1968 Topps Baseball Design

[Sean]

I don't know what changed in the '68 Topps set, and in this forum I'll bet I'm not the only one.
Can you show us an example?

[Chris-Counts]

I like the second design better than the first, but how about putting this in the post-war section?

[bobsbbcards]

I like the wider-meshed burlap of the 1st series as well.

[toppcat]

I've always wondered if they had issues with the brown color in the first series. Brown seems to have caused Topps some issues over the years and juts a WAG but it does seem odd. They also changed the look of Football in '69 between series 1 and 2 from full bleed to white borders for some reason, so someone at Topps (Ben Solomon most likely) must not have liked the original look of each set.

[ALR-bishop]

In 1968 Topps also produced a special run of some of it's baseball, football and hot rod cards for a Milton Bradley Win A Card board game. There were 76 cards in the baseball subset which had the same fronts as their regular set counterparts, except for 49 Brinkman and 66 Cox, which have yellow team names. They are often treated as variations to the regular 68 set, but in fact are just MB cards

The chief way to tell the difference between the MB cards and their regular counterparts are the backs. MB card backs have light yellow as opposed to orange/gold backs. However, this phenomena is sometimes repeated in higher series regular cards which occasionally are offered, incorrectly, as MB cards. The game cards go no higher than card 195.

Back to topic. There is one variation to the MB baseball set. Card 107, the second checklist can be found with either wide or fine mesh as in the different series examples above. Meaning you really need 77 cards to have a full MB set...and you may not get it by buying a complete game.

I owe knowing about this variation and getting one, to MB master collector Carlton Miller:

[savedfrommyspokes]

Dr. Miller is one collector who has likely forgotten more about MB cards than most collectors will ever know....he is also very willing to share his knowledge as he has been a great source of information for me too.

[cardinalcollector]

When I was buying packs of 1970 Topps cards I noticed that the 1st series did not have a vertical white line between the name of the player and his position.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1970-Topps-1...item51a8ba0d55

The remainder of the set does have this vertical white line added. An exception may exist for players with a long name.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1970-Topps-2...item35c4b25a49

Has anyone else noticed this?

Randy

[JollyElm]

Originally Posted by ALR-bishop

In 1968 Topps also produced a special run of some of it's baseball, football and hot rod cards for a Milton Bradley Win A Card board game. There were 76 cards in the baseball subset which had the same fronts as their regular set counterparts, except for 49 Brinkman and 66 Cox, which have yellow team names. They are often treated as variations to the regular 68 set, but in fact are just MB cards.

As a v & e collector, I have to ask, is this a verifiable fact? I have never heard this explanation for those variations before. You'd think someone at Becketts, etc., would've made this distinction before.

[ALR-bishop]

Darren-- I think Bob Lemke would agree and believe Carlton above does too. I have them in both my regular 68 set and my MB set, but they all 4 have MB backs. If you have them, compare the backs to other backs from that series. They will be dull yellow versus yellow/orange. You could view the whole MB set as variations of the regular 68 set. Sort of like the 82 Topps Blackless set, which I also have, is listed separately in SCD, even though they are all just misprints from the regular 82 set. Carlton might not agree with that though :-) The MB set was an intentional separate print run. The Blackless were a printing mistake

I am also a long time variant collector

[cardinalcollector]

Originally Posted by JollyElm

As a v & e collector, I have to ask, is this a verifiable fact? I have never heard this explanation for those variations before. You'd think someone at Becketts, etc., would've made this distinction before.

The Cox and Brinkman variations definitely came from the MB set. This has been common knowledge for years among serious MB collectors.

Beckett is not the best source for accurate information along these lines. I have cataloged over 500 mistakes, errors, omissions, and duplication etc. from their last alphabetical checklist, and that was ONLY Cardinals. Most of these mistakes still exist in their online database. Anybody with a common name such as Jack Taylor (or John), or Craig Wilson, are almost guaranteed to be combined with everybody who had that name. I used to inform them of these mistakes years ago, but quit because they corrected very few of the errors.

As a side note, I discovered the 1968 Topps Mike McCormick variation in 1986 and was given credit from Ralph Nozaki in his Baseball Hobby News column.