 Topps Collectors' Series and 1985 Drake's Super Pitchers cards. If I were a batter, I wouldn't feel too confident seeing this picture, since it probably means there's a slider coming at me.

The back of Carlton's 1985 Drake's card. Much easier to read than the awful green of the 1985 Topps cards.

There were some other fun 1980’s oddities, like Carlton’s 1985 Drake’s Super Pitchers card, which was included with Drake’s snack cakes. According to Wikipedia, Drake’s is largely distributed in the Northeast, which explains why I’ve only heard of them because of these baseball cards. Drake’s had some kind of licensing deal with Topps, as their cards used the same backs as Topps did. But the front of the Drake’s cards had different photos from Topps cards, making them a desirable oddity, at least in my eyes. Drake’s cards featured “Big Hitters,” and in 1985 they expanded it to also included some “Super Pitchers,” like Steve Carlton. The 1985 Drake’s cards also featured a red back, rather than the awful green back found on 1985 Topps cards, which made them extremely hard to read.

Cards number 1 and 10 in Star's 14-card Steve Carlton set, from 1987.

The back of card 10, showing Steve's amazing 135-55 record at the Vet in Philly.

There were also two cards from the 14-card Steve Carlton set issued by Star in 1987. Star issued sets of well, star players throughout the 1980’s. I don’t know how these were distributed, if you bought packs that had different players in them, or if you bought sets of the same player, or what. Star had also issued a 24-card Steve Carlton set in 1984. On the back of Carlton card number 10 from the 1987 set, you can see Carlton’s amazing dominance at Veterans Stadium: he was 135-55 at the Vet, for a winning percentage of .711. Wow. The 1987 Star set also features a rare card: Steve Carlton giving a press conference after he signed with the San Francisco Giants in 1986.

Steve Carlton's last card as an active player, his 1988 Fleer card, which is also the only card that shows him with the Minnesota Twins. Steve doesn't look too thrilled with the photographer.

The back of Carlton's 1988 Fleer card. When you pitch for so long that they run out of room on the back of your baseball card.

In this lot there were 121 cards of Carlton’s 1987 Topps card, and 50 of Carlton’s 1988 Fleer card, which was his last card as an active player, and the only card that pictured him with the Minnesota Twins. Even today, in 2021, there’s never been a card commemorating Carlton’s time with the World Champion 1987 Minnesota Twins. Which is kind of surprising, since Topps clearly has no shortage of random cards of retired players. So, Topps, get on that already! Yes, I know, Carlton was out of gas by the time he joined the Twins, and he only won one game for the team, but it was still a World Series-winning team, even if Carlton was left off the postseason roster. At the very least, we need a card commemorating the Twins’ visit to the White House after the World Series, where Carlton was listed in photo captions as an “unidentified Secret Service agent.”

It was a lot of fun to sort through these cards and find the fun oddities contained therein, as I continue my look into the baseball cards of Steve Carlton.

Steve Carlton: 30 Cards

 

The 30 Steve Carlton cards I recently bought on eBay.

Like many kids who grew up in the 1980’s, I collected baseball cards. My collection was haphazard, as I bought new packs regularly, but one of my favorite activities was scouring the commons boxes at Shinder’s. The commons cards dated back to the 1960’s and 1970’s, so it was through Shinder’s that I learned about many obscure baseball players from those decades. My reasons for buying a specific card could be varied: it might be a player I’d heard of, or it might just be because he was wearing a cool uniform.

My favorite baseball player is Steve Carlton, so I’m always on the lookout for his cards. I have all the major brand Steve Carlton cards that were issued during his career—I hesitate to say I have ALL his baseball cards, because it seems like there’s always some kind of rarity out there. Suffice it to say, I have a lot of Steve Carlton cards. But I’m always on the lookout to see if I could upgrade the cards in my collection, or to see if there’s something I’ve missed. So that’s why I recently bought 30 Steve Carlton cards from eBay.

