Head Count

Today's episode is a confluence of a some older and newer threads on the 1968 Topps Giant Stand Ups set, a legendarily rare issue that is seldom discussed and even more sporadically seen.  I've presented scans of about half the set previously and thought it would be nice to top that off with a  fully annotated checklist as Friends o'the Archive Keith Olbermann, Al Richter and Bob Fisk have been kind enough to send the completing scans.

This is the checklist and it's worth noting the set appears in issued, die-cut form and also in proof form, which are thinner and have no die cuts.  Either is hugely difficult as these are among the rarest Topps cards ever issued:

1. Pete Rose - Outfield - Cincinnati Reds
2. Gary Peters - Pitcher - Chicago White Sox
3. Frank Robinson - Outfield - Baltimore Orioles
4. Jim Lonborg - Pitcher - Boston Red Sox
5. Ron Swoboda - Outfield - New York Mets
6. Harmon Killebrew - 1st Base - Minnesota Twins
7. Roberto Clemente - Outfield -  Pittsburgh Pirates
8. Mickey Mantle - 1st Base - New York Yankees
9. Jim Fregosi - Shortstop - California Angels
10. Al Kaline - Outfield - Detroit Tigers
11. Don Drysdale - Pitcher - Los Angeles Dodgers
12. Dean Chance - Pitcher - Minnesota Twins
13. Orlando Cepeda - 1st Base - St. Louis Cardinals
14. Tim McCarver - Catcher - St. Louis Cardinals
15, Frank Howard - Outfield - Washington Senators
16. Max Alvis - 3rd Base - Cleveland Indians
17. Rusty Staub - Outfield - Houston
18. Richie Allen - 3rd Base - Philadelphia Phillies
19. Willie Mays - Outfield - San Francisco Giants
20. Hank Aaron - Outfield - Atlanta Braves
21. Carl Yastrzemski - Outfield - Boston Red Sox
22. Ron Santo - 3rd Base - Chicago Cubs
23. Jim Hunter - Pitcher - Oakland A's
24. Jim Wynn - Outfield - Houston

As noted previously here, Rusty Staub and Jim Wynn are just shown as being with Houston; using the name Astros was a no-no for Topps until 1969 due to a trademark dispute between Monsanto and the team. Houston is an odd choice for two players representing the team as well. I get the extra player from Boston and St. Louis, teams that met in the 1967 World Series and even the Twins, who had been in the Fall Classic in '66 and were a game back in '67 but Houston was a 9th place team!

Also odd is the position distribution.  There are no 2nd Baseman at all, the NL is lacking a Shortstop and while they had four Pitchers represented, the AL had no one to catch!

Looking at it a little more closely, every player in the set was a 1967 All Star selection and every team has at least one subject, so that makes sense, but there were 53 All Stars selected that year and if you wanted to overweigh the NL team, the Giants had finished in second in 1967, and while a good ways back in the standings, they were a strong team at the time.  The Cubs were also good in '67 and with only a single NL pitcher included, Fergie Jenkins would have been a pretty obvious choice.  As an aside, did you know that Jenkins was never on a team that made the postseason?!

So what happened with this set's player selection?  My own guess is that Topps loosely planned a second series, although it's debatable whether another 24 players from the All Star rosters would have been all that interesting:

967 MLB All-Star Rosters
AMERICAN LEAGUE	NATIONAL LEAGUE
Rod Carew, MIN	Tim McCarver, STL
Carl Yastrzemski, BOS	Tony Perez, CIN
Tommie Agee, CHI	Rusty Staub, HOU
Max Alvis, CLE	Pete Rose, CIN
Ken Berry, CHI	Tom Seaver, NY
Paul Casanova	Fergie Jenkins, CHI
Dean Chance, MIN	Hank Aaron, ATL
Tony Conigliaro, BOS	Dick Allen, PHI
Al Downing, NY	Gene Alley, PIT
Andy Etchebarren, BAL	Joe Torre, ATL
Bill Freehan, DET	Ernie Banks, CHI
Jim Fregosi, CAL	Lou Brock, STL
Steve Hargan, CLE	Orlando Cepeda, STL
Joe Horlen, CHI	Roberto Clemente, PIT
Catfish Hunter	Mike Cuellar, HOU
Al Kaline, DET	Don Drysdale, LA
Harmon Killebrew, MIN	Bob Gibson, STL
Jim Lonborg, BOS	Tom Haller, SF
Mickey Mantle, NY	Tommy Helms, CIN
Dick McAuliffe, DET	Denny Lemaster, ATL
Jim McGlothlin, CAL	Juan Marichal, SF
Don Mincher, CAL	Willie Mays, SF
Tony Oliva, MIN	Bill Mazeroski, PIT
Gary Peters, CHI	Claude Osteen, LA
Rico Petrocelli, BOS	Chris Short, PHI
Brooks Robinson, BAL	Jim Wynn, HOU
Frank Robinson, BAL

