Mailing It In

Topps changed their "pushed" inserts for the 1958 baseball and football issues from what had been done in prior years. Gone were the checklist cards which would be delegated, with one exception, to the backs of the baseball team cards and the guess-the-score contests of '57 had been reduced to divining the result of the upcoming All Star Game. 1958 Topps baseball deserves an in-depth look down the road as there are complexities within that far too tangled to reveal here today. A premium was offered via an insert card as well, reprising an experiment from 1956, of which more will be written another day as well. Today campers, we look at those insert cards, couresy of some scans filched from Ebay.

Upheaval was the name of the game in '58 and Topps may have cut back a little on the contest cards in order to deal with the fact two major league teams now played on the west coast. The sole contest insert had an All Star theme:



You could not only win prizes but cash! The reverse was the portal to unimaginable wealth:



In case you were wondering, the AL beat the NL 4-3 in a closely fought contest in Baltimore, in a game featuring 13 hits, all of which were singles!

You could also get yourself a nice, five inch diameter team emblem



All you needed was a single wrapper and a SASE (hopefully a big one) in order to get your emblem, as we see here:



You can see a sample emblem over at the Old Cardboard magazine website. The 58's reflected the new cities when compared to an earlier issue and also hawked the Bazooka and Blony brands. As mentioned above, the 1956 emblems will be addressed another day, as will their antecedent, the 1952 emblems.

Turning to football, all you could do was get a crummy initial:



This actually follows an old Topps them of offering numerals and initials so kids could make their own football jerseys out of an old shirt. The back had the details, sorry for the miscut:



As with earlier pushed inserts, I believe the contest and premium offer cards were printed separately as this misprint indicates:



As always, the football insert is much tougher to find than either of the baseball ones.

No C Saw

Hot on the heels of my last post, I received a scan of a contest card reverse from friend o' the Archive Mike Tavenner. You will see the "A" identifier also is on the back of the card.



He also sent a long a front scan, which differs from the Nov. 25 version I showed last time around and prominently features our ol' buddy Bazooka Joe:



Next on the hit parade, are there similar variations for each type and date?

Mike also confirmed there is no "C" version of the Nov. 25th card known in the hobby

I doubt if you could identify them now but I wonder if any of the contest prizes have survived the last 54 years?

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!