Cards
Topps still synonymous with baseball, national pastime as longtime card maker celebrates 75th anniversary
When collectors think of baseball cards, there is one brand that instantaneously comes to mind: Topps.
Topps and baseball are synonymous with one another; the manufacturer is engrained in America’s National Pastime.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of Topps breaking into the trading card business. It’s quite a monumental feat for a company that was founded to produce chewing gum—cards were basically an afterthought years after the fact.
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While its licenses for football, basketball and hockey have come and gone over the years, Topps has never relinquished the baseball license. It’s quite apparent the sport holds the utmost importance to the tradition-rich company.
“There’s no other brand,” said longtime card grader Mike Baker, founder of Mike Baker Authenticated. “Most people don’t know what a Goudey is. They’ve heard of Cracker Jacks, but that’s usually in a box. It’s really the most iconic brand in collecting. There’s no doubt. I’m happy to say it’s still here.”
It’s 75 years of memories for collectors of all ages. It’s peak nostalgia for kids who grew up and frequented their local five-and-dime to grab a few packs of cards after school.
“There are so many connections to childhood that people have with Topps in trading cards and baseball cards in particular. It’s fond memories,” said Ryan Hoge, president of grading at Collectors, the parent company of PSA, SGC and Beckett. “I think people come and go in and out of the hobby, but there is always that kind of genesis where people go back to this point in their childhood that they have really fond memories of the cards, their friends, their favorite players, hanging out with their parents, going to games and that type of association. So, I think that’s one of the magical things about Topps baseball cards.”
Joe Orlando has always felt a deep admiration for the Topps brand. As a kid, he and his friends would buy the current Topps release and have a hard time waiting the entire year for the next product to come out.
“I grew up in the 1970s and through the 1980s, before the ’80s Topps was such a dominant presence that it was all about Topps for the most part,” said Orlando, executive vice president of sports at Heritage Auctions. “You had your regional issues, you had some esoteric card productions that were being released at the time, but everything was about Topps.”
When lifelong collector Lanny Ribes was growing up, Topps was always his first choice. The ubiquitous brand made it easy to collect.
“Not everybody had access to everything in all areas. I hear some people say, ‘I never saw Fleer in 1985. I never saw Donruss in 1984.’ But it seemed like everybody had access to Topps,” Ribes said. “It was everywhere. It was one thing that you and all your friends could get the same thing, and you could trade with each other, you could build the set because you knew everybody had them. It was almost like universal currency back then. It kind of brought us all together.”
Vintage Breaks and Just Collect owner Leighton Sheldon thinks Topps making it to 75 years is an incredible accomplishment. Going from chewing gum producers to successful card producers doesn’t happen by accident.
“I don’t want to be all sappy, but I think it’s a testament to life and what we’re trying to show our kids in the next generation is that anything’s possible,” Sheldon said. “It was Woody Gelman, a couple people and a dream. And, of course, Topps has changed ownership just a couple times and who knows, maybe it will change ownership again in the future. But the point is the brand, you have to argue, is really as strong as it’s ever been and that’s amazing.”
ELIMINATING COMPETITION
What started off as a small endeavor for Topps has turned into a multi-billion-dollar cash cow.
Topps—which was purchased by Fanatics in January 2022—has faced its fair share of competitors over the years. But companies such as Bowman, Upper Deck, Donruss, Fleer, Score and Sportflics haven’t been able to outlast Topps.
When Topps decided to produce its first baseball card set in 1951, Bowman was already in its fourth year of designing cards.
Topps released what amounted to pretty much a test run in ’51 and then really hit the scene in ’52 with a set featuring 407 cards spread out in two series, high and low.
The 1953 set was monumental before Bowman signed Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Bob Feller to exclusive contracts. That meant the three stars could only appear in Bowman products in 1954 and ’55.
“It’s kind of a shame we don’t have a ’54 Topps Mickey Mantle, for example,” Hoge said. “That would be a pretty cool card, if it existed.”
In the heat of competition, Topps bought out Bowman in January 1956. That’s when Topps started an era of dominance.
Orlando calls Topps’ purchase of its competitor a pivotal moment for the development of the company as well as the hobby.