I guess we will never know.  So on to the rest of the visual checklist (click the Label for this set to the right to see images previously shown).

These are courtesy of Keith Olbermann-Catfish Hunter has an airbrushed logo due to the original photo showing him in a KC hat and of course the two Astros had their lids wiped :

Here is a Clemente (proof), from Bob Fisk, another guy with a drool-worthy collection:

Here are the remaining three, courtesy of Al Richter.  A couple are proofs and that Cepeda might actually be a repro, although Al warned me it was a low-res scan.  Actually every Cepeda I've seen looks like the original picture is pixellated:

PSA has graded a total of 22 of these suckers.  Are they the rarest, issued Topps pure baseball set?  Could be, could be.

Stain Stick

I'll be posting a large number of real juicy scans of 1968 Giant Stand Ups soon thanks to a phalanx of JPEG's received from Friend o'the Archive Keith Olbermann but wanted to highlight something specific about the set today.

Despite extant (empty) retail boxes and (full) packs, the retail issuance of this set has been questioned by some as it's just so hard to find.  So what then does it mean when PSA has graded only 22 examples from this issue,wrongly ID'd as from 1967 to boot, inclusive of proofs? I think it means:

a) test issues are tough and;

b) any type of set that could be played with, punched out, peeled, scratched off or stood up is a lot harder to find in an otherwise apples-to-apples comparison than one that isn't and;

c) the set tested poorly.

There's some SGC slabs out there too but I can't make heads or tails of their pop report other than to note they have four Frank Howard examples graded (one is mine). But really, no matter how you slice it, not many of these things exists in the wild.

So anyhoo, take a gander at this Frank Robinson from the Olbermann collection:

Frank always seemed to be smiling! He's doing so here even though his reverse is gum stained:

So how did that stain get there if the set wasn't issued at some retail level?  And for that matter, how did poor Jim Fregosi get gum stained on the front:

Issued set, 1968.  Now, where did all those furshlugginer proofs come from?!

Yaz Sir!

The parade of things (mostly) never seen before continues unabated with a trove of scans (mostly) sent by Friend o'the Archive Al Richter concerning 1968 Topps Giant Stand-Ups.

As has been seen here previously, the set, while commonly described as being from 1967, was issued only as a test in 1968, as confirmed by the Oakland A's designation for the Jim Hunter card. Today though, our quarry is Yaz.  Here is his standard die-cut Giant Stand-Up:

These pop up very, very infrequently and any examples can properly be considered rare.  What's interesting though, is that an example of the Yaz (and presumably at least another batch of players) can be found missing a color pass:

Need more?  Proofs without the die-cuts exists as well, as this Heritage Auctions example from 2004 shows:

It was described as one of three Yaz proofs known at the time.  I am not sure if that figure has increased since then but I doubt it. These are thinner than the quarter-inch thick test issue. The other dimensions are 3 1/8" x 5 1/4" by the way.

Going back to Al Richter's scan-ucopia, here is the box that was planned for the set.  I cannot tell if this was assembled from a flat or was the actual box.

Topps Vault had sold a flattened box at one point but it was in worse shape than this one:

The packs are Mick-free and strangely feature what I think is a caricature of Johnny Pesky, a Red Sox legend and coach with the Pirates at the time.  Eh, maybe it's Jim Lonborg:

The pack was sealed with an instructional sticker:

I'm not sure why Topps thought this set was a good idea but they did follow up with an insert in 1968 Football that was somewhat similar.

