Topps Topics: Studies in Uncut Sheet Arrays - 1973 to 1992

 

Presenting the concluding part six of an ongoing series examining the use of short prints and double prints by Topps in their vintage era; part one can be found HERE, part two HERE, part three HERE, part four HERE and part five HERE. Today Mark Pekrul is taking a long look at the 1973 to 1993 press sheets for the annual Topps Baseball sets, a time when more cards were added in each successive year and also brought Topps just about to the end of issuing sports cards in series.  Mark, who posts as “deweyinthehall” on Net54 Baseball  has dug into these along with a couple of other stalwarts over there and worked to reconstruct most of the print arrays for all Topps Baseball series from roughly 1955 to 1970 (1971 and 1972 are mostly known but will be covered here nonetheless).  This work has essentially been compiled independently of anything I’ve posted previously. Mark maintains a website that covers Topps Baseball sets from 1965 to 1994 in some commendable depth as well,  CLICK HERE to be transported.

As a reminder, from 1957 through 1995, all Topps standard-sized (i.e. 2.5 x 3.5 inches) sets, sports and non-sports alike, were printed on sheets containing two large blocks of cards, 11 columns by 12 cards each.  This created discrete groups of 132 cards, in many cases giving us complete set counts which are very recognizable today – 132, 264, 396, 528, 660 and 792.  Some early hockey and football sets, as well as many non-sports sets, had only 66 cards – exactly half of 132.

Therefore, when we hear the term “uncut sheet” today, we typically think of a roughly 2' x 4' array of 132 cards. However, a full standard-sized uncut sheet was twice as large, and had 2 groupings of 132 cards (as above).  The outside margins were white (even for sets with colored borders, such as 1971 or 1962) and contained various notations including positioning and cutting guides and other errata.  They eventually even featured commodity codes, just like Topps used for cases, boxes and packs.

Down the middle ran a thick white space called the “gutter” – full sheets were sliced down the gutter before each half-sheet, or ‘slit’, was then fed into a cutter. 

Each slit contained 12 rows of 11 cards.   For ease of reference, we can label the rows A-L and columns 1-11. Any card position can then be designated as A-1 (far upper left), L-11 (bottom right), and so forth, as shown below.

             SLIT A                                                                      SLIT B

Here is the final, big burst:

1973 Topps Baseball – 660 Total Cards in Set

Series 1: 1-132, 132 different cards

Series 2: 133-264, 132 different cards

Series 3: 265-396, 132 different cards

Series 4: 397-528, 132 different cards

Series 5: 529-660, 132 different cards

In addition to a card count reduction of more than 100, 1973 marked the first year Topps’ baseball card set was not issued exclusively by series.  Depending upon where you lived in the country, you may have still waded through the set series-by-series as the year went along, or you may have received both card #1 and card #660 in the same pack in March.  Further, 1973 was the first year where, even if you received cards by series, the checklists were not reprinted in successive series, allowing each series to include exactly 132 different cards.  Thus, a nice round 660 (132x5) cards in the set.

Probably because of these differing packaging and distribution processes, most series were printed in two different ways.   

We know that series 1-4 were each printed in blocks of 66 cards across a full sheet:

Slit A: A, B, C, D, E, F, A, B, C, D, E, F

Slit B: G, H, I, J, K, L, G, H, I, J, K, L

We also know each was printed such that a single slit contained all 12 different rows, A-L top to bottom.

These images from series 3 illustrate this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                       

‘                                                          

For series 5, all we have are the two 66-card block slits.  There is no evidence that series 5 was ever printed in a full 132-card fashion.

What may explain this is that the 66-card block sheets were used for series-by-series distribution, while the 132-card slits were used for all-at-once distribution.  If this is so, each 132-card slit might have been paired with a 132-card slit from another series on a full sheet.  We don’t have any full-sheet images so this is speculative. 

In such a scenario, series 1&2 and 3&4 would be captured on two different full sheets.  When series 5 hit the presses, there was no need to pair with another series (or manner to do so without creating print volume disparities from series to series).  Hence, all we have for series 5 is the 66-card block formulation from which both types of distribution were drawn.

 

1974-1977 Topps Baseball – 660 Total Cards in Each Set

Gone were series.

All 660 cards appeared on one of five 132-card slits.  With exception of slits containing Traded cards in 1974 and 1976, it is believed that each full sheet featured two identical slits, with one having indicia containing a single * on back and the other **. 

What bears mentioning is how Topps managed the Traded set in 1976.

In 1974, evidence suggests that the 44-card Traded sets were printed separately from the main set, with three full sets per slit (four 11-card rows repeated in blocks, three times per slit).

