Complete sets: 1982 TCMA Greatest Hitters, Pitchers, and Sluggers

So my latest COMC package did arrive, just not quite in the state I expected.  Somehow a few cards got excluded from the shipment and were just chilling in my inventory.  Oh well, I turned those lemons into lemonade by grabbing a few more cards for myself along with a few for trade packages and once again requested a shipment.  That means I'll be waiting on some of the cards needed for posts (and trade packages), but I'll get to them eventually.  In the meantime here's another post covering more of my complete set collection.

A small part of my collection has been with me since before I was really a collector, meaning that my parents bought some cards for my brother and me when we were pretty young.  I know for sure that we had complete sets of 1989 Donruss and Topps because I vividly remember flipping through those in my earlier days--I would have been six when they came out.  A number of those got moved around to various locations, such as my grandparents' house, or lost entirely, including Griffey's Donruss rookie, but regardless, I think it's cool that my parents bought those for us before we were really into collecting.

Besides those more mainstream items I have some stuff of the oddball variety from earlier in the decade, including reprint-type cards.  In fact, I can recall looking at the back of a Honus Wagner reprint, reading the text on the back indicating its value at the time, and excitedly reporting to my mom that we were rich.  Not so much, young me!

Anyway, where this long story is leading is that in today's post I'm showing off three of my oldest, oddballest sets.  Many of you are familiar with the name TCMA and have cards from their products in your collections.  I happen to have three sets made in 1982, the year before I was born:  Greatest Hitters, Greatest Pitchers, and Greatest Sluggers.

Each is a 45-card set filled with black-and-white and classic color photographs of a ton of the game's greats, most of which are Hall of Famers.  Naturally the first and third sets have a bit of overlap which means twice the fun when it comes to a few legends.

I'll let the scans do most of the talking but the fronts and backs are a sort of off-white with red or green borders.  Backs include a write-up and career stats with everything in blue.  Numbers can be found in the bottom-right corner in the format "1982-#".

As I said, the player selection is excellent given the themes, and I'm happy to be showing off a bunch of Tigers--Al Kaline, Harvey Kuenn, Ty Cobb, Harry Heilmann, Heinie Manush, and Charlie Gehringer (Hitters); Hal Newhouser (pictured with Cleveland for some reason), Denny McLain, Frank Lary, and Jim Bunning (Pitchers); Eddie Mathews (incorrectly spelled with two "Ts"), Hank Greenberg, Norm Cash, Rudy York, and Rocky Colavito (Sluggers)--and a couple PC guys as well:  Gehringer and George Sisler.

And to tie this in with the COMC mention, I did need to grab one card from there to replace a missing one in my Pitchers set, Jim Bunning (you can tell the back of his card is whiter than the rest in that scan).

So to give some of you around my age or older a good case of nostalgia, and introduce some fun old cards to the rest of you, please enjoy the fronts and backs of these three sets!  (NOTE:  I realize the write-ups on the back aren't easily readable, but I just didn't feel like putting in the effort to scan, edit, and post them individually.  I hope appreciating how they look is more important to you!)

Hitters

Pitchers

Sluggers

Trading Cards, Man--Awesome!