There was nothing rare or valuable in this lot, and I already have all 30 of these cards—you can see a picture of the cards at the top of this post—but my main reason for buying them was because of the very nice condition 1972 Topps cards. The cards were a real mixture, with a bunch from the 1970’s and 1980’s, and a couple of Topps cards from 2015. The highlights for me were the 1972 cards—Carlton’s base card, featuring him with the Cardinals, and the scarcer 1972 traded card, where he appears in a Phillies uniform for the first time. Carlton was having a salary dispute with the Cardinals—sources differ on how much money the dispute was over, but the highest figure I’ve heard is $10,000—and so they traded him to the Phillies for pitcher Rick Wise. Not a wise move, if you’ll pardon the pun. Carlton went on to win the pitching Triple Crown for the last-place Phillies, winning a career-high 27 games.

Some other highlights of the 30 cards were a very nice 1974 and 1975 Topps, and two of the more obscure 1980’s Carlton cards: a 1984 Topps Nestle “Dream Team,” and a 1985 Topps Drake’s Super Pitchers. The Nestle and the Drake’s cards aren’t necessarily rare, but they’re the sort of obscurities that I never knew about in the 1980’s and 1990’s, so they’re kind of exciting to me for that reason. The 30 cards I got were worth the $18 I paid for them.

Steve Carlton: Box of 440 Baseball Cards

 

The box of 440 Steve Carlton cards I recently purchased.

Some of the highlights of the box: 1985 Topps Woolworth's All-Time Record Holders, 1986 Fleer Mini, 1987 Action SuperStars-featuring Carlton with the Giants, and 1986 Fleer Future Hall of Famers.

And a bunch of 1986 Topps cards, of course.

As you probably know from my previous posts, I collect Steve Carlton baseball cards. I’ve got just about every card that was issued during Carlton’s career, and many of the cards that have been issued since he retired from baseball in 1988. So, why do I keep buying more Steve Carlton cards? Well, that’s a good question. How much time do we have? Seriously, though: I do like upgrading my collection when I can, and it’s oddly satisfying to get more of something. Do I really need any more 1986 Topps Steve Carlton cards? Well, no, but it sure is fun to get more! Fortunately, this doesn’t carry over into other shopping habits in my life.

About a month ago, I bought 440 Steve Carlton cards for $50 on eBay. There was nothing truly rare or amazing in here, just more cards from the 1980’s. But they’re all in good shape, and I couldn’t pass them up for about 11 cents a card. And I did find some very cool things, like Carlton’s 1985 Topps Woolworth’s All-Time Record Holders card. That was a 44-card set that featured Hall of Famers like Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays, and Frank Robinson, along with more obscure players like Johnny Frederick, who set the record for most pinch-hit home runs in a season with 6 in 1932. There was also a 1986 Fleer mini, which features a different photo on the front than Carlton’s full-size 1986 Fleer card.

One of the highlights of this box of wonders from the 1980’s was that it included two cards of Carlton from the 1987 Action SuperStars set. It’s one of the few cards that shows Carlton with the San Francisco Giants. Carlton was with the Giants from July 4^th to August 7, 1986, after getting released by the Phillies. Carlton made six starts for the Giants during that month and won only one game. But it was with the Giants that Carlton got his 4,000^th strikeout. I had Carlton’s Action SuperStars card as a kid—no idea what card store I found it in—but in tracking down Carlton’s cards as an adult, it’s one of the hardest ones to find. I don’t think it’s an especially valuable card, but it’s rare to find it. The internet tells me that the Action SuperStars set was unlicensed, so maybe they got into trouble with MLB and had to pull them off the market. So, I was psyched to get two more Action SuperStars cards.

Other fun oddities were the 1985 Fleer Limited Edition, the 1984 Topps Ralston Purina, and the 1986 Fleer Future Hall of Famer. And of course, there were many of Carlton’s 1980’s base cards from Topps, Fleer, and Donruss. The only base card from those three manufacturers that wasn’t included was Carlton’s 1984 Donruss card, which speaks to the relative scarcity of 1984 Donruss cards. Carlton was on a lot of cards during the 1980’s—he was on 8 different 1984 Topps cards!

I feel like I got my money’s worth out of this box of Steve Carlton cards, so I was happy with it.