Check All Of The Above - The Theory of Checklist Relativity Part 1

Back to the subject of Checklists today campers, specifically from 1958, the year major league baseball became bi-coastal and the Topps cards really started to show their colors. It also marks the beginning of what I call the Theory of Checklist Relativity, or TCR for short.

As we know, Topps started printing cards on 132 card half sheets in 1957. These were always arrayed in 12 rows of 11 cards each. You would think this would lead to nice, even 132 card series but it never, ever did in the baseball sets. Without looking at an uncut sheet it would be hard, if not impossible to see which cards were printed with each other. However, thanks to the way Topps printed their checklists we have a window to peer through.

I managed to track down my tearsheet from the January 22, 1999 issue of Sports Collectors Digest which detailed Mr.Mint's October 1998 "Philly" find of about 200 uncut sheets (mostly partials but some 132 card half sheets were found) from the second series of 1957 baseball cards. If you remember or saved that issue, just beware that the sheets shown on the cover were reconstructed as virtually all sheets from the find were damaged, some quite heavily.

We can see how both halves of the full 264 card sheet when reconstructed yield three copies of each card, in what I call an A B A / B A B pattern, with each letter representing a distinct group of 4 rows of 11 cards. This is one half sheet (Mantle is rightmost in the second and tenth rows, so he appears in the A grouping):



So the pattern is A B A. Here is the other half sheet sheet with Mantle rightmost in the sixth row, with a B A B array. You can see how the A B A / B A B pattern works when comparing the two:



There was a closeup detail or description of about a dozen cards which show they ran from numbers 90 to 170 so I feel safe in saying the 88 cards from the second series were all printed together and that the first four series in 1957 were 88 cards each, which exactly matches the checklists. The fifth and final series of 55 therefore also checks out using this reasoning.

I am not certain if Topps co-mingled series in 1957. I suspect they may have but don't have access to unopened pack runs. It does seem certain that they were seeing if the checklists would be a good way to advertise the next upcoming series.

In 1958 they did something different and started a trend that would continue through 1972, occasionally refined, where the series runs didn't match what was on the uncut sheets. In addition, the team card backs became home to player checklists which continued through 1960.

The information on the 1958 checklists in the major price guides gives us the following series runs and totals:

Series 1: 1-110 (110 cards)
Series 2: 111-198 (88 cards-#145 Bouchee pulled so an extra print of someone added)
Series 3: 199-286 (88 cards)
Series 4: 287-374 (88 cards)
Series 5: 375-440 (66 cards)
Series 6: 441-495 (55 cards)

The checklists tell a different story though, revealing five 88 card series on the backs of the team cards:





Those show numbers 177-264 belonging to series three and a look at all five confirm that the first five checklists had 88 cards listed on them. This is why I call it the Theory of Checklist Relativity; they are showing series that are different relative to the uncut sheets or what is shown in the major price guides.

What does it all mean? Well, I'm going to be a tease and put that part of the discussion off until my next post, which will delve into the '58 uncut sheets and their assorted mysteries. Not gonna leave you totally hanging though, let's look at series "6" before we go.

The four team cards that appear after #440 (Redlegs, Orioles, Braves, Tigers) come two ways as you can find a numerical checklist or an innovative alphabetical one:

The alphabetical cards that showed the numbers of your favorite players spread out over four cards so you could track them down:



They only go up to #440 though, or exactly five runs of 88 cards each. As you can see on this numerical checklist back, something was afoot in the sixth series:



So, where oh where is the checklist for the Sport Magazine All Stars? Why on the back of the All Star Managers card,of course!





That is from checkoutmycards.com kids, the only site I could find with a back scan.

Those all star cards are one of the reasons I am holding off the rest of this discussion until next time. See you soon!

Checking Out

We're going to round out the unnumbered checklists today with a quick look at the one from 1957 Topps Football. It's a bit more colorful than the ones found with '57 baseball:



The big Beckett Football Guide also mentions a variety with white instead of yellow background and states it is equal in supply to the yellow version but my quick, unscientific search of Ebay (from whence all these scans came) and Google last night only turned up a dozen or so of the yellow type. Can anyone (I mean you Doug!) provide verification of the white version?

The backs (and there are two, one for each main type of Topps bubble gum at the time) have a more finished look than the reverses of the '57 baseball checklists:





Same ads as the baseball! The Blony connection makes some real sense here as Topps borrowed one of the proposed designs for 1956 Bowman baseball cards in composing the 1957 football cards. Here is a '57 FB for comparison:



Printed on the now standard 132 card half sheets, the first series had 88 cards and the last 66, for a grand total of 154. Beckett indicates 22 double prints in the second series, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a 66 card print run usually means all cards are printed equally. That is a story for another day though.

