A 1980s Card Part 51 - 1985 O-Pee-Chee Jack Clark

One of the best trades the Cardinals made during the 1980s was picking up Jack Clark from the Giants for Dave LaPoint, David Green, and Jose Uribe before the 1985 season.    

Jose Uribe from EBay.  

That's not suspicious at all.  

The 1985 Topps set had Jack Clark as a Giant.  

A few months later the Topps Traded set rolled out, and we got Jack Clark in a Cardinals uniform.  

Darrell Porter in the background.  

Meanwhile, our friends north of the border in Canada got a really cool combination of these two cards in the O-Pee-Chee Set, or Maple Topps.  If you have never seen an O-Pee-Card from the 1980s of a player signed as a free agent or traded in the offseason, it is worth your time to go find a few of these cards.  

This is the Jack Clark card.  

We get the Topps Traded border with the base set Topps photo.  The best part is always the caption "Traded" or "Signed" or "Now With" that was stamped onto the card.  These O-Pee-Chee cards are almost better than the Traded cards.  Almost.  

I wish Topps had not used the stamps on the regular Topps cards.  It seemed to make the "Now With" types of stamps a little less special.  

Who remembers Doug DeCinces on the Cardinals? 

Not very memorable, but if you put a Cardinals frame and design around Doug DeCinces than you've got an interesting baseball card.  No, O-Pee-Chee did not give DeCinces the usual treatment.