A Dicey Situation

There is some seriously interesting Topps test material popping up in uncut form of late.  The latest entry in the clean-out-your-checking-account sweepstakes is a 1961 Dice Game (really 1963 it seems) production sheet.  Those of you familiar with this 18 subject set are aware of its extreme rarity and high percentage of Hall of Famers, offered recently by Collect Auctions.

Here it is in all its black & white glory:

I count eight Hall-of-Famers on there, nine if you count Camilo Pascual's Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame enshrinement (and excluding specific team Halls-of-Fame).  You can see the centering lines at all four cardinal compass points above, and also on the back of the sheet:

I believe this sheet has belonged to the (Larry) Fritsch family for decades.  The February 1974 issue of Sports Scoop had a piece by Ron Greenwood mentioning Fritsch had a set of the cards:

An ad in the January 1978 issue of The Trader Speaks offered the set...

...but as PSA notes in this article, it was merely a test by Fritsch to gauge interest and determine values. They speculate, as do I, that what was being offered in 1978 was the uncut sheet featured above.

While there is nothing to indicate they produced the set, which was never released in any form, the look, typefaces and a later Heritage-type lookback set all scream Topps. I believe, albeit without concrete proof, the set was reconfigured and eventually turned into what we know as the 1967 Baseball Punch-Out set. Sometimes development of a non-mainstream set took several years to accomplish at Topps.

(UPDATE 4/3/25: The sheet sold for $252,000 including the buyer's premium.)

Dice K

Well the near impossible has happened and a recently concluded Mile High Auction has given us the three cards missing from the Topps Dice Game Visual Checklist: Dick Groat, Norm Siebern and Bill White. Groat, in fact, has given us confirmation that the set was not from 1961 but rather that it dates to 1963, albeit based upon 1962 statistics.

Here's the missing three:

If you compare Groat's Cardinals duds to Bill White's, you can see Topps airbrushed a St. Louis logo on his cap and eradicated any mention of the Pirates on his uniform top (which is clearly the vest style favored by the Buccos at the time). Groat was dealt to the Cards on November 19, 1962 and Topps often used to work on their test and in house sets around New Year's.  The player selection still screams 1962 due the the 16 All Stars and two near misses depicted but the Groat airbrushing clearly indicates 1963 as the intended date of "issue".

Mile High had some thought too on the writing seen on the backs of some Dice Game cards, namely that they depicted tweaks made by Topps R&D  after having the game played with by kids (there's the lab setting I mentioned last time). It's possible I guess, but probably not what occurred.

Groat was not a guy with a lot of home run power (39 lifetime regular season dingers) but maybe you would want one to be a possible outcome.  I dunno......

Another interesting thing-the two subjects that I had only as oblique shots (Davenport and Mazeroski) were the the other two cards offered by Mile High.  These five also have darker toning than many I've seen and also have all of the cards known with writing on the reverse. No staple holes are defacing these either - they have been together in the world for quite some time. That will probably change now.

A Dicey Situation

I was starting my research for this post, which covers the "1961" Topps Dice Game set, when I discovered-very much to my surprise-that I had not posted anything in depth on this subject.  Given the near mythic status these have attained and the stratospheric prices even low grade examples have been bringing, the time is indeed here to dive in.

The cards don't have any indication they were made by Topps but the photography and especially the typography undoubtedly peg them as one of theirs. Long attributed to 1961, apparently for their alleged resemblance to the regular issue cards from that august year and possibly due to (an irrelevant) set count, the 18 black and white cards that make up this unissued set were designed to allow a game of baseball to be played by two youthful enthusiasts.  No doubt influenced by two dice based baseball games, namely ABPA, founded in 1951) and (probably more-to-the-point) Strat-O-Matic, which debuted in 1961, Topps developed and possibly tested Dice Game in the early 60's. If there was a test, my guess it was in a research lab setting and not at retail. Len Brown however, seems to indicate in an old interview that the set was retail tested but given how the surviving examples present and the general lack of cards, I just don't think that's accurate.

