The other day I was finally able to visit my ever more wonderful Hometown Local Card Shop. I truly hope you have one of those, in your Hometown.
The visit was on my way out of Hometown, heading back to where I work in the winters lately, 150 miles to the south. It had been an unfortunate visit in that just after I arrived I had begun to notice a fresh nasal drip in the back of my throat, which quickly escalated to yet another annoying round of respiratory illness. 2026 has not been kind to me on the Health front, that's for sure.
A definite casualty of the unpleasantness was some Baseball Carding time, in general, and in particular, no energy to run the scanner to create 600dpi res images to share with you, something I always look forward to. My previous post, featuring another round of $1-ish cards, was written with scans made over the recent holidays.
Fortunately the return trip had no time constraints so I could still squeeze in a visit to the LCS, something I only settled on upon concluding that my makes-no-sense (given that I had coughed through a round of Covid in the middle of January) coughing & sneezing was traceable to a new cat in the house where my Baseball Cards live, rather than a communicable disease.
I mostly stopped at the LCS to get the most important piece of information for me, this time of year: what day is 2026 Baseball Card Day? Although I think there is an official Baseball Card Day on some astutely chosen Summer day during the actual season of playing Baseball, I consider Baseball Card Day to be the big day in February of late, when Series One of the Topps Baseball set is released. That turns out to be next Wednesday, February 11th. If you aren't looking forward to that day, you are reading the wrong web page.
Although I had plans to sit down and wonderfully palm through a $1 box, or the 50¢ box, over a fresh cup of Java from the Coffee Shop next door, that establishment proved to be closed for a winter vacation. This threw me off my game-plan completely and I found myself contentedly chatting up the Baseball Card news with the only employee around, while gazing through all the display cases for the always predominant "Buy Singles" faction of collectors, full of cards I would never actually buy anyway.
Until, that is, I reached the end of those cases where a new shelving unit was sitting, full of a wide variety of "Junk Wax" products - mostly factory sets from the 80s to the 00s. And, an assortment of opened boxes with loose packs for sale. Including, these:
Much like I will have to do next Wednesday night, I can only post up images of my happiest day of Baseball Carding so far this year, via cell-phone camera. Sorry, not sorry.
I knew instantly what was held inside these Swell packs; I have had a "Baseball Greats" set on my eBay watch list for quite some time now, after pulling an Al Kaline Baseball Greats card from a repack box some years ago already.
But I have long had a not sneaking, but definite suspicion that I would never pull the trigger on purchasing such a set. Probably mostly because I just don't like the idea of paying > $10 shipping to receive Baseball Cards. Even though COMC shipping charges are becoming infamous at this point, I pay those with Free Money obtained by stupidly paying the gambling tax on packs of brand new Baseball Cards, just as I will be doing next Wednesday, and have been doing whenever a run for groceries turns up a blaster of Archives on the shelves, which is surprisingly not as common as you would think. People are just loving them Baseball Cards lately, seems to me. The not free-at-all money is partially returned to me when I finally get around to sending a 10 year old Manny Machado card out to COMC and someone gives me $1 for it, which I can never understand, but does make shipping not-Machado cards back from COMC become "Free," kinda-sorta, not really.
I also don't care for receiving Baseball Cards in shipped boxes, as even in small towns, boxes on porches attract Porch Pirates, and the thought of someone stealing my usually-worthless-but-still-surprisingly-hard-to-find Baseball Cards is of course totally horrifying. Whereas a single worthless Baseball Card in a regular letter envelope would never be stolen out of an actual mail box, because that is a Federal Crime and those seem to have pretty serious repercussions, as it appears on the News lately.
So the cool looking plastic box of 140 or so Baseball Greats routinely cycles to the top of my eBay fantasies and then fades away again, a conundrum never to be solved, I thought. I suppose a set of Baseball Greats could appear on a card dealer's table at one of those seemingly mythical Baseball Card "Shows" I have heard of, but are never able to attend, since they don't hold those out in the Backwoods, where I usually am.
The one thing I had never contemplated about this unfortunate yin-yang want-don't-want-enough push-pull was how a set of Baseball Greats had ever been delivered to Baseball Card fans, back in the day, when they were brand new. For all I knew, they were put directly into the plastic snap boxes as seen on my eBay watchings, and then handed out to collectors, fully assembled, much like the numerous such small 80s sets sold, complete, in a single small cardboard box, with names like the Kmart MVP Collection or Baseball's Exciting Stars, aka basic "Boxed Sets." That was my thinking, until the other day anyway, when I so unexpectedly found myself looking not at just that pleasing red waxed wrapper now already scrolled back off your screen, but instead, this glorious sight -
A Complete Unopened Box of Baseball Greats!
The cards not only arrive in soothing little wax packages, unbeknownst to me, but I suddenly had an opportunity to own a whopping 36 packs of these treats.
This delightful treasure was mine for the simple price of $25 + Zero Shipping.
Here's a closer look at some box details:
OK, ok, time to get this show on the road. Let's rip a pack!
