[nolemmings]

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the traded set had been configured by mid-December. Topps decided upon a 44 card set, which is one sheet with the cards printed thrice. There’s no way they can count on there being that many total trades in December/January–recent past history strongly suggested otherwise–much less trades of meaningful players worthy of their own cards. Thus they already had to know that almost if not all of the trades were in the bank before going forward. As it turns out, 39 of the 43 players in the traded set switched teams between December 3 and December 11, with the others having done so earlier.

By December 12, then, Topps probably had its traded set composition, and it was just a matter of airbrushing selected photos and drafting some brief text for the card backs. If they tried to acknowledge a change in the regular set, there would a hole to fill to get back to 43 Traded (plus checklist), and they would have to count on subsequent player movement, little of which really happened (the only trades involving players on a regular 1974 card made between 12/11/73 and 2/1/74 were for Jack Aker, Mike Ryan and Jackie Hernandez, the latter two being swapped on the last day of January).

Sooooooooooooooo, instead of having planned all along to have a traded set, it seems to me Topps was so overwhelmed with player movement in that first week plus of December that they knew they couldn’t make all necessary changes before print time and decided to issue a traded set because they knew they would have 43 players to fill it. Rather than changing a couple or so of these in the regular set and then wait for the January trades, they finalized their selection well before year end, and printed the Traded set then or shortly thereafter.