“Bowman had put up a really good fight for a few years, but then after purchasing them and basically shutting the brand down, Topps was the player in baseball cards and other sports as well,” Orlando said.
But without competition, Ribes believes Topps got a little lazy with the photo selection and design of its cards. That started with the 1968 and ’69 releases.
“To me, anyway, not great designs,” Ribes said. “Some people like the burlap back. Nobody really likes ’69. But there’s a lot of redundancy. Hank Aaron is one of the best examples. It’s the same pictures both years. If you look at some of the ’68 and ’69 stuff, it’s pictures from three, four, five years before that, because you remember seeing that same picture on something else.”
Topps quickly stepped up its game in the 1970s and produced some phenomenal, vintage sets.
“It’s good to have competition, because it pushes you to be more innovative, more creative,” Baker said. “I think Topps did a great job. No one’s going to know what their product’s going to be at that moment, they only know it 30, 40 years later. Where you can say, that ’77 Topps Nolan Ryan is impossible, because this and that. And grading has brought a lot of attention over the last 35 years to just how difficult some of these Topps sets are. Like a white letter No. 569 Topps Mickey Mantle, that card’s notoriously off-centered, but you wouldn’t know that at the time. It’s just another variation of a card. Now, that card in a 9 is a million-dollar card. Like a ’63 Topps Rose, one PSA 10. That’s an incredibly difficult card to get.”
It wasn’t until 1981 when Topps was met with competition as Donruss and Fleer emerged as viable card producers. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Score, Upper Deck and Leaf joined the overcrowded field fighting for a piece of the pie in the baseball card market.
“With all the ’90s gold rush of manufacturers out there, I think that Topps set themselves apart,” Baker said. “They were like the brick-and-mortar brand that didn’t just come and go. They were one of the pillars of collecting and whatnot. Their longevity is kind of awesome. They weren’t like a cash grab. The reason why they’re still Topps is because they’ve kept to what they started with and I think they’re innovative, they’re understanding of where they’ve been.”
Even with more card options in the hobby, collectors have always known which company was tops (which is how the card company acquired its name).
“Even in the ’80s and ’90s when Donruss and Fleer and even when Upper Deck came around, Topps was always the one to get,” Ribes said. “Granted, you’d have your offshoots like the Upper Deck Griffey, of course, and Topps didn’t have him in 1989 until the traded set.
“For the most part, like in ’83 if you had Tony Gwynn, Ryne Sandberg, Wade Boggs, Topps was the one to get. Same thing with ’82 where the Ripken to get was in Topps. I think your collectors and your value guys always want the Topps cards and the Topps rookie cards because they know they’re going to hold their value over time.”
CLASSIC DESIGNS
Although the designs have changed year to year, Topps has stood the test of time and always been that one constant in the hobby.
“We could go set by set, year by year and in some cases the look of their product changed dramatically,” Orlando said. “A great example of that is when they first started in the 1950s, you look at their first several years of production and then it dramatically changed by the end of the 1950s, going to standard photography versus the colorized pictures that look more like traditional artwork. They have changed their design quite a bit, you see that certainly throughout their entire history.”
When Orlando started collecting in the 70s, there were some huge swings with Topps’ designs. But the company’s cards have always had a consistent feel about them throughout the years.
“When you get into the 1980s and some of the other manufacturers started to come into play, they had their own look and feel,” Orlando said. “By the end of the decade, when Upper Deck finally came into the business, of course, Upper Deck had a very distinct look and feel compared to the cards made previously. While I would say Topps does have a consistent feel about them, I do think they utilized a pretty wide range of designs to keep the product looking fresh.”
When Topps released its first set in 1951, it was all about experimentation. It produced two 52-card series, the red backs and blue backs. The playing cards had rounded corners and each card was just 2-by-2 5/8 inches—which is quite a bit smaller than the standard card size collectors know today. By the following year, Topps bumped its card size to 2 5/8-by-3 ¾ inches.
Hoge is a big collector of the 1975 Topps Mini set. He has about 80% of the set in binders in his office at Collectors. The colors and design from that set captivated him as a young child even though he had not been born yet when it was released.