OK, a bit of an oopsie there in that I thought the MLB Logoman would appear in that picture, a Logoman telling me the product was OFFICIAL LICENSEE / MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, continuing beneath with more probably required legalese "PLAYERS' NAMES AND LIKENESSES LICENSED BY MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PROPERTIES" — all information I already knew from seeing Swell Baseball Greats cards occasionally, on-screen, but still quite re-assuring in that I really do prefer to see the team iconography on fully licensed cards, which is strangely never mentioned in all that legalese that just seems to always grow larger, decade by decade, in the universe of Baseball Cards.
We have a Winn-Ahh!
(best heard from the famous Comet Pinball machine)
Well it certainly appears certain that no one has searched this box, I must conclude. That's pretty Great. And it is just durn hard to beat opening a pack of Baseball Cards to discover Hank Aaron, right off the bat, no matter what year, product, manufacturer, whatever. I just got a Hank Aaron Baseball Card I didn't have before the other day, and that's freakin' cool. But we all know the card on the bottom of the pack isn't the First Card to be remembered forever and everer, or so we always hope. Let's flip the little stack of 10 cards over:
Now this, I did expect, and was something I was quite looking forward to:
Sweet. A Powder Blue Baseball Card with a matching blue sky. And you wondered where they got the inspiration for these classic unis, way back there in the days of Baseball Greats known as - the 1970s?
I will be honest here. I love the 1970s, very much. I just didn't expect they would be included amongst the Baseball Greats. And, even if they were, I expected I would know the names of every Baseball Great included in my pack of 10 Baseball Greats.
But I was completely unfamiliar with who Deron Johnson was. This likely traces to his exclusion from a key Topps set in my Baseball Card life - 1975 - my very first ever seen set of Topps Baseball Cards, from which I also pulled a Hank Aaron card from a waxed package. With that set, I probably knew the players I didn't have a little better than the ones I did, as they had an annoying empty square next to their name on the checklist card. He did appear one final time in Topps Baseball, in 1976, but I actually peaked a little early back there in 1975 and struggled to assemble anywhere near as many 76s as 75s and was unfamiliar with his 76er.
I am in no way unhappy about this, finding a true Baseball Great (1765 Games Played) with whom I was unfamiliar, just a touch surprised at this first checklist entry I finally managed to find. I did learn quite a lot about Deron Johnson from the back of the card -
"LIFETIME STATISTICS"
Of course there is an instant fork in the road when the back of a Baseball Card is created for a retired player - a table of complete stats with one line per season, or the single career line as seen here. Overall I quite like this approach of trading in the year-by-year stats for a nice pair of paragraphs summarizing the career; quite well done.
I was a bit more chagrined that I did not know that Deron Johnson was a key cog in the legendary Swingin' A's, a team I quite admired mostly from those fabulous 1975 Topps World Series cards, but I was only 6 years old in 1973 and not yet cognizant of concepts such as "Baseball" and "World Series," yet.
Overall, a pretty perfect First Card of a Philadelphia Phillie in a set from Philadelphia, PA, kinda-sorta, as denoted by the appearance of PHILA. CHEWING GUM CORP. there on the back of the card....
.... which just created oodles more mystery in my mind however, something that was also part of the strange allure of Swell's Baseball Greats cards, before I finally found them to purchase. I well knew that Swell was a brand of bubble gum; if I saw a tub of it on a gas station counter today, like I routinely did as a child, I would buy a piece occasionally still today. I love bubble gum.
But whenever I had seen a Baseball Greats card, I always wondered how Swell managed to make both bubble gum, and Baseball Cards? I mean, I did know from even way before I ever saw a Swell Baseball Greats card that it couldn't possibly have arrived with any actual bubble gum, a concept that the Topps Chewing Gum Corp. had on 100% legal lock-down. Every Baseball Card collector surely knows that backwards & forwards, amirite?
Yet here we have a whole other Chewing Gum Corp. making Baseball Cards — and it's in (kinda-sorta) Philadelphia, PA???
That's where Fleer Corporation was from, too. I will never forget stumbling across this sight while visiting Philadelphia in 2016:
Oh, what a tangled web was woven, there in Philly. I'll suggest a setting of the wayback machine to 2014 and a visit to the Topps Archives blog (yes, you read the name correctly), for bit of history of the OG Chewing Gum Corporation and probably not at all coincidentally, the creators of the first set of "Baseball Greats" which was not the PHILA. CHEWING GUM CORP., even though that 1960 set of Baseball Greats was actually created in Philadelphia, which is not where the PHILA. CHEWING GUM CORP. actually was, being perhaps just across a City Limits line over in Haverton, PA.
Confused yet? I was. Another good look at the history of chewing gum and specifically Fleer Corp.'s role in that can be found at a Philly history website called Hidden City, which however also doesn't mention these Swell cats going all copy-cat on many things happening in Fleer land over the decades. Perhaps somewhere out there a wonderful blogger has written up a Swell history of PHILA. CHEWING GUM CORP., but I am getting itchy to see more Baseball Cards...
