Cotton Pickin'

Well gang, it's been over decade since I last took a look at the 1976 Topps Cloth Baseball Stickers. Thanks to a recent Love of the Game auction, an interesting proof or concept piece has turned up.

The stickers themselves are of course,a  two man set: Duffy Dyer (shown as a Pirate) and Bob Apodaca (depicted with the Mets).  The unique thing about the prototypes is that four different textures were believed to have produced, some with out any backing affixed.  These were:

Thin Felt
Thick Felt
Textured Felt
Silk

However, the LOTG lot featured two additional types, namely an almost sheer cotton material and a thin paper version, which looks like final production proofs on bright white paper, which was how Topps would check colors back in the day, as evidenced by the 1967 Baseball white proof panel that I showed here almost around the time I first posted about these stickers:

The reversed images are interesting as at least one type of material had the image printed on the reverse of sheer material.  I wonder if Topps also experimented with iron-ons as well, given the cotton proof panel LOTG offered:

The lack of uniformity and upside down examples among the spacing is odd, no?  The Dyer/Apodaca combos match the sticker backed two card panel I own and in my last look at this set I opined the Dyer seemed a bit easier then the Apodaca to find (across all types of material).  If the 5:4 ratio on the panel above holds true, that would explain why.

I suspect there is even more to learn about this "set".  Some type of small hoard of at least one material type must have been unearthed at some point in the last 15 years as they are offered somewhat regularly on eBay.

Two Man Advantage

Topps tried for seven years before they were able to issue a cloth sticker baseball set. The 1970 materials test was discussed here a while back and I will shortly post on the more readily available 1972's but there was also a tiny test in 1976 that mirrored and then expanded upon the materials experiment six years prior.

Only two players comprise the checklist in 1976, Bob Apodaca and his former Mets teammate Duffy Dyer (I will refrain from using our childhood nickname for ol' Duff but you can imagine what we did to his last name). In addition, four different types of materials were tested in '77, ranging from thin to thick cloth and veering into the realm of felt and ersatz silk, the latter of which ended up being very close to the material used for the well known 1977 issue (also unblogged upon at present). Here are the two players in uncut "silk" form:



It is a bit strange the cards were oriented upside down in relation to each other as I once held in my hands an uncut vertical strip of the felt Dyer cards that were all oriented the same way; Topps normally did the upside-down trick when full bleed borders made it convenient (1953 and '54 Baseball are prime examples of this) but these borders are white. I also handcut a Dyer from said strip but alas I cannot find among the flotsam and jetsam here at Archives HQ. The felt was sheer though and I doubt ever had a backing attached.

Speaking of backings, the uncut strip has the typical brown Topps backing used in the 60's and well into the 70's:



Despite the wrinkling this strip is still pretty well integrated.

The 77's of course had a white backing with printing but I'll show that in the '77 Cloth Sticker post I am working on (don't worry, through the magic of labels you can view them all together eventually).

Here is a scan from a mis-remembered source showing all four types of material tested:



Just so he doesn't feel lonely, here are three types of Dyer's, from an Ebay auction I unfortunately lost a while back:



Apodaca seems in shorter supply generally than Dyer but there is a fairly good amount of these out there, unlike the situation about twenty years ago when they were pretty hard to find.

I can't recall another tested product that took longer to materialize in the marketplace than the baseball stickers. Seven years time to do so must have meant Topps had technical difficulties with the cloth material, which I will adress in more detail when I get to the 72's.