Quote:
Originally Posted by Merkle923
The explanation is that the 1969 Miller Topps Vault photo was taken, at the earliest, about March 1.
Miller's 1969 card, if I remember my dates correctly, was issued in the 3rd Series - which would have been released around April 20, 1969. The process of turning a brand new photo into a card in packages shipped across the nation used to take roughly three months.
The series Miller was in "closed" and was printed in January, 1969. Maybe early February. The first 1969 Spring Training photos to appear on 1969 cards were in the 5th Series (starting with card number 426), which hit stores around June 1.
Also, the Miller card photo doesn't show him with the Orioles. It's capless for a reason, as nearly all such shots were in that time - in case the guy got traded and they wanted to put out his card earlier than June 1. Among other things, you'll notice that his uniform has blue piping coming down from the neck and the Orioles never wore that. The image was taken at Mets' spring training 1966.
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Yes, I mentioned that #323 was a BHNH Mets picture from 1966. So Topps made the decision of whom they were going to use the older photos for (for Series 1-4) before the photographers even went to camp, huh? Interesting. I would have thought they would have excluded players who had changed teams from the earlier cards and used the camp photos to fill out Series 5-6.
Of course, this strategy would have been very difficult to implement in 1969, given that there were four new teams to shoot. A pretty lousy time to have been without much in the way of new pictures for over a year, due to the 1967-1968 boycott, I'd expect. And also the spring training boycott of 1969 pushed availability back, as well. (Although Miller was in camp and being photographed by the
Baltimore Sun on Feb. 22.)
At least Topps still had the late-summer series to issue in '69. That stopped after 1973, which is why the expanded '75 set has so many bad airbrush jobs.
Thanks for the info.
(Interesting that they even chose to give a card to Miller, given his poor record and that he'd been in the minors for the past two seasons. I guess somebody figured the Orioles knew what they were doing when they drafted him…)