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| Eyes down |
Similar to the
Ron Cook variation, but not as creepy looking, card number 133 featuring Mickey Lolich has the eyes up / eyes down variants. The eyes down version has Lolich looking straight ahead and his left eye is slightly more open than the version where he is looking up at his cap. A small difference, neither is noted on any graded versions and both are readily available. This card is notoriously hard to find centered and considered one of the toughest cards to find in a high grade. All the O-Pee-Chee's I have seen are the eyes down version.
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| Eyes Up |
Lolich is probably best know for going 3-0 in the 1968 World Series, winning games 2, 5 and beating Bob Gibson in the deciding game 7 earning MVP honors. He also lead the AL in wins, starts, complete games, innings and strike outs in 1971 finishing second in the Cy Young voting, behind Vida Blue, and 5th in the MVP vote. During the years between 1965-1974, Lolich had more strikeouts than any pitcher (Gibson was second) and more wins than any other AL pitcher. Lolich spent the maximum 15 years on the Hall of Fame ballot, but only got as high as 25.5% of the vote in 1988.
I looked in my box of 1971's and found exactly two Lolich's, one of each. What exactly did happen?Was one of the versions manipulated somehow? Is his mouth a little different too? My wife thinks it's just a printing variation (as in contrast)but I definitely see differences.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what happened here, information is hard to come by on these, my guess is someone thought he looked dopey and fixed the eyes in later pressings like they did with airbrushing blobs.
DeleteOnce they got done with fixing whatever team a player was now with, OPC vitrually never corrected anything. Almost all the variations people find in Topps simply don't exist in OPC. I got burned on a '69 Perranoski variation that was never corrected in OPC.
ReplyDelete