King of the North

Anyone else looking forward to the Season 7 Game of Thrones premiere?  It's been over a year since we saw Daenerys and her dragons depart for Westeros.  But this post isn't about that.  It's my next submission to Tony's 30 Day Baseball Card Challenge.

The card I'm using for the 18th Challenge is part of my COMC order, which hasn't arrived yet, so I'm leapfrogging it.  Today I'm going to tackle the 19th Challenge: A favorite card from a country other than the United States.

I've been looking forward to writing this post since I first saw the list of challenges, because I have a whole collection dedicated to Japanese baseball cards.  I even had a card already picked out... but after thinking about it... I've already written about it twice.

So I decided to go in a different direction.  Instead of heading west across the Pacific... I went north of the border into Canada.

Since I returned to the hobby in 2008, I've developed a deep appreciation for vintage O-Pee-Chee baseball cards.  The main reason is because they're something different and much less abundant than their sister company to the south.

My favorite O-Pee-Chee cards to chase are the rookie cards, which if you're interested... you can read about here.

However today... I wanted to show off my 1983 O-Pee-Chee card of The Stolen Base King:

The 1983 Topps card design has always been one of my favorites... and back then Rickey was my favorite player.

The card is almost identical on the front with two exceptions:

#1:  The Topps logo has been replaced with O-Pee-Chee.

#2:  The O-Pee-Chee added Voltigeur next to Rickey's position.

On the back, you'll immediately notice the lighter colored card stock that is often associated with O-Pee-Chee baseball cards.  In addition to that, most of the text has been written in both English and French.

Due to the additional text, they were forced to reduce the size of the text and one of the 1982 highlights was edited out.  If you look closely at the bottom you'll also notice in the fine print that this card was printed in Canada, while the Topps version was printed in the U.S.A.

Well there you have it.  One of my favorite cards that wasn't produced here in the states.  What about you...

Are you a fan O-Pee-Chee baseball cards?  Do have a preference between the two sister companies?

I hope you all are enjoying your week.  The past week or so, I've been very busy trying to binge watch the first six seasons of Game of Thrones in hopes of being ready for Sunday night's premiere.

Happy Thursday and sayonara!