Be careful out there kids, this set and its packaging has been reproduced!

A Wrinkle In Time

Another guest post from Keith Olbermann , wherein two crazy scarce test baseball and basketball sets are re-dated. The baseball dating is due to common sense but it took some sleuthing on the basketball side. Mr. O is referring back to his 1967 test USA hockey post here at the beginning but I've already run a post in the interim, so you'll have to stitch them together yourselves! 

The release dating of 1950-70's Topps issues for Basketball and Hockey, especially the latter, continues.

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Yeah, so the years on the “1968-69 Topps Basketball Test” and “1967 Topps Giant Stand-ups Test” sets are also wrong. 

       Sorry.

       These postulations doesn’t require nearly as much explanation as why that’s actually the 1967-68 Topps Hockey Test set, not the 1966-67. They both pivot not on a seldom-noticed pattern of player transactions, but the simple fact that cards in each set reference a team that didn’t exist in the supposed year of issuance.

       The Giant Stand-ups set is fantastic and imposing. The cards are the size of the ’64 Giant Baseball set, but about six times as thick. They feel like you could break some skin if you threw one at somebody. The color head shots against the shiny black background is just fantastic. And the set contains number 23, Jim Hunter, of the Oakland Athletics.

       The A’s didn’t move to Oakland until 1968. The cards could not have been made in 1967, unless Topps was guessing that the rumors were true and Charlie Finley really was moving the team at season’s end. By 1967 there had been stories — all circulated by Finley — that he was moving to Oakland. Or Dallas. Or Louisville. Or Seattle. Or staying in Kansas City.

       These cards were made in 1968.

       And by the way I have seen several supposed experts in the field declare that these were “uncirculated.” Nonsense. I can’t testify first or second hand that they were actually sold to store customers (as I can about ’68 Topps 3-D), but I have seen a bunch of these beauties which were evidently used as stand-ups and are missing the part of the card around the player’s head. I don’t think that’s an accident or something a modern collector did. Besides, the perforations required to create the stand-up required specialized production equipment. If Topps made these cards only for internal review they wouldn’t have wasted the money. The claim that they never left the shop probably results from the discovery a decade ago of a bunch of full-thickness proofs which do not have the die-cut impressions.

        Meanwhile, the basketball set, always listed as dating to 1968-69, is certainly not from that year. It’s possible — even probable — that the cards were printed and distributed (and again, too many roughed-up cards exist to suggest these never hit the streets) in the late winter or early spring of 1968, but the cards absolutely pertain to 1967-68, not 1968-69.

        There are only 22 cards in the set, and three of them show players (Zelmo Beaty, Bill Bridges, and the misspelled “Len Wilkins”) from the St. Louis Hawks. On May 3, 1968, the Hawks’ franchise was sold to Georgia interests who announced they were moving it to Atlanta for the 1968-69 season. The NBA approved the shift a week later.

                      

        If that’s not enough evidence for you, two months later Wilt Chamberlain was traded to the Lakers. Yet he appears in this set with the Philadelphia 76ers, and the image that the puzzle backs of this set forms also shows him in a Philly uniform. As illustrated on the back of Hal Greer’s cards, the socks on Chamberlain’s puzzle image have already been re-touched — the uniform could have easily been altered, too.

 If you’re testing to see if basketball would sell to the gum smackers of the late ‘60s, you’re not going to put out an outdated card of the sport’s biggest name, nor three cards from a team that had just changed cities.

        There’s also another bit of evidence that dates the set as 1967-68. Card #12 features the rookie of the year for that season, Earl Monroe of Baltimore. That fact is often used to support the 1968-69 dating. But look at it. The card shows Monroe in the uniform not of the Bullets, but in the generic garb of his college team, Winston-Salem State. 

        The other evidence used to backstop the 1968-69 date is the inclusion of Bill Bradley in a Knicks’ uniform. Hard to conceive this now, but Bradley’s arrival in the NBA was probably as ballyhooed as Wilt Chamberlain’s nearly a decade earlier. But after traveling to England to continue his education at Oxford for two years after the Knicks drafted him, Bradley’s debut was further delayed until December, 1967, because of military service. This would seemingly be conclusive — why would Topps scramble to get a shot of Bradley for a silly test card when any one of a dozen other stars could’ve filled the space in the set? — except that a quick perusal of the old basketball books and guides of the era shows pretty quickly that all 22 of the photos in the Topps set were publicity shots released by the teams. Monroe’s college shot was probably distributed by the Bullets as soon as he officially made the club in October, 1967 (or maybe even the day he was drafted), and I recently discovered that Bradley did a photo shoot for the Knicks in the spring of 1967, before going into the Air Force Reserves.