Unchecked

Following up on last episode's look at 1957 baseball checklists, we have received some scans from Firiend o'the Archive Doug Goodman that confirms the theory the checklists were printed separately from the regular issue cards and likely cut in strips. Here is the front of a 2/3 Series checklist, with some red title block showing on the bottom:



The back shows a similar story:



A checklist and corresponding contest card (which are about to be blogged upon in our next installment and which consist of four distinct dated guess-the-score contests) could have been printed together and inserted into the packs series-by-series.

1957 would be the last year of these bland checklists as a new paradigm was unveiled in '58. Have no fear though, we still have to take a look at what was in the football packs in '57 too!

Checking In

Today will be the day you read more about unnumbered 1957 Topps Baseball Checklists than you ever thought possible.

As we know, Topps issued some unnumbered checklists with their 1956 baseball and football cards. They started seeding in contest cards as well in the football packs and then in '57, amid shrinking their cards to standard size, there was a riotous frenzy of checklists, contests and premium cards added to the packs. I'll address the contest cards in my next post as this one is going to be long enough but you can see the premium card insert here.

Still actively promoting Blony, the gum brand that came to Topps with the Bowman purchase in February of 1956, the '57 baseball checklists had ads for that brand and Bazooka as well. I have to think Blony was a still big seller for Topps, likely in the Philadelphia area, since they were going into warp drive promoting Bazooka otherwise.

First we will look at the fronts. As you can see below, there were four checklists issued covering five series in total: 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5. Each checklist covered two consecutive series as Topps continued to work in previews of what was coming next, a meme that would grow and grow in the future.









You can see the blue/red/blue/red alternating header block pattern which appears to be consistent all year long but there are also three different style fronts; only the second and fourth series obverses look close to the same and even there they swap secondary colors. By the way, all the scans in this post are either culled from Ebay, Mike Wheat Cards or 707 Sportscards.

Those first two up top have wavy or off cuts which leads me to believe the checklists were cut at high speed from vertical strips. 1957 uncut sheets have been seen and while they are the first to be made up of two 132 card half sheets - a sacrosanct array for Topps stretching across four decades) - none have been seen with checklists on them so once again these cards were pushed into the nickel wax and whatever cello packs were sold that year.

The reverses carry either Bazooka or Blony ads. Here we go with Bazooka first:









While the ads don't change, the cardboard stock seems to, although it's always hard to tell from scans. The final Fifth Series header is also in Blue, matching the color on the front designating the Fourth Series while the prior three were Red, also matching their front Series designator. There seems to be no difference between Bazooka and Blony fronts but there is some variation with the Blony backs and if you look at all of the 2/3 fronts and backs together, that series does seem to have been printed on white stock whereas the others are gray:









Even the "Twin" goes to blue for the last series! The 4/5 checklists seems to be appreciably harder to finds than those from the earlier series. I can only speculate as to how they were seeded into the packs but the 4/5's could have coincided with the scarcer semi high number (4th series) cards in '57. Notice how Big Blony appears on the first two and Twin Blony on the final two. I wonder how the rough and tumble boys of 1957 liked the "made of...sugar 'n' spice 'n' ...everything nice" line?!

In case you are into symbolic gestures, note how the 1957 set matches the 1952 with 407 subjects, and includes team cards once again but also two multi-player cards of the Yankees and Dodgers (almost a first if you discount the 1954 O'Brien twins card) plus a combo of the league presidents, a sure fire bicycle spoke candidate. The first four series in '57 have 88 cards, which means each would have been printed three times over two 132 card sheets and a final series of 55, a number which seems to lead to short prints in the Topps universe (along with 77). I'll post a 1957 Topps Baseball set overview someday that delves into this more deeply.

For some reason the 1956 checklists seem to be in greater supply than the 57's. I find this odd as the normal Topps trendline is increasing production for each successive year but maybe more 56's were simply printed. The price guides seem to price the 3/4 checklist at about double the level of the previous two but supply of all three seems pretty similar. As noted above, the 4/5 checklist is the toughest by far.

Hang tight-a look at the 1957 contest cards will be coming up right quick! Meanwhile, we'll see if any of our eagle-eyed readers can find some further checklist variations.

Check Back Later

After issuing a couple of unnumbered checklists in 1956 baseball packs, Topps took the idea to the gridiron and issued a single checklist card that year, also "pushed" into the packs:



I had to grab that from Ebay as I have not yet waded into the 50's inserts personally.

With only 120 players in the set, there was no need for a second checklist. However, the flip flop of the colors from the first group of 60 to the last indicates to me two series were issued. This Ebay nab shows the reverse and a Bazooka ad:



Unlike the baseball checklists from '56, Blony Gum does not seem to have made the cut for football, although Topps would continue to market the historic brand aggressively for a few more years.

