Most undervalued HOFers

[Balticfox]

Originally Posted by jchcollins

Yep. I go back and forth on head shots. Certainly when more action oriented stuff came about in the early 70's, that was a departure and I'm sure was preferable to many. I do like if posed, at least more of a profile or bat included shot - the '58 Clemente is a good example of this.

But I don't hate head shots / Topps profiles. In some cases it was cool to get a glimpse of the player close up.

Speaking of head shots, the most appalling display of these occurred in the 1964-65 Topps Hockey which was the first sport card set to come out as "tall boys". They weren't actually very popular with kids in the schoolyard despite being the first Hockey set in a decade to include all six NHL teams. First of all, the first series was priced at a dime a pack (at least in the neighbourhood variety stores in my corner of London, Ontario). Moreover the cards were too long to easily fit in a kid's pockets.

But the tall boy format of these cards lent itself splendidly to the proportions of the human body and this was in full evidence in the first series:



Of the 53 non-Checklist first series cards, only eight were less than fantastic full body shots and four of these were coaches anyway. But an atrocious 43 out of 55 cards from the second series featured truly wretched head shots:



Because the first series didn't sell very well, O-Pee-Chee's production run for the second series was comparatively small. As a result, second series cards are a lot tougher to find these days than those from the first series. Moreover quite a few cards were shortprinted on the second series sheet. While I still need six of the shortprints from the second series to complete my set, I'm disinclined to pay the price those ugly head shots command these days. I'd rather spend my money on better looking cards.