Hey, look — it's Mr. Mint!
(err, no, it's not that Al Rosen)
I did kinda vaguely already know that, but I confess I had to discount double check, just in case. I would have to imagine Al Rosen Baseball Cards were a particular favorite of the first ever famous Baseball Card dealer, but that's a rabbit hole I will never care to visit.
And I was proud to know that Al Rosen was a 1940s & 50s player, which was something I was more expecting from my nascent Baseball Greats collection. Big bonus points for you, dear Reader, if you can confirm the backdrop of this card, something I am very slowly beginning to think I understand, not being a proud owner of very many 1950s Baseball Cards, until perhaps, now, kinda-sorta.
The surprises just kept right on rolling on the 3rd card in the pack, too -
Confusion...is next.
Why confusing? Because in my mind, Fritz Peterson = mustachio'd. Because, 1975 Topps. But there, he is a Cleveland Indian, not a clean-shaven Yankee. And his 1976 Topps Baseball Card, well now there's one heapin' helpin' of straight-up confusion. But you'll have to 'clect that one on your own, I always get too quickly exhausted by all those 1973 style player silhouettes on 1976 Topps and I can never focus on them very well, so I mostly opted out of 2025 Heritage in favor of saving up for 2027 Heritage and thus lost my chance to get a 50th Anniversary stamped copy of that '76 Fritz Peterson, sigh. That card is truly a sight to behold.
Anyhow, it was cool to see Yankee Stadium still being the OG Baseball Card backdrop once again. Seems fitting for a Baseball Great. Batter up!
POW!
Powder Blue batting gloves, too.
Close enough for me.
The 1970s truly were Great.
Watching Baseball from a 3rd deck, though, perhaps not so much. Anyhow, a player I was vaguely familiar with, from cards, though one admittedly not on my Greats list.
Now this is what I was anticipating quite a bit more of, when I purchased this wonderful box of cards. Black & White photo, 30s to 50s player, name probably instantly known to fans of the time, but not to me, too many decades later. Quite Great.
100% what I expected to see in this set. I hope all 5 inaugural Hall of Famers are included; I sometimes wonder how many sets of Baseball Cards have ever achieved that feat. Probably several, but also probably many more were never able to do it as rights contracts expire, heirs change decisions, etc., yadda, etc.
Yet more as drawn up during the years of pre-game, imagining Swell Baseball Cards. A slight bend in the usual paradigm here is an early 1950s career, but a full color photograph including a bit of backdrop, something not seen on cards until 1957 I believe. My guess is this photo could be from a classic Yankees "Old Timer" game; hard tellin' for sure.
Powder Blue Hot Pack?
Larry Sorensen played until 1988, says one part of the card back, while another bit suggests he retired in 1987. Not the Greatest moment for Swell Card Back Writer. Fantastic Powder Blue flashback, surely. But I'm starting to get creepy 21st century Topps vibes with the mix of journeymen and Inner Circlers, though Topps does that with 11 game Rookies, not 11 year veterans like Sorensen. I will definitely be bindering up this set in order of date of player retirement, not card #, that I can tell you. It's the only way I can handle Hall of Famers mixing with commons.
All Aboard!
We're heading back to Cooperstown.
More, please...
What a treat.
Never did I ever expect to find a Hank Aaron Baseball Card that I could add to my Willie Stargell collection.
Wait, wot?
Yes I enjoy collecting cards that show a player wearing a batting helmet over his regular ball cap, something I associate with Willie Stargell more than any other player. I am certain that as pages of such images reach my collection, I will be able to place a Willie Stargell card on every such page, quite easily. And now, Willie and Hank will be hangin' out together, foreverer and evers, right on my coffee table.
Well that was quite a journey through Baseball History, for the low low price of just about 70¢, kinda-sorta. I am quite looking forward to exploring this set just one pack at a time; I figure it will go particularly well with an upcoming subscription to the paid streaming service I plan to buy with a brand new Color Television as I move on up to that deluxe life in the sky, rather than on the road all the time. A streaming deal I have my eye on is the various documentary series from Ken Burns, certainly beginning with his look at our beloved Game of Baseball; these cards will be just one nifty accoutrement I will be enjoying right alongside that.
I only mostly expect I will easily complete this set however, as my first few days of pure Baseball Card bliss with these have now given way to the sad news that packs 5, 6, and 7 were card-for-card repeats of packs 1, 3, and 4 that I have pulled from this box. Yes, all ten cards the same, in 2 separate packs. Not the way any Baseball Card collector would draw it up in their mind, ahead of time, at all.
Perhaps that explains the availability of this particular box of treasures, 36-ish years later. If I purchased 2 packs of Baseball Cards as a child and the packs were complete duplicates of each other, I would have sworn off using the word Swell for the rest of my life for such a low down dirty crime. But for just 70¢ a pop, I think I can afford to be gracious here. I'll let you know how it turns out, some day. If you might perhaps need a card or 59 from 1990 Swell Baseball Greats, well, I'm your huckleberry.