That's essentially the organized hobby knowledge of the set!  There is a little bit more that can be added though. In a Sports Market Report for PSA, Kevin Glew interviewed (via email) a couple of us hobby types (including moi) trying to pin down, among other things, exactly when the set was produced. My own thoughts were the cards resembled those being designed for internal use by Topps starting around 1965 while noted collector (and Friend o'the Archive) Bob Fisk opined that the set was probably intended for issue in 1962 or '63 due to a player selection that included 16 1962 All Stars and two other players (Tony Kubek and Bill White) who put together campaigns that should have landed them in the Midsummer Classic. (Update 3/6/19-the dating has been confirmed as post 1961, a post will be made in April 2019 explaining.

I have previously posted here my thoughts that the Dice Game could have been intended for sale in set form with a pair of dice and and possibly a scoresheet but that has never been confirmed.  Two later examples make the possibility of complete set marketing a 50/50 proposition I think.  The 1966 Baseball Punchouts, which are even rarer than the Dice Game cards, seem like they were intended to be sold piecemeal while the 1968 Batter Up box set took the baseball game inserts from the 1968 Baseball packs and packaged them all up at once, with box-back instructions on how to play a nine inning contest. The Punchouts were also an 18 card set, although designed as panels that each featured an AL and NL player and could be split apart and seem to me to be the next logical step in the Topps quest to issue a standalone game product.  In fact, it's possible the Dice Game cards were a kind of prototype for the Punchouts but there are a couple of key differences as the latter were printed in color (except for the small player photos on each) and there is a wrapper proof or two known.

Right now there are 15 documentable subjects of 1961 Dice Game out there, while the checklist definitively stands at 18; no packaging has ever been seen to my knowledge.  I'm sure these missing three cards exist as the checklist is derived from an 18 card uncut sheet owned by Fritsch Cards and which was in their possession as of April 2018 (and likely still is). Examples not on this sheet can be found with staple holes (from internal Topps memoranda no doubt) or not, and some are hand cut.  I'm pretty sure an example or two once resided in a Woody Gelman "Idea Book" but have now been liberated from whatever page they resided upon. I doubt there's more than four of any one card in existence and only some subjects are known as multiples.

The checklist is a doozy (an asterisk indicates examples without a scan or picture known):

Earl Battey - Minnesota Twins
Del Crandall - Milwaukee Braves
Jim Davenport  - San Francisco Giants
Don Drysdale - Los Angeles Dodgers
Dick Groat * - Pittsburgh Pirates (Update 3/6/19, Groat has been verified as a Cardnial)
Al Kaline -Detroit Tigers
Tony Kubek - New York Yankees
Mickey Mantle - New York Yankees
Willie Mays - San Francisco Giants
Bill Mazeroski - Pittsburgh Pirates
Stan Musial - St. Louis Cardinals
Camilo Pascual - Minnesota Twins
Bobby Richardson - New York Yankees
Brooks Robinson - Baltimore Orioles
Frank Robinson - Cincinnati Reds
Norm Siebern * - Kansas City Athletics (Update 3/6/19, Siebern has been verified)
Bill White * - St. Louis Cardinals (Update 3/6/19, White has been verified)

Groat, Siebern and White all have their teams inferred.  Groat was a Pirate in 1962 and a Cardinal in 1963, Norm Siebern was a member of the Athletics through 1963 and Bill White was a Cardinal through 1965 so I'm pretty comfortable with those assignments. There are nine players from each league in case you were wondering but only a dozen teams of the 18 in existence as of 1961 are represented. Missing: The Cubs and Phillies from the National League and the Indians, Red Sox, Senators and White Sox from the junior circuit. Scans of the "known" 15 are below. (Update 3/6/19-better scans of Davenport and Mazeroski have been added below)

The Mazeroski and Davenport examples just surfaced and are quite interesting as both look like a kid updated a result on the back of each. Compare to the Mays reverse:

Hopefully the missing three scans turn up soon.  If they do, I'll post again to complete the visual checklist.

Top Ten List

So we are, amazingly, coming up on eight years of this blog and as I was rolling around in the "posts" section, which I do occasionally and where I can see stats, etc., I noticed a couple of eye-popping page counts for a few posts over the years.  So I thought I would take a look today at the top ten posts in terms of page views, which led to a few surprises.