In 1976, however, Topps took a different route.   One of the regular full sheets (with two slits formatted A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L) was reformatted such that each slit appeared (T=Traded Card Row):

Slit A: TA, TB, A, B, C, TA, TB, D, E, F, TA, TB

Slit B: TC, TD, G, H, I, TC, TD, J, K, L, TC, TD

This is illustrated in the images below.  Topps likely reduced the print run of the normal version of this full sheet in order to avoid over-prints. 

 

                                 

                                                                                                  

 

1978-1981 Topps Baseball – 726 Total Cards in Each Set

Remember that just a few years after MLB expanded from 20 to 24 clubs, Topps shrunk its sets from nearly 800 cards down to 660.  In 1978, the year after the Mariners and Blue Jays were introduced, Topps finally felt it was time to expand their set sizes again, but for whatever reason didn’t expand by a full slit of 132 additional cards.  Instead, they only went with 66 more cards, for a total of merely 726 cards per set. 

Adding just 66 cards created a challenge when formatting slits and sheets – do they print a 6^th slit with all 66 new cards printed in blocks, two per slit?  Do they over-print six rows from the other five slits on a new 6^th slit, and add the new 66 cards below or above them?  Nope.

What Topps actually did was expand to six slits, and feature a single double-printed row on each.  This would give each of the six slits 121 total cards, and, doing the math, this gets us to 726 cards in the set. 

So, from 1978-1981, each set features 66 cards which are double printed.  All 24 slits from these sets feature a row pattern of:

A, B, C, D, E, E, F, G, H, I, J, K:

                                              

 

                                             

The 24 double-printed E rows are:

1978:

1979:

 

1980:

 

1981:

 

So, if you recall getting an excess of certain cards as you were busting packs in these years (and I sure do), you now have a good idea why.

Also, 1978 was when Topps began affixing a lettered code near the copyright data on each card’s reverse.  Letters A-F were used and they corresponded to which slit from which the card was cut.  In the example from 1978 earlier in this section, this is the F slit from that year, and each card it contains features a little “F” on the reverse.  This system held through 1992, after which Topps began mixing and matching blocks of cards with different letter codes on the same slit.

 

Beyond

From 1982-1992, Topps sets featured 792 cards.  Each set was cut from six different slits, lettered A-F, which each featured 132 different cards, as in this example from 1983:

                                               

 

In 1993, Topps began issuing its base sets in two separate series, and started using slits which featured cards with more than a single print code letter on the reverse.  

Finally, in 1996, Topps changed things up completely and for the first time since 1956 did not utilize 132-card slits at all.

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This concludes Mark's look at a multitude of Topps sheet arrays.  We'll have a wrap-up/update post next time out.

Yellow, It's Me

An update post today kids, as some bits o'info have flowed in on 1974 Baseball team card markings covered here a month ago.

Here's a copy of the Red Sox "dot" team card from '74, as forwarded by Keith Olbermann. The offending blip is left of the team name:

Two points: that missing patch of sky looks like a spot of the card was lost; this is not indicative of how the dot variations look.  Also, something else is amiss, namely the left edge of that photo, which looks that way on many of the examples of the card I've seen, dot or no dot:

The problem seems to be a leftward shift in the yellow ink pass, this closeup reveals a yellow halo around the heads of the players and you can see the yellow bar has been pushed outside the outer black neatline:

1974 is not a year known for sharp, well-defined images but that's pretty bad.  Some Red Sox team cards came through ok though, although that gnarly strip of fuzz hard left in the image remains, so that seems to be a prep or proofing problem:

I do find it interesting that the three cards that have markings on their front all have yellow frame lines or team names (Pittsburgh has both, Oakland just one-the frame line). If I did this right, these team cards also all have yellow present:

Yellow Team Name: New York Yankees, Cleveland Indians, Houston Astros

Yellow Frame Line: Kansas City Royals, Chicago White Sox, Philadelphia Phillies, San Diego Padres

I don't know if any of this is significant or not but it may help narrow down the potential pool of marked team cards in 1974.

The 21 Club?

Friend o'the Archive Steve Schnaper has been sending in some scans of anomalous doings in the 1974 Baseball set, specifically related to certain team cards deployed by Topps. 

The scans started off with thIS Oakland A's card, which had a mysterious "21" printed next to the team name:

The reverse staining shows clear evidence of the card once being from a pack:

Following this, and noting the "2" and the "1' above are from two different typefaces, sans-serif and serif respectively, this Pirates card turned up with either a sans-serif "11" or two parallel lines in the same general area:

There's also a back scratch froma  pen on the card that Steve advises was not applied post-factory (hard to tell if that' s another 11 or not but it's pretty sloppy either way):

The A's card was sent in to SGC and determined to be authentic and garnered a grade of 4:

Steve also says he has found a Red Sox Team card with a front dot in the same general area as the other two markings and mentioned the Pirates card has now been slabbed by SGC.

