One of the non- card items I collect was laid out by hand, and in a rush Out of a sheet of 100 of the same object every instance was put on the plate tilted. Every single one. Outside of the rare bit of sloppy cutting (where yes, they had some awful miscuts) there are none that are centered properly.
While the exact details of the entire process were probably treated as trade secrets by Topps, they wouldn't vary all that much from industry standards.
The masks (Large sheet sized composite negatives) used to make the plates were assembled by hand. I don't recall the shop I worked for making any mistakes in that department that made it to the pressroom. But we did high quality lower production work and Topps printed millions of cards regularly.
Getting one card, or even a group of cards crooked compared to the rest of the sheet wouldn't be all that hard, especially with a design that has a rounded upper border.
If we had a decent scan of that part of the sheet, maybe the lower few rows, we could probably measure the tilt.
Looking at uncut sheets, another thing I notice is that in 72 the dashed lines along the sides and bottom of the sheet appear. Earlier sheets don't have them.
Those lines to me indicate they switched to an automated cutting system, one that probably cut the cards essentially as they came off the press. Similar dotted lines were used on other things as a guide for the "electric eye" that guided the sheet through the cutter. A system like that may have cut vertical strips. The 79s with 78 backs I got when they were originally found came as a vertical strip. (It's also totally possible the people who found them found intact sheets and cut them as strips themselves, although strips instead of panels is an odd choice. )
That system may have drifted a bit, making the tilt worse. - In other words, a card slightly tilted on a sheet was then cut even more tilted, but still with all corners at 90 degrees by an automated system the factory wasn't quite used to.
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