36 Sports Collectors Digest / August 16, 2019 http://www.sportscollectorsdigest.com
B
aked. Fried. Crispy. Flavors ranging from plain to exotic.
Many resemble a fresh saddle; others appear on the
crumpled continuum. However they are made, taste or
their form, slender potato chips sit atop Salty Snack Mountain,
with annual sales in the billions of dollars.
Some credit George Crum with inventing the shaved potato-
related treat in the 1850s; while some additional information
points elsewhere, and earlier, for sparking the tasty sensation.
Either way, the history of food product promotions and
sports seems bottomless, like a new deep big bag of chips, and
in the 1960s crunchy potato slivers and baseball often teamed
up.
Metal baseball MLB team pins about the size of a quarter
came with chip bags on a fairly regular basis during the era, and
from 1964-66 Guy’s brand via Kansas City, Missouri played a
solid role in this scenario.
In his own way, Jeff Lederer followed the advice on the back
of many of the pins that urged people to “Be wise buy Guy’s”
when he fi rst started collecting raw versions of them in 2009.
Lederer stepped up his game a few years later.
“I got into grading (the pins) when I found a bunch of color
variations digging through some boxes at the (2013) National
(Convention),” Lederer said.
Now the sports hobbyist owns all the regular Guy’s pin sets
in upper-tier grade.
“The ’64s have a brown back, which I call their base set, but
they also have a variation with a black back for each,” he said.
Brown and gold represent the 1965 main back color choices.
In addition to some color variations with these 20-team sets in
each of the three years, sometimes another more eye-catching
twist comes into play.
“In 1964 fronts of (regular) Chicago Cubs pins have a star on
each side (of the team name),” Lederer said. “But one version
has three stars on each side.” And those Cubs pins appear in
both color choices.
“Finding the variations has been as exciting for me as col-
lecting the pins,” Lederer said.
Most of the time just the team name and some sort of art-
deco style logo adorn the pin fronts, but in three cases the main
design features the name and the word “fan,” as in “Los Angeles
Dodger Fan,” “San Francisco Giant Fan,” and “A Yankee Fan.”
Of that trio the Yankee pin generally attracts the most attention.
Backs on all of the 1964-66 Guy’s pins include the company
logo; yet only the ’64s are undated.
Lederer’s favorite pins are numerous, but when pressed his
personal top picks came from the 1964 set and included the
Baltimore Orioles, Pittsburgh Pirates, the Boston Red Sox white
One of the Guy’s
1960s baseball pins pack some punch and crunch
byDougKoztoski
Offbeat Beat
Metal MLB team pins came with a bag of Guy’s brand of potato chips from
1964-66.The front of the 1964 Chicago Cubs Guy’s Potato Chips metal baseball pins
came in two versions. One version had only one star on each side of the pin
(left), while the other version had three stars on each side of the front of thepin (right).