Vintage Topps Print Run Info - Uncut Sheets

gemint

I was talking to Kyle Boetel at the SF show this past weekend regarding the strange distribution of vintage Topps cards. It seems that there are always handfuls of cards from most series' that are much harder to find in any condition than others. For example, if I flip through thousands of mid grade 1969 Topps baseball cards, I'll almost always find a ton of Preston Gomez, Al Dark, Denver Lemaster and others. But I rarely find more than a few of Mike Shannon, Mike Andrews, Dave Duncan and a few others. I could understand the high grade examples of these low pop cards being difficult to locate, but why would VG or EX versions also be difficult? Kyle wasn't sure why but hypothesized that those cards may have been on 1st series sheets that had a much lower print run than other sheets. There are no double prints in the 1969 set, so it's not due to one card appearing on a given sheet many more times than others.

Does anyone else know or have a theory? Did Topps have an uneven print run of various sheets within a given series? Inquiring minds want to know.

mikeschmidt

I thought that there was only one sheet per series....?

gaspipe26

There were 2 sheets per series. There are DP in 1969. I believe each sheet had 64 cards on it so with around 109 in each series, there would be 19 DP on it. I remember seeing 1969 sheets years ago. I do remember Mike Shannon on a corner.

mickeys

There are definately double prints in 1969 - first series at least. I recall the Luis Aparicio, the Nettles and the Clemente for certain are DPs among the stars and the checklist card as well as many of the leader cards. Haven't seen a sheet for 15 years but I recall those Dps. Possibly the Banks too.

Agreed though there weren't enough DPs to make the impossible cards that scarce - e.g., they are scarcer than the other cards similarly printed. They also must have been on the edges because as you say they are tough even in NMT.

We have some uncut sheets from 1966 and 1971 (series 2 and 1 respectively) if any questions arise about positioning on those years - nothing on 69 although I'm sure someone out there does have.

Mick

gemint

<< <i>There were 2 sheets per series. There are DP in 1969. I believe each sheet had 64 cards on it so with around 109 in each series, there would be 19 DP on it. I remember seeing 1969 sheets years ago. I do remember Mike Shannon on a corner. >>



Now that you mention it, I do recall seeing the 'DP' designator on some 1st and 2nd series cards. I would say that those harder to find cards appear to be much scarcer than the more common DPs. This phenomenon also extends to later series cards as well like the #663 Radatz and #620 Chance. The last series has that one short print, Tug McGraw, which is also strange since it isn't all that difficult to find plus how could there only be one short print on a sheet?

scottsusor

Wow, I haven't seen this topic discussed in about 30 years. But hopefully I can shed some light on why certain Topps cards have lower populations, at least for 1973 and before. 1973 was the last year Topps issued cards in series, as opposed to all at once, in case you didn't know. This comes both from personal experience and from discussions back in the early-mid '70s.

Back then, Topps wasn't terribly concerned with equal distribution of all card numbers. In fact, it was rumored, though never confirmed by anyone at Topps, that the company purposely destroyed many cards (specific cards, but chosen randomly, and never superstars) as they came off the cutter. Why? Because they knew that lots of kids were buying cards. Some were looking for favorite players, some were looking for all the players on their favorite team, and some were even trying to make complete sets. What better way to get kids to continue buying more and more cards than to artificially lower the number of certain cards that the kids could find in machines and packs? Pick one player per team, per series, and trash half (or more) of those cards before they went into vending.

What's intriguing here is that I can recall buying packs of 1969-1973 cards as a 10-14 year old, and often I'd see the same sequence of players, as if they were semi-sorted like that coming off the press, which probably was truly the case. However, every once in a while I'd be thumbing through the same sequence I'd seen several times before when Bang! -- there'd be a new card that I'd never seen in that sequence before. Often it was one that I either didn't have, or only had one other of. This is certainly not scientific proof that Topps was tinkering with the supply of certain cards but it does make one think that its possible.

Scott

CW

No theories here, but here's a sheet being auctioned off by
Mastro. This image might answer some of your questions.

curmudgeon

Good job CW:

As you can see, that sheet corresponds exactly to the 5th series checklist, which contains cards 426-512. That's 87 cards, and the 88th is the 5th series checklist (Mantle).

As you can also see, 44 of the cards are double printed and 44 single printed--the middle 4 rows are the singles. If gaspipe is correct, then the second sheet presumably would have these players flipped, with the singles becoming doubles and vice-versa.

Griffins

<<If gaspipe is correct, then the second sheet presumably would have these players flipped, with the singles becoming doubles and vice-versa.>>>
This is the series with the white letter variations-which would account for the uneven distribution of white vs. yellow letters. Does anyone know if this is roughly a 2:1 ratio? Or was the plate changed either later or earlier, so that the ratio is even higher?

mikeschmidt

Speaking of sheets,
does ANYONE out there have any idea what happened to the 1955 Bowman sheet that Bob Lemke referenced in one of his Baseball Card Magazine articles nineteen years ago? The image was pretty blurry, and I would just love any information about series distribution/sheet placement.....

MS

Fuzz

I believe that Gaspipe is correct on both matters, but in a different way. He was refering to the "half sheets" that sometimes appear I believe with 66 on a sheet. The full sheet is 132. If there were two full sheets with the "extras" flipped, then there would be no DP's has it would equal out. But there would be two half sheets. 61 Fleer FB hi numbers is a case where there are two full sheets with the cards flipped around. I believe there was only one large sheet for the 69 T BB so DP's should exist.
Griffins, I believe the "white letters" is a printers error and not contained to a different sheet. I suspect that it was an error sheet that was run for a while and then a corrected sheet that ran later for most of the production. I collected WL for years and they are hard to come by in any condition. I suspect that the ratio would be much much higher.
In general, cards that are "easy" are from one part of the sheet and cards that are poorly centered are from other parts of the sheet. This explains hi grade shortages (along with the DP) but not the shortage of low grade cards past the normal DP/SP.