I recently shared the following photo of a 1975 Topps Baseball Mini Cello Pack with George Brett on top to the PostWarCards Twitter audience.
Unfortunately, the pack is fake. Any 1975 Topps Cello pack (mini or regular) with George Brett on top is fake.
I wrote a blog post about the proper 1975 Topps Cello collation in July 2020, but after my tweet, many people continued to ask me how we know those packs are bad. I thought the topic warranted a quick blog post, simply for the improved historical searching power and googleability of these blog posts compared to tweets.
The holder is a legitimate PSA holder. No one hacked apart a PSA case and inserted a cello pack. PSA mistakenly authenticated a bad pack (the holder is an early generation one). This pack would not pass authentication today. PSA graded it before collation was widely understood in the marketplace, around 2010-2011, and got duped by a talented resealer.
The short of it is that Topps built 1975 Baseball Cello packs from cards cut from both single and double asterisk sheets. On top of the gum, the first seven cards have two asterisks, and the 11 cards behind the gum have one asterisk. And George Brett is a single asterisk card (again, see this blog post for more details on collation), so it can only be on the bottom of cello packs.
That 1975 Topps pack with George Brett on top is currently listed for $4k and has 21 watchers. What’s worse is that the population report shows that there are 5 of these 1975 Topps Baseball Mini Cello packs with George Brett on top. There is also one regular-sized 1975 Topps Cello Pack with George Brett on top AND the bottom, among other bad packs.
Resealers were using the best card in the set to make extra money.
So please do not buy these packs – any 1975 Topps Cello (Regular or Mini) with George Brett on top is a fake.
If you have any other questions, please post them in the comments or reach out to me on Twitter.
So how are so many “fake” packs getting authenticated by Steve Hart & PSA? I thought he was the “expert” of “experts”…..
It was a long time ago before the hobby pieced together more information. He’s still the most knowledgeable in the industry.
I have a pack with Brett on top that I bought in the late 1980s. With that in mind, should I just open the pack? What would yo do?
I’m sure a lot of folks would be curious about the collation of the pack if you did open it. In the past, when I’ve bought bad packs to get them off the market, I’ve busted them. Often there have been cards from other sets inside. I’d visit the FB group “vintage wax and packs” and start up a conversation about it before opening it.
what is the theory when you would of opened a pack and had duplicate cards in same pack of common players. I am talking back in 79 thru 83 because I recall this happening to me a few time, I can remember this from wax and rack packs. Is there a chance that some packs were placed out of order?
Not sure I follow what you’re asking.