A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article called 10 Random Post War Baseball Card Facts and wanted to follow up with a few more bits of hobby info.
1
1968 Topps 3-D are so rare that the only rumors of them in stores were a brief stint in some Brooklyn candy stores over the summer. PSA has only graded ~700 of them.
2
Topps couldn’t get licensing rights for Richard Dreyfus or Francois Truffaut, so the two main characters of Close Encounters of the Third Kind aren’t in the 66-card set from 1978.
3
Topps retired card #7 in its sets after 1995 when Mickey Mantle died and reserved the number, on rare occasions, for Mantle himself.
4
Perhaps no more than a dozen 1968 Topps Test basketball sets exist (it’s a 22 player set).
5
If you think the 1969 Topps Deckle Edge Baseball card set is just too tough to find in high-grade (zero PSA 10s and 62 PSA 9s with almost 8000 cards submitted), maybe try the 1970 OPC Hockey Deckle inserts. After nearly 2000 submissions, there are a whopping 29 PSA 10s.
6
Stan Musial played from 1941-1944 and 1946-1963, but his first Topps card was the 1958 All-Star since he didn’t sign a contract with the company until 1957.
7
The 1950 Scott’s Chips George Mikan has only been graded by PSA 13 times. The set was distributed in potato chip and cheese potato boxes regionally. It’s even rarer than most regional releases because the cards were redeemable for game tickets and autographs.
8
Jean Beliveau is pictured on Dickie Moore’s 1953 Parkhurst card.
9
A big hobby rumor is that Reggie Jackson wanted to acquire 563 of his rookie cards to sign when he got into the Hall of Fame.
10
Fleer and Donruss entered the card market in 1981 because, in 1980, the government ended the Topps monopoly.
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