1968 Topps Mike McCormick - White Team Name

[toppcat]

Originally Posted by deweyinthehall

Thanks - can you explain what a "masking issue" is?

In general, the production process of Topps cards is still largely a mystery to me - some sites have offered up general descriptions of printing processes in general, but it would be helpful to understand precisely how Topps manufactured it's cards from start to finish each year in the vintage era. Are they any guides which provide this?

A mask would prevent ink from being applied on a certain color run in the offset printing process. Steve Birmingham is the go to guy for this stuff but I think in the case the yellow pass was likely impacted by an inadvertent part of the mask being left in place over the team name that was later corrected in the press run, or in second run, and allowed the team name to be properly inked in yellow once the offending portion of the mask was removed.

[steve B]

It probably is a mask issue. Which isn't exactly as described, but it's pretty close.

The mask is the plate sized negative, often a composite of several smaller ones that is used to make the plate.

For yellow letters they would have simply had the yellow print area be round. then have the blue with the team name unprinted go over that.

They probably had several team name negatives and just inserted the right ones. If they used one intended for the blue plate on the yellow plate mask, it would have unprinted areas in both for the team name, and white letters.

It's not missing yellow, if it was the team name circle would be blue.

[ALR-bishop]

I wonder what anyone associated with the Topps printing process back then would think about this quaint group of people here who speculate and worry about such stuff today

Always appreciate Dave and Steve’s input on print differences in cards

[cardinalcollector]

I discovered the Mike McCormick variation in 1986. Ralph Nozaki had a column in Baseball Hobby News back then. He was the Variation expert and the author of "The Mistake Manual" the first book on variations. I mailed both cards to him for verification and he wrote an article about it, I believe in the summer of 1986. I have since lost the article, but perhaps someone on Net54 can locate it and show it here? The funny thing about it was that my personal collection had the rare white version. I stumbled upon the yellow common version by sheer luck. At the time, I thought yellow was the rare one.