        When I first heard of this set some time in the ‘70s, it was always referred to as “1968 Topps Test Basketball.” I think that’s where the presumption came from that it was from 1968-69 — you hear “1968” and you don’t think “1967-68.” The decision to include two rookies like Bradley and Monroe suggests the season had already begun by the time the cards were put together, so it’s likely that they really were put out in calendar 1968.

        But, during the 1967-68 NBA season. Not the 1968-69 one.

Standing Tall

About a year and a half ago I posted on the 1967 Topps Giant Stand-ups. Well, a few things have happened since then that make this set worthy of revisiting.

The first thing that happened was that I managed to get ahold of an example for my slowly expanding Topps type collection. The next thing to happen was that an empty display box was found and auctioned last week at the National by Legendary Auctions and is purported to be the only one in existence:



Yes, that is the Mick! Here is a side view:



The other side is the same (like the bottom of the side) but the top if the side is different:



The back has the full ingredient list, Topps and copyright information and a product code, which brings us to the third newly learned thing:



The auction description indicates the code has an "8" suffix so these were a 1968 issue (or were intended to be one) and not a '67! Something clearly went wrong as these are very, very hard cards to come by. I would rate them as harder than the 1968 3-D cards (of which more anon) but about as tough as the 1967 Discs, albeit in a photo finish. The 1968 Discs would be rarer by a fairly large margin though.

The box went for over ten grand-wow!

Stand Up And Be Counted

One of the rarest Topps test issues of the 1960's is also one of the most sought after; a terrible combination if one is looking to even buy a single type example for one's collection. Yes, if you want to find something on most advanced collector's wantlists, look no further then the 1967 Giant Baseball Standups. Obtaining one of these has been at the topp of my wishlist for a long time now so I must be content with spurious scans from the wee corners of the internet until one is safely ensconced in my collection.

There are 24 oversized Stand-Ups in the set. As you can see from the test wrapper and instruction sheet (courtesy of a recent Leland's auction) these are black bordered headshots designed to be punched out and inserted into a base (also punched out) for display.



The instruction sheet was actually a sticker that closed the flaps on the wax pack, a little known fact Rob Lifson imparted to me. The wrapper shown above sold for over $2,500 in November of 2008, which shows how rare it is, even with the somewhat iffy condition it is in. I would think two cards came in each pack due to use of the plural.

The set is gorgeous, oversized at 3 1/8" x 5 1/4" and loaded with superstars:



That little V notch atop the Mantle is somewhat common to certain Topps test issues that do not conform to standard size or thickness (and these are pretty thick).





There's also a few guys who should have been Hall of Famers but are not for various reasons:



I think one of those two guys above will eventually get in.

Now if I ever do find an example, it will likely be a lesser light:



But most likely one of the least likely players in the set will be the one I snag:



For the record, the other 12 players in the set are:

Jim Lonborg
Ron Swoboda
Harmon Killebrew
Roberto Clemente
Don Drysdale
Dean Chance
Orlando Cepeda
Tim McCarver
Rusty Staub
Richie Allen
Catfish Hunter
Jim Wynn

If either Rose or Santo make the Hall, then exactly half the set will be comprised of Hall of Famers.

There is also a proof version on thinner stock of all 24 players, that does not have the die cuts.
Here is a scan of one, from the staggering collection of Bob Fisk:



These generally sell for a little less than their metamorphic counterparts but even a common in decent shape will set you back a grand or so. That is, if you can find one.

The talented Mr. Lifson also advises that gum damage can occur to these cards from when they resided in the pack and that examples with bits of black scrapbook paper still adhering to their backs came from Woody Gelman's personal scrapbook.

As the noted oddball dealer (I am referring to his inventory, not his personality) Steve Werley once said about these cards, if you see one, grab it!