As of the date I am composing this (July 30, 2016) the blog has 56 subscribers and an average post gets roughly 135 page views; 658 posts have been made as of this date. It takes a couple of weeks after a post for that page view count to be reached. Some posts have very few views, especially those from the early days (Sept.-Dec. '08), although a post I made on the 1961 Dice Game set on January 2, 2009 seems to have brought attention here hence, likely because I mentioned it over at Net54.

Speaking of the Dice Game and before I get rolling here, I just noticed something today as I was editing the scans to insert here.  Take a look:

Look closely at the baserunning results boxes (the three little boxes to the right of each batting result).  They are hand drawn! I guess there were size limits on those great Topps fonts after all and the variety is vast on these:

Speaking of variety, there is quite a bit of it among the top ten topics and a couple have an exponentially higher number of views than those that came before. Counting down, we start with:

#10 (973 views) - Test Pattern-The Mid 60's Black and White TV Cards From Topps (Part 4) which was the conclusion of a popular four part series on black and white test cards of TV shows issued by Topps in the 60's. Land Of The Giants, Captain Nice and Bonanza were highlighted. Part 1 is even more popular, as we'll see below.

#9 (999 views) - Catching Up on Coins and Cards almost made it to four digits, we'll be there soon I bet.  This covered a few areas: 1952 Baseball high numbers, Batman, Krazy Little Comics, 1980 Baseball Coins, presentation boards and prototypes. I don't do as many wide ranging catch up threads as I used to as I tend to just devote a full post to one updated topic these days

#8 (1,007 views) - Easy As A&BC  is one of the surprises to me.  The post covered the 1970 English & Scottish Footballer sets issued by what was essentially a company Topps controlled via indebtedness.  When I posted this one, Blogger didn't allow ampersands; I went back later and converted every "and " to "&". Don't ever say I'm not willing to go the extra kilometer for all of you!

#7 (1,119 views) - Naughty Not Nice, a look at those fake Rak Paks polluting the hobby for decades now. Caveat Emptor!

#6 (1,127 views) - Bigger, Longer, Uncut, which featured 1952-56 Baseball uncut sheets and panels. Uncut Topps sheets have always been one of my favorite subjects, yours too apparently.  Too bad many are being cut up after market in the quest for high grade slabbed cards. I'm a firm believer in vintage collectibles staying in the form in which they have survived down the years and decades.

#5 (1,378 views) - Test Pattern-The Mid 60's Black and White TV Cards From Topps (Part 1) kicked off the series capped by our #10 starter.  This one had a few regular issue color cards (Beverly Hillbillies, Outer Limits) mixed in with Daniel Boone, Bewitched, King Kong, Superman and Flash Gordon.

#4 (1,476 views) - Fleer Factory showcased the other major competitor Topps had in Philadelphia in addition to Bowman. Fleer got involved with issuing cards for real in 1959 and was a major threat to Topps' baseball card supremacy in the early and mid 1960's. They sold their player contracts to Topps in 1966 but a decade later their lawsuit paved the way for the modern era of baseball cards that started in 1981. This is one of my favorite posts.

#3 (1,903 views) - Who Ya Callin' Short?!, another favorite of mine, harkened back to my first piece of hobby research, namely the 1967 high numbers. 1967 is an immensely popular set and the high numbers have been the subject of scrutiny for decades. I first realized Topps often printed two different sheets for each series during their golden era as a result of this research.  For the record, the eleven true short prints in the high numbers are: 552 Savage, 553 Yankees Rookies, 558 Orioles Rookies (Belanger), 563 Adcock, 568 Sullivan, 581 Mets Rookies (Seaver), 586 Jiminez, 591 Cline, 597 Abernathy, 603 A's Rookies, 607 Stanley.  An open question is whether or not the 67 high number short prints are harder than those from the year prior.

#2 (2,423 views) - Field Guide To Dating Topps Wrappers explored various ways to date Topps products based upon the clues on the wrappers.  A lot of my research depends upon the indicia found on retail wrappers or the bottoms of retail boxes. I thought this would be the top viewed post but it wasn't, not by a long shot.

