1990 Target Dodgers - An Appreciation Post

In 1990, as I was celebrating my first birthday, the Dodgers franchise was turning the corner for their 100th lap around the National League circuit.  In fact, the club had actually been around since the 1884 season; however, the team emphasized their transferring from the failed American Association to the National League.  Of course, the century mark is an incredibly momentous milestone for any person, place, or thing, and a baseball franchise is no exception.  At the time, only a select handful of clubs had been able to stay functioning long enough to make it into the triple digits.  Thus, the Dodgers simply had to do something to mark this centenary.  With the height of baseball card investment and the junk wax era in full swing, it should come as no surprise that this 100-year celebration became the cardboard anniversary.

That summer, the Dodgers partnered with big box giants, Target, to release one of the most ambitious trading card sets to ever hit the market.  In order to properly pay tribute to 100 years of Dodger baseball, the powers that be created an expansive 1,095 card checklist which purported to include every single Dodger to ever take the field - be it in Brooklyn or LA - during their NL existence.  Every. Single. One.

Printed in perforated sheets of fifteen cards each, these treasures were distributed - typically in packs of multiple sheets - at Los Angeles area Target stores with a qualifying purchase, as well as at select Dodger home games as a giveaway.  The stock for the cards is cheap and thin... comparable to the sturdiness of your average index card - after all, this was a massive checklist printed in mass quantities.  As for the individual cards themselves, they were shrunk down from the standard size to 2"x 3", in order to cram as many on a sheet as possible.

Of course, with a project this ambitious, the 1990 Target Dodgers set is not perfect.  Many of the pictures are less than appealing, owing to the fact that many of these bygone ballplayers' careers pre-dated widely available flash photography.  Furthermore, the set was plagued with production issues, as player identities were screwed up, names were left off of the checklist, card numbers were confusingly repeated for multiple entries, etc.  That said, when you're trying to compile the all-time roster for a baseball team that's been around since the Benjamin Harrison administration, there's bound to be a mistake or two made.  I should know, seeing as I'm trying to compile a similar project for the even more ancient Chicago Cubs.

 Hell, some of these guys had to settle for drawings of their likenesses.

While I am not a Dodger fan, this set has long been of interest to me and my collecting habits.  After all, the set contains plenty of cards for men who had few or no other baseball card issued in their honor.  Additionally, since - like most of it's contemporary brethren - the set did not hold much investment value, it also provides an affordable opportunity to acquire cards of players who might only show up in the hallowed Goodwin Champions, T206's, or other pricey tobacco issues.  Most importantly, since the entire Dodgers timeline parallels that of the Cubs, there's a good amount of overlap in player usage for both historic franchises.

Add those factors all together and you can see why the 1990 Target Dodgers set has become a goldmine for my Cubs All-Time Roster Collection.  As of December 23rd, 2018, I had 19 Target singles resting comfortably in said binder, making it one of the most well-represented single products in my pages.  Although, you might be asking yourself why I added such an oddly specific demarcation line to that statement.  Well, you see, this past Christmas, I very nearly doubled my Target Dodgers content.

Man - they just don't come up with nicknames like that anymore.

As I mentioned in my post about the great Roy Johnson mix-up yesterday morning, I was gifted with a hefty haul of cardboard by my deceptively generous father this Yuletide season.  It seems he came across my blog want-list and simply went down the line, buying up as many cards as he could in the $1-$3 range.  Seeing as the Target Dodger checklist made up a good chunk of my list of desired cardboard and it's singles rarely sell for more than a buck or two, I ended up with 18 new "Red Bulls-eye" faces for my CATRC binder (and then some, but that's a story for another time).

All told, this amazing gift made up the largest single-day addition to my most hallowed tome in years.... maybe ever!  After all, it gets awfully hard to add more than a card or two at a time when you're trying to track down utility infielders and mop-up pitchers who were old enough to serve in WWI.

All of the cards that you've seen in this post were part of this Target haul substantive enough to make my wife blush.  Man, the amount of money we, as a couple, would drop at Target if the Cubs were to do a similar promotion with the Cubs at Chicagoland area stores...  Target and baseball cards - two of our favorite things!

Of course as well as that theoretical set would line up with my collecting and personal interests, I don't know that I'd actually want such a thing to come about.  After all, while collecting one card of every person to have ever played for the Cub is, in fact, my ultimate goal, if a single set were to come out and achieve that goal in a single release, it would negate a decade and a half of work on my part.  Not to mention, it would kind of just ruin the fun for me and abruptly end the thrill of the chase.

