Stand Up And Be Counted

Part homage to their past, part acknowledgement of the 1964 Major League All Star Game being played in New York and firmly part of the onslaught of extras Topps issued to commemorate the Mid Summer Classic, the 1964 Baseball Stand-Ups have enticed collectors for almost 50 years now.  There are 77 cards in the set, all of the same design and in true Topps fashion, 22 single prints make things difficult for the set collectors among us while two-toned full bleed borders and the punch-out feature make mint cards a rarity even if you forget that they were only sold in penny packs with gum.

The cards are quite well done.  Here's a few atop some unopened penny packs:

Sorry but I don't have any notes as to where that scan came from.. It could have been eBay though. I think Topps mostly sold these in the one cent packs as they had another bonus baseball set being sold in nickel packs, the so called Giants (actually named Baseball All Stars). There are nickel wrappers out there but they are not abundant.. Friend o'the Archive John Moran has sent a scan of one:

You could also buy a pack of regular baseball cards and get a coin or two as an insert-1964 was a real active year for the ancillary sets.

Here is an uncut sheet scan, I regret it does not blow up too well and you can't see which player is which.  This was in the 2012 Robert Edward Auction:

The pattern can be discerned though.  There are twelve rows and the double prints look like so:

Rows 1 & 9
Rows 2 & 10
Rows 3 & 11
Rows 4 & 12
Row 5 & 8 (one is upside down)

Single prints are in rows 6 and 7.  The SP's are as follows (cards are unnumbered):

Baldschun
Cash
Clendenon
Culp
Drysdale
Gonder
Gonzalez
Howard
Lock
Lumpe
Marichal
Mathews
McCovey
Pearson
Roebuck
Santo
Spahn
Groat
White
Williams
Woodeshick
Yastrzemski

While I am not a huge fan of population reports in determining scarcity, the PSA totals for The Stand-Ups tell a fairly complete story.  There are 12,501 total graded Stand-Ups as of April 2nd.  Of this, a mere 10 are 10's and only 2.17% of the population grades out at an unqualified 9.  The Giants of the same year have more cards graded (30,989) while there are 269 10's and a whopping 12,71% of the graded examples are true 9's.