“There are so many iconic designs, so many different generations of players where it kind of mirrored the eras, I think that’s the thing that’s kind of fun,” Hoge said. “You anchor some of these iconic designs for the era where it’s ’52 and ’56 Topps design, I think about Mickey Mantle, I think about Willie Mays. You fast forward to the ’60s, and I probably jump immediately to the Nolan Ryan ’68 Topps card #177 with the burlap sack style border, kicking off that next generation leading into the ’70s.
“Then the ’70s have some of my favorite sets, the ’71, the ’75—iconic, very condition-sensitive sets, iconic rookies in ’75. And then into the ’80s, starting the generation with the Rickey Henderson year and kind of ending when we got into the mass-produced so-called junk wax era, which was my childhood. I have fond memories of all that stuff.”
Ribes recalls his first year of collecting was 1982. That Topps set is engrained in his mind and it’s his favorite of all, despite it not being one of the most popular designs from the company.
Most years, Topps has used customary white borders. However, 1962 and ’87 were outliers with the wood grain, while ’75 and ’90 feature colored borders.
“I’m a big black border guy, but at the same time the one thing that has really always drawn me to Topps is a nice, white, defined border,” Ribes said. “They had a couple years there, 2016 and ’17, ’18, I believe, where it was a full bleed to the edges, I’m not a big fan of that. I like the white border. I like the picture, looking like it’s a frame. I like a nice, clean design, easy to read and everything else. Overall, Topps has done a really good job of that over 75 years for sure.”
As a company, Topps hasn’t gotten to where it is without hitting some bumps in the road. But it has smoothly adapted to the times and continued to thrive.
“They’re pushing more innovation, especially in more modern years when you start looking at what’s happened over the last five to 10 years, as the collecting demographic has changed a bit and I think what the interests are of the modern-day collector,” Hoge said. “Some of the innovations that they’ve done with the MLB Debut Patch program, awesome. Love seeing that. Love that they’re taking that to other sports, too. One of the cooler things I think we’ve seen in the hobby over the last decade. Then just continuing to make sure that they’ve got products at different price points too for their different types of collectors and budgets.”
1952 SET
When collectors think of Topps, there’s a good chance the 1952 set is front and center. It is packed with great players in the early parts of their career, including Mantle, Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson.
This set really embodies what Topps brought to the table—true pieces of artwork—in its early years, noted Orlando.
“When you want to debate or come up with a list of what the most important post-World War II cards are, I don’t think there’s any question that the 1952 Topps set is the premiere post-war sports card set ever produced,” Orlando said. “Even though Topps had come out with some other issues the previous year, some smaller releases, that was their real coming out party in 1952. And one of the things that they did—and they actually promoted this on their packs and on their boxes and in their marketing material—they said, look, we’re coming out with our new products. Look at how much bigger and brighter they look. They really focused on the size of their cards where they were introducing a larger format for collectors. Now, when you look back, there is something about just the visuals that you see, especially the ’52 Mantle. It really has become pop culture art as much as it is a baseball card.”
It’s astonishing to Baker that Topps produced its most iconic set of all time in what many collectors consider the first year the company released a full set.
“No one understood what the artwork was going to become like paintings and tapestries of Mickey Mantle valued between $40 and $50 million in a PSA 10, and now it’s like a Mona Lisa,” Baker said. “Back then, the cards were sold ancillary to the actual gum that was sold. No one paid any mind about the cards; it was all about the gum.
“Don’t get me wrong, there were tons of collectors at the time that were all about it. But they were flip cards, put them in your bike spokes. Who knew there would be three Gem Mint copies out there that are just worth eight figures.”
The 1952 set was the start of something special for Topps and the hobby. The company has been riding the wave the last three quarters of a century.
“I think they caught lightning in a bottle,” Sheldon said. “In other words, if you had to start today, I don’t know if Topps could exist. But they started in a time period where cost and barrier to entry was low. They started to catch amazing guys, starting with Mickey Mantle. What if there was no Mickey Mantle? Do you think Topps would be the same today? I don’t believe they would be.”
