1981 bert blyleven

rik aalbert blyleven, better know as bert 'be home' blyleven, was traded by the pirates to the indians, along with manny sanguillen, for gary alexander, victor cruz, bob owchinko, and rafael vasquez in december of 1980.  this was just one year after bert helped the pirates to their world series win over the orioles.  here's his 1981 o-pee-chee card depicting him in transition:

not only do we get the text and team variations, along with the appropriate indians color scheme on the hat, we also get the position translation and the tiny 'o-pee-chee' text in the baseball.  maybe o-pee-chee should have gone with just 'opc' in order to fill the sweet spot a little better.

here's the topps front:

i do love how topps changed the hat style for the pirates.  that is attention to detail.  too bad they didn't do variations with the yellow hats though.

here's the o-pee-chee back:

still bright stock, although i understand that o-pee-chee did some print runs using a gray card stock which i suppose is similar to topps'.  this is the first time we see the o-pee-chee kiddie logo on the back.  it made it's front debut on the 1979 cards.  notice that the '1' is missing in the 1980 stat line.  as you can see, bert is number 294 in the set. 

here's the topps back:

it's also missing the '1'.  i guess o-pee-chee wasn't doing any quality control on the stats.  the topps card is 554 in the set. 

this was the third year in a row (and the last year) that o-pee-chee's set topped out at 374 cards.  as the blyleven card illustrates, the set was not a parallel of topps' set. 

voici à vous, 1981 bert blyleven!