#1 (5,976 views) - New New Developments (Blue Sky Version) took an in depth look at the 1967 Baseball Punchout set.  I was shocked to see how many page views it had. Oddly other posts on this set did nowhere near this number and were mostly in the low hundreds. I almost have to question this view count then but Google says what it says.

So baseball, UK soccer and non-sports seem to be among the most popular subjects around here.  I'll be looking more and more at the non-sports issues from Topps going forward as that's where my main interest lies these days but we'll still have the usual mish-mash of topics here as we get close to and enter our ninth year.

UPDATE 10/4/16: It's funny but since I posted this the average view count seems to be hovering around 250.

Dice Is Nice

Every year or so it seems I run across an issue that is not exactly vintage but strikes a chord that seems Archives-worthy.  For over a decade now, Topps has issued Heritage sets that mimic the design of a classic and vintage Topps set but include current players.  The anniversary matchups are a year off (the first set was released in 2001 and used the 1952 Topps baseball design) but they are basically spanning a fifty year gap (much like your webmaster this year).

In 2010 a 1961 design was used for Heritage baseball; basic but fairly attractive and uncluttered except for the annoying logo at upper left (I despise them on TV as well):

It's the back that got my attention as it is a replica of the 1961 Dice Game in-house test that is among the rarest of all Topps sets:

Compare that to an actual Dice Game Reverse:

Pretty close, except for all the indicia on the newer card.  The take away is that this absolutely confirms the 1961 Dice Game cards were a Topps creation as they originals have no identifying marks on them. Retro is clearly in these days, as this 2011 Topps Lineage 3-D card of David Wright shows.  I've already blogged extensively on the 1968 3-D set so figured I would throw this on here as a bonus.




That card is not cut straight!  The 3-D effect is very "deep" (the player in the background completely disappears when you tilt the card one way and moves around a bit when you tilt it the other way) but I like the effect on the 68's a little more, even though it's not as technically advanced.

Now, when do we get some retro Punchouts?

Gonna Roll the Bones

I thought I would kick 2009 off with a quick look at a super rare Topps set-1961 Dice Game.

This set of 18 black and white cards (yes, I am on a B&W roll of late!) does not bear any Topps or TCG indicia but the typography and seemingly good hobby intel over the years pegs it in my mind.

This Frank Robinson card is from the collection of Bob Fisk:



You can see staple holes in the upper left-to-center of the card; I would think one full set of these has staple holes, or two at the most. Why? Because I believe such examples came from the Topps internal archives, probably through Woody Gelman and Card Collector's Co. Topps would keep an archive copy in a book, sometimes with a matched display of fronts and backs stapled or taped to a page for executives to refer to. Woody's m.o. was tape (and I think he might have had his own archives in addition to the official ones) so maybe the cards came from another Topps big wig. If front and back copies of each were included in the reference material, then it stands two copies of each card would have the holes.

It's good Bob and a few other sources have scans of these-I doubt I'll ever own one as my estimate is that from 2 to 4 copies exist at most for any player. A lesser conditioned Leon Wagner (vg-ex I would say) than the one below went for a little over $2000 about three years ago in a Ebay auction. I don't know where this scan is from though:



A vg-ex Mantle went for almost $25,000 a while back. I don't think it was this one, again from an unknown source:



The back of Mick's card gives an idea how the game would be played:



As there are 18 cards in the set with seemingly matched pairs of AL and NL players by position, I would surmise the intent was to sell the entire set, with two regular dice, one die for pitch selection, another for something else (those little trifurcated boxes must be significant) and possibly some score sheets, as a self contained toy. I would guess 29 cents at retail would have been the going rate.

Here is a Willie Mays front/back combo as well, from a Mastronet auction a few years back.



Did the cards ever make it to a full retail test? I am not sure but it's possible as the presence of vg-ex examples could indicate handling by purchasers. The test, if it made it that far, must have failed. It's also quite possible the cards only made it to the final proof stage. I seem to recall an uncut sheet existing at one point that may have been cut up for singles but have no source to confirm that.

No matter how they entered the hobby, these are some of the rarest cards Topps ever produced. PSA has one registered set (50% completed) with a number of 1 grades (possibly for staple holes, I do not know) and SGC has zero. I would say examples only come up for auction once every two years or so on average. I am in awe if you own one of these.