Rich Mueller at Sports Collectors Daily posted about the A's card a little while back and a friend of mine with a LOT of 1974 team cards looked through his stash to no avail; neither had ever encountered anything like these oddities before.

If anyone out there has a clue what's going on here, please reach out!

Trading Spaces

Happy Hump Day folks!  Today's midweek peek features the 1974 Topps Baseball set-- and I do mean "set" --as Sleuth o'the Archive Roy Carlson has sent along his findings after a neat bit of detective work involving two players who were traded for each other on November 7, 1973: Glenn Beckert and Jerry Morales.

This Cubs-Padres trade was, I'm sure, quite a big deal in Chicago and certainly less so in San Diego. Beckert was the Keystone part of a longstanding Double Play combo with Shortstop Don Kessinger for the Baby Bruins, although he was at the tail end of his career at the time the trade was made. Morales was more of an up-and-comer for the Padres, a corner outfielder with enough speed to sometimes get the nod in center but essentially a replacement level ballplayer as it turned out.

As we all know, 1974 brought some uncertainty to the Padres franchise and a planned sale and move to the nation's capital began a slow and tortured path in April of '73, as DC area supermarket mogul and prospective Owner Joseph Danzansky became embroiled in various lawsuits, ultimately resulting in Ray Kroc--of McDonald's infamy--becoming the new owner on January 25, 1974 and allowing the team to stay in America's Finest City after coughing up what was then a whopping $12 Million.

Things got so far as a potential new name: the Stars, although Nationals (a keeper methinks) and Pandas also were being bandied, the latter due to the recent arrival at the National Zoo of Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, two Giant Pandas sent by China as a thank you gift to the United States as the result of a diplomatic thaw.  I was a ten year old lad when they arrived on our shores in 1972 and can tell you they were a major story and attraction at the time and for several years thereafter.  A prototype Stars road uniform was even created and modeled by Pitcher Dave Freisleben (he of the three variations in the '74 set) and you can get the vibe from the cap:

Nothing says class like having an electrical outlet in your promo shot, but I digress. Topps, of course, printed up about half the 1974 set with Washington "Nat'l Lea." showing as the team name for Washington before correcting things back to the San Diego Padres and allowing 15 variations to live on as a result (16 if you count the two varieties of the aforementioned Freisleben rookie card's font variation on the Padres version of card #599). Considering the NL Owners had approved the DC move on December 6, 1973 and Kroc ended up buying the team a mere six weeks later, you can see how Topps would have been embroiled with the Padres/Washington NL card changes.

Here's the Beckert variation:

You will note that despite the rewrite of the franchise information, Beckert is still in his Cubs togs on the corrected card:

It was easier to change text than a photo but putting that aside, unless they had a good head shot on file, there's no way they could have gotten a picture of Beckert in a Padres uniform in time to further update the corrected card.

Morales had a similar name/uniform mismatch in the other direction:

Now the reason I am dragging you down this particular garden path is that on the retail and full set boxes, whether through fate, serendipity or dumb luck, both players are featured on the graphics but on their pre-trade teams.  Here's Beckert, in splitsville so to speak (all scans hereafter are courtesy of Roy Carlson):

Morales is in the mix too:

In addition to the much more pleasing color coordination, you get a look at what must have been proofs of Beckert and Morales. and, I assume, all the other cards shown as well).  I imagine Topps could have updated the graphics but it seems like a classic "why bother" scenario, as you could not see their given or team names on the boxes.

Topps also went from a ten to fifteen cent pack at some point in 1974, the latter price point a significant departure from the practice of having their wee consumers pay no more than a penny per card, which had been in place since 1948 but was impossible to maintain post 1973 Suez oil crisis. (UPDATE: It does appear ten cent packs held eight cards only, plus a team checklist in some instances-thanks to gogosox60 and John Moran for that tidbit).

Here's all three boxes with the aforementioned graphics:

And the all important indicia:

Topps had a lot going on in 1974 for what was their first year of true "all 660" packaging, so it's understandable not everything was worth changing.  They came up with the idea of a "separate' set of Traded cards in '74 and then for some odd reason not bothering with such a thing in 1975 before they ran it back up the flagpole in '76.  That was it for being up to date until the boxed 1981 Update set was released to much criticism (due to no retail option) five years later.