120 cards is an interesting figure as well as the cards would have been printed on 110 card half sheets (two of which comprise 220 card full sheets; half sheets are what almost all extant uncut sheets actually are) as seen in the '56 baseball checklists post. This gives 11 rows and 10 columns, or vice-versa depending upon your perspective, on a half sheet and it appears there are 20 short prints in the '56 football set, so we have a number divisible by 10.

I've never seen a full '56 FB sheet but if you take each 110 card half sheet and print 100 cards in the same quantity on each and then a different group of ten each in one column on each half sheet you can get to 120 different cards with 20 short prints very easily. This will be a discussion for another day as there is also some thought certain teams were short printed in their entirety and wouldn't you know it, there were twelve teams that year and at ten cards each you get 120!

Topps used the 1956 football set to start a trend that would continue into 1957, the contest card. Five or six different ones were issued, covering two separate dates (you had to predict scores of various games and mail in your response). Here is one that covers two games played on October 14th:



And here, in a scan I borrowed from a great online store called Quality Cards, is an example of the November 25th card:



Each date has (maybe) three different possibilities as different games were featured . I say maybe as the reverse shows these were actually numbered (or lettered) in a sequence as such, as revealed by Beckett:

C1, C2, or C3 for the three types of October 14th games (C must be for "Contest") and CA and CB for the November 25th games. There is a question as to the existence of the third type of November 25th card and since I can't find any good back scans of these at all, I'll leave that for another post as well. You can see the number or letter superimposed int he center of each card.

The contest cards appear to have been printed along with the checklist as this helpful miscut details:



The contest cards and checklist are tough and the checklist is difficult in nice, unchecked condition, much more so than one of the baseball versions. Miscut and off-centered checklists are frequently seen.

My feeling is that the contest cards were a way for Topps to see if their distribution network was working efficiently. After all, they now had tons of addresses from around the country and could see where their cards had been sold and it appears Topps tried to get a team from both coasts and middle of the country on each card, which would make a lot of sense for a nationally distributed product. 1956 was also the first year of the NFL's national TV contract, so the stars were aligned for Topps!

Check This Out

One of the earlier quirky items in the Topps pantheon goes back to 1956 and the inclusion of two unnumbered baseball checklists that were likely inserted only in nickel packs (and probably whatever larger cello packs existed) and for the first time gave the card buying public a look at the full lineup of players available to collect.

I once thought it was silly that Topps had never offered a checklist card to show who was in their sets but the truth of the matter is they were probably so unsure of what players Bowman would lock up or sue over that a published list might have made them look inept if it was full of holes. Once the Bowman purchase was finalized in the early winter of 1956 it was off to the races and they never looked back.

Topps used a skip numbered approach to the two checklists, showing Series 1 and 3 on one and 2 and 4 on the other. This was a smart move as it allowed a glimpse into the distant future (beyond the next series) and also marks the beginning of their later method of providing a preview checklist of an upcoming series with the prior series' cards. I call this the Theory of Checklist Relativity and I'll be exploring that theme further in 2010.

The two 1956 checklist cards are very basic in appearance:





Those above and all the other scans in this post are from long lost sources I am sorry to say. I sold my only '56 Checklist many years ago. The backs are similar but present a slight variation in appearance:





While these are not that easy to find in unchecked, decent shape today and nice examples certainly warrant a premium, there are plenty available on Ebay if you want them. These two backs are likely the same color cardboard, the scans make it appear one is lighter than the other but I don't think that's the case. Notice how the team cards (an innovation for '56) are highlighted in red.

I've been contemplating how and when these were inserted into the packs and the strange cut on the 1/3 checklist indicates it may have been part of a sheet sliced into vertical strips and cut at high speed as the strip moved through the cutter, as opposed to being cut as part of a larger stack that was lying flat when the blade or wire fell.

It is possible the checklist cards were printed on the regular, 110 card halfsheets in 1956 as there would have been some wiggle room, as seen on this first series example:



That right hand column is a double print of the one next to it; you could just run a string of checklists down the right side on the final run. However, I doubt this was the case and there were other insert cards starting to appear in '56 so all those contest and promo cards of a similar look may all have been printed outside of the normal set runs. These kicked into high gear with the '56 football set (which also has a checklist card) so Topps was clearly enamored of the process at the time.

To me the logical place to insert the checklists would have been at the end of the first series runs. I am missing a crucial bit of information though, as there is white and gray stock used for the cards in '56 and I believe only the gray stock appears with the checklists but am not 100% certain on that point. If that is the case, it may mean the white stock first series cards formed the first print run in '56.

I also am unaware of any anecdotal evidence of how these came out of the packs and if they only came out of packs with gray backed cards or if they could be found with whites as well. I would also like to figure out if penny packs only came with one color of stock but that is an investigation requiring someone more like Sherlock Holmes to get involved!