1979 Metallic Creations Signature Miniatures

[FireGardy]

Is it possible that the set is larger than we thought?

I was screwing around on google and found these from Baseball Digest:
Oct 1979

Apr 1980

Jul 1980

Mar 1982


The pictured statues match the ones in the Signature Miniatures set.

I also found this Sporting News clip (google won't allow you to see whole article)
Volume 187


Players on checklist but not these ads (6):
George Brett SP
Roberto Clemente SP
Steve Garvey
Thurman Munson SP
Pete Rose SP
Nolan Ryan SP

Players in ads but not checklisted (15):
Cy Young
Dizzy Dean
Joe Tinker
Johnny Evers
Frank Chance
Al Oliver
Bob Horner
Vida Blue
Willie Stargell
Bob Lemon
Maury Wills
Lee Mazzilli
Frank Tanana
Gaylord Perry
Sandy Hawley

edit found this:
Oct 1978 lists Garvey and Rose

[laughlinfan]

Sandy Hawley?

Any chance that you can see the actual ordering blank from those baseball digests in your search?

[FireGardy]

The magazine just had a generic order form for ordering pretty much any of the items in the ads. If you look above the order coupon you'll see the above offer has the same address (Baseball Digest).

You can poke around on google books and read the whole magazine http://books.google.com/



I pieced together several snippets from the Sporting News 187 to get this:



Metallic Creations in El Monte CA
It also gives us the initial 8 statues. I couldn't get google to give me the middle of the order form.

[laughlinfan]

Very nice research! Quite a mystery now - I can't imagine they would run this ad issue after issue with players that were never produced. But I I'm pretty certain we never were able to order any but the ones that we have now - Dizzy Dean would have been high on our list - we always liked old Diz - and Lee Mazilli would have made his way to our house since I was and am a Met fan. I'm pretty certain that there aren't a ton of figures out there beyond those on the checklist. The figures we were able to acquire and the checklist are a dead on match, if we really are quite sure no Rose or Ryan were issued. And why no listing in any of these for some that were issued? Very odd.

[FireGardy]

It's pretty weird that there would be others listed for sale if they never existed. Unfortunately, I can't find anything else really online about these beyond the ones we know exist. I guarantee if they were stamped with "Topps" there'd be sets all over we could reference no matter how few were made. Somebody must have a stash of these somewhere. I thought it would be a headache looking for variations when I read this was a 20 card set; at possibly 39 cards it would seem to be a real nightmare. I wonder how long the silver plated statues were available as they seem to have disappeared after the Sporting News offer.

[FireGardy]

got some more of the middle of the SN ad:



CALL COLLECT

[laughlinfan]

I honestly think (aside from maybe proofs) that this is a 20 card set, and a 22 figure set, but I'm a little less certain today than I was a couple of days ago. I would think that somewhere along the lines some card or figure of a player I never saw would be added to the Standard Catalog - at this point the only one that is listed that I never saw a card or staue for is Rose, and it sounds like that never got past the proof stage.

Hey maybe you can call that number collect and see if they have any left!