Second Team

I'm on a bit of a Baseball Candy roll of late and today we look at what is the least popular of the five subsets that made up Topps' inaugural release of a standalone baseball set. That would be the Team cards.

I've written about these oblong,  gold bordered cards previously but there was a recent sale of a full master set of 18 at Heritage that caught my eye, although not my wallet.  Sets do come up, a bit infrequently, but every year or so one is offered at auction. It's unusual for the master set of dated and undated varieties to pop up but that too, happens from time to time.

Printed along with the Connie Mack All Star cards, PSA as of December 13th, had graded 1,053 examples of which the highest is a lone 8.5 of the dated Athletics card.  The dimensions work against them as a mere six straight 8's have been assigned and it's easy to infer high grade raw examples are just not out there. Meanwhile 996 Connie Mack's have been slabbed by PSA and 211 Major League All Stars. That's a different distribution from the last time I really checked, about a decade ago, with the spread between Teams and the Connie Mack's almost pulling even while the Major League All Stars have gone from about half the population of the Connie's to a mere twenty percent or so. Those MLAS cards are tough kids!

Distribution between the dated and undated Teams varieties seems roughly even and the least graded cards are those of the Giants, followed by the White Sox and Cardinals. I'm still tying to figure out if Topps used three different cardboard stocks and can say the recent Heritage lot only showed two, the brilliant white stock that seems to stay bright forever and the far dingier tan backs. I've long thought a cream stock exists but it didn't show up in this lot and relying upon scans doesn't always yield precise results. Let's take a look then at two different Teams, the Dodgers and Athletics.

The boys from Brooklyn were going to blow a massive lead in the National League pennant race by season's end but it was a dynastic squad that often brawled with an even more dynastic one in the Yankees from 1947-56, with six World Series clashes but only a single World Championship to show for it.

The back of this undated card shows off the brilliant white stock; it's a thing of beauty in a way:

Meanwhile the Whiz Kids got a National League Champions notation:

There was no Yankees card as seven teams were never produced, so no corresponding American League Champions card exists. The back of the Phillies card is also brilliant white:

They got two red pennants added on the back as well.

Now for the dated cards, which were issued after the undated ones, likely in a bid to avoid running afoul of Bowman.  Dodgers again:

Here's a closeup of the name plate showing the date.

The dingier card stock is easily discernable when compared to the white:

The Phillies stand tall...

...despite the dingier card stock:

That's how the whole auction lot presented; brilliant white for the undated cards, dingy stock for the ones with dates.

The offered set was ninth on the PSA Registry and a check over there shows sixteen master sets on the registry, with half of them at 100% completion. The Heritage lot was the lowest ranked set that was complete, with a GPA of 3.48; the no. 1 set has a GPA of  6.16 and only one other partial is above 6. 

These cards are not for everybody but many Hall of Fame players can be found in the photos and they certainly have their place in the history of the hobby.