Thankfully, the Cubs celebrated their 100th anniversary back in 1970 and their 100th anniversary of NL baseball in 1976, so a similarly branded marketing effort would have come about already.  Maybe for their 150th milestone...  Anyway, I am glad that the Dodgers were honored with this all encompassing product - I'm also thrilled that such a large amount of baseballers split their time between the Windy City and the Zoo/City of Angels.

Plus, if any other old school clubs want to pursue such a project, I'd be okay with that too.

While we're on the topic of the Cubs though, I would be remiss were I not to point out a couple of surprises that I came across in my Target stash.  While the sets purports to have one card of every National League Dodger, getting a photograph of said players in the proper rags was not a possibility for everyone.  Heck, in some cases (like the dapper Mr. Charlie Irwin, above), the only pictures available don't even show them in baseball attire at all.  With that in mind, sometimes those who created the 1990 Target Dodgers set had to settle for whatever imagery they could actually get their hands on.  At this point, we're not talking about Sandy Koufax or Jackie Robinson.

With the approach being take what you can get for the more "off the beaten path" type players, the checklist is riddled with cruddy photography, lithographs, drawings, and guys wearing the jerseys of other clubs.  If I'm a Dodger collector, this is a foreseeable problem that I would just have to accept were I to collect this set.  However, as an interloping Cubs fan, that latter problem isn't necessarily a problem; rather, it's an opportunity...

An opportunity to track down Cubs cards from an seemingly unlikely source!  Both Dick Scott and Greek George are clearly sporting Cubbie Blue and not Dodger Blue in these photographs - this is good enough for me to declare these as proper Cubs cards for my CATRC!  Mr. Scott was a cuppacoffee reliever who made brief cameos with the Dodgers (9 games) in 1963 and the Cubs (3 games) in '64.  His career was short and unproductive (8.27 ERA), so Topps never bothered to include him in their industry standard set.  In fact, this Target card is one of only two to have ever been produced with his likeness and, ironically, his Fritsch One Year Winner single shows him in proper Dodger duds.  Who knows why this set had to resort to a Cubs photo, but I am certainly not complaining!

Meanwhile, Charles "Greek" George was a longtime minor league catcher who was called upon to fill in at the Major League level in five different seasons.  The backup backstop snuck into seven games for Brooklyn in 1938 and 35 for Chicago in 1941 and also spent time with Cleveland and Philadelphia (A's).  In 1945, George punched an umpire and then, unsurprisingly, never stepped foot on an MLB diamond again.  Yea... that's a pretty big no-no, though it does sound like the ump was egging George on.

Unfortunately, "Greek's" entire career was played out in the cardboard black hole after Goudey's iconic bubblegum release and WWII, meaning his pasteboard presence is also extremely thin.  I'm just thankful that Target went with a posed action shot of "Greek" during Cubs' Spring Training at beautiful Catalina Island - look at that windbreaker under his jersey!

In the end, regardless of whether the players were shown in a Dodgers, Cubs, or any other teams' wardrobe, I was able to add 18 cards from the 1990 Target Dodgers release to my CATRC in one fell swoop and that's a supremely significant one day influx!  In fact, another major milestone was achieved by this set that is, itself, celebrating a major milestone:  a card from it's checklist pushed me over the 75% mark for all-time completion.  That means that I now have more than three quarters of the men to have suited up for the Chicago National League Ballclub over the last century and a half represented in my humble Cubs All-Time Roster Collection tome.

Hot damn - I never thought I would make it to this point.  Hell, I didn't even think it was possible!  Now, how far will I be able to continue pushing my way towards completion?  Stay tuned to Wrigley Roster Jenga to find out!

As of my drafting of this post, my completion percentage reads at a little higher than three quarters - 75.85% to be precise.  That's because my father, in all his magnanimous altruism, didn't only bestow these Target Dodgers upon me.  No, no - when he came across my want-list he took it as a personal challenge and vowed to whittle it down as much as possible by Christmas day.  In the next few days, I'll be posting at least a couple of further times about this holiday bounty, in case you're curious about what other goodies he came across.

For now, I'm just grateful for my dad's munificent endowment and for the panoptic 1990 Target Dodgers set!