2017 Sportlots purchases: mo better Lous

See?  No "Happy Lou Year" in the title, just like I promised!

Of course that means today's featured PC guy is Lou Whitaker.  I didn't knock anything off his checklist in my Sportlots purchase but did find a few scans' worth of new stuff to add to his collection, mainly of the oddball variety:

Most of what I grabbed was from the 80s which makes sense since Whitaker's career spanned 1977-95.  This bunch starts and ends with Topps Glossy Send-Ins from 1984 and 1987.  I don't generally count stuff like that towards the mainstream checklist because I tend to limit it to box- and pack-pulled stuff.

As with many of the other players you've seen, Lou appeared in many of Fleer's prolific array of products that decade, and here you can see his issues from their 1986 Limited Edition boxed set as well as the Star Stickers offerings from that year and 1987.  The stickers are definitely odballish enough to leave off the checklist but I may change my mind on the Limited Edition card at some point.

Last up is the most oddball of this scan:  1986 True Value.  These logo-less cards (despite apparently being approved by the MLBPA?) came in panels of four when you bought stuff at one of those stores.

Here's the final four standard-sized cards:  Up first is 1989 Classic Travel purple, an update to the product that featured trivia questions on the back.  Next is a psychedelic design from 1992 Topps Kids, another product that's weird enough to leave off my checklists, at least for now.  I'd argue that kid-centric products look a bit better today.

Going a bit more mainstream are Whitaker's 1993 Pacific Spanish base (with that butt-ugly logo from the early 90s) and Upper Deck's Fun Pack from that year, another kid-friendly product.  I may also decide to put these on the main checklist at some point.

Lou was living large in the 80s--five straight All-Star Games, four Silver Slugger Awards, three Gold Gloves, and 43.4 bWAR are proof--so naturally he belonged on some oversized cards like this Donruss pair.  The first is from the 1985 Action All-Stars set while the other product's name simply opted for "All-Stars".  If you're familiar with either year's base set you can see some similarities in the designs, though they're notably different as well.

And now we have the oddballs of the oddball stuff:  undersized and other non-standard form-factors.  The first and third items in the top row are stamps produced by Fleer in 1982 and '83, apparently designed to be stuck in an album, much like stickers from the era.

Speaking of stickers, this scan is littered with them:

• Topps:  (L-R, top to bottom) items #2 (1982), 5 (1983), 6 (1984), 7 (1986), 9 (1989), and 11 (1988).  The '88 sees Whitaker paired up with 1984 World Series foe Garry Templeton of the Padres.
• Fleer:  #4 (1983)
• Panini:  #8 (1989)

Item #10 is the first of four non-stickers, a Topps UK Mini from 1989.  Also from Topps I have a pair of coins from 1989 and 1990.  It looks like the company brought those back for a few years starting in 1987 after they were a mainstay of the 60s and early 70s.

Our final item on the day is also round, and it's a King B Disc from 1990.  The discs are food issues that came in packages of beef jerky made by a company I wouldn't know about if not for the cards!

And with that I have another nice bunch of Whitakers to beef up his collection and give it a ton more variety as I close in on 300 total cards.

Stay tuned for another Sportlots PC post soon, and in the meantime please check out a Michigan Football-related one this evening over at TMM.