The other day I was putting my card house in order, and started to organize the 1976 SSPC cards I'd acquired to date. I'd been a little confused about the backs of some of them - how they were in "landscape mode" - but then my organization
really took a turn when I realized I had two different #8 cards - one with Frank Robinson as the Angels' player/manager (and with his 1974 stats on the back), and another of the Cleveland Indians' Larvelle Blanks, which references his 1975 season in "portrait mode" on the back - as do the majority of the SSPC cards I have.
So I reckoned as one does that something was up here. I went to my two most reliable blog sources for classic card-collecting what-not, The Shlabotnick Report and Night Owl Cards, and their respective archives both helped a little if not explicitly. It was the Trading Card Database that gave me the good word on these things. These are the "1975 SSPC 42" - a 42-card set, mostly of then-stars and quite a few future hall of famers. It's one of several smaller sets that SSPC put out with a large color photograph of the player on the front, and given the general uncertainty about the date origin of the much-larger 630-card 1976 SSPC set - the one we most commonly refer to as "the SSPCs" - I'd just figured that the cards I had from the 42-card '75 set and those I had from the larger set were one and the same. Now I know better.
Here's what the back of a 1975 SSPC 42 looks like. This is Tommy Davis' card - #7 in the 42-card set. The fact that they used the players' god-given full names is maddening, so you have to think a little bit about who "Herman Thomas Davis Jr." might actually be. Oh - right - Tommy Davis. I know him. Here's the back of Carl Yastrzemski's card:
The good thing, I guess, is that collecting a full set of 42 cards is going to be quite a bit easier than grabbing the 630 I need to complete the 1976 SSPC set. I'm up for the task, wallet permitting. Here are the fronts of the other four I have so far, besides Tommy Davis.
