A 1980s Card Part 50 - 1988 Topps Stan Musial

A little bit different 1980s Cardinals post for this week with my feature card being a "Turn Back The Clock" card from the 1988 Topps set.  I actually really liked these cards as a kid.  There was zero chance my parents were going to let me drop a couple hundred dollars for a nice vintage card of a Hall of Fame player from the 1950s or 1960s, but these cards at least gave those players a presence in my collection.  

At least, that's the way I felt at the time.  

Here is the Musial card.  

It's even got a picture of his 1963 Topps card on the front, which is the year the back of the card will talk about when we get there.  

Now, if you have never seen one of these before, you might be a little disappointed looking at the back of the card.  I generally ignored the back as a kid, choosing to focus on the fact that I had a Stan Musial card.  As an adult, I am tremendously disappointed at the back.  The card has Stan Musial on the front, surely the back will be all about Stan Musial, and showcase him as one of the greats of the game.  

Well, not so much.  

Let's work our way down the card.  Again, you have the 1963 year at the top, along with the "Twenty Five Years Ago" heading at the top.  

The various facts from the season featured on these cards were always more of odd occurrences variety than actual highlights.  Never any mention of who won the World Series or MVP, someone who reached a career milestone, or things that might have been truly historic that season.  If they made these cards today, they would have things like, "Junior Lake wears wrong Cubs road jersey in a game against the Pirates" 

or "Edwin Jackson has not pitched for all the teams in the league, but he's getting pretty close"  

In 1963, Sandy Koufax won the pitching Triple Crown and Willie Mays hit his 400th home run.  Pete Rose won the Rookie of the Year Award.  Might have been a nice touch to mention some of those highlights, especially since these cards were made when kids were actually still collecting cards.  

The Musial section of the card is roughly the bottom third.  I guess it's decent, but I think it would have been nice to give some of those numbers a little more context.  When he retired he was the National League leader in almost all the counting number stats outside of home runs.  Saying he had 3,630 hits and more than 700 doubles is nice, but giving the ranking makes his place in history stand out a little more.  

While it was nice to say, "Of course I own a Musial card" when this card rolled around, Topps really could have done better with this subset by focusing more on the player shown on the front.  I have some good Cardinals cards the next couple of weeks.  Going with some of the bigger names and more important cards for the last few months of these posts.