Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

I was looking through some 1968 and 1969 Topps football cards yesterday, and the Steelers’ “Batman” jerseys caught my eye. Looking at the Steelers cards together, I wondered if the Batman jersey photos had all been taken in the same session. It’s possible: I did some Googling and found that the Steelers wore the jerseys for only a season and a half, from the middle of the 1966 season to the end of 1967. My guess is that the photos were all taken before the 1967 season.

An article on team’s web site recounts the full story, but the gist is that, in the midst of the 1966 season, the Steelers decided they wanted their uniforms to be more distinctive. To achieve this, they incorporated a “golden triangle” into their jerseys. This was meant to represent Pittsburgh’s downtown, called the Golden Triangle because it sits between two rivers that give it a triangular shape. (A nice photo I found on Wikipedia shows the triangle.) According to Wikipedia, the players didn’t like the uniforms, because they thought the jerseys looked like Batman’s bat-suit. In 1968, the team reverted to a more standard uniform design, which you can see on 1968 KDKA Steelers cards. Too bad, I think. I kind of like the caped look.

Oddly, though the Steelers were wearing the Batman uniforms going into the 1967 season, the uniforms appear on only one 1967 Philadelphia football card, the Giants Play card shown here. This card shows the Giants and Steelers in their December, 1966, game in New York. All of the 1967 Philadelphia cards of individual Steelers, however, show them in older uniforms. The Batman jerseys didn’t appear on cards of individual Steelers until the 1968 Topps set, after the team stopped wearing them. The jerseys also appeared on several 1969 Topps cards, and on one 1970 Topps card, Chuck Hinton.

Along with the 1969 Topps Andy Russell card above, here are all of the cards I found that picture players wearing Batman jerseys. Click on any card to get the details about it. There are also a few photos of the Batman uniforms–including a great team shot–on UniWatch’s 1966-67 Steelers flickr page.

As I’ve written before, my favorite pose on a football card pictures the player about to put on his helmet. It’s fun seeing old helmets on cards, but if the players are wearing them, you can’t see their faces. Here are a few examples; for more, see an old post, My Favorite Pose.

1963 Topps Ernie McMillan and 1966 Philadelphia Don Chandler:

1967 Philadelphia Gail Cogdill and 1968 Topps Junior Coffey:

1968 Topps Dan Reeves and 1969 Topps J.R. Wilburn:

What is My Card Worth?

I get a lot of email from people asking what their old football cards are worth. To answer this question, I put together a couple of web pages, Football, Baseball, and Other Sports Card Values and Where to Sell Football, Baseball, and Other Sports Cards. For quick answers, check out those pages. For more details, read on.

Most times, the answer is “not much.” The reason is that most vintage cards are not rare: the card companies printed great numbers of them, and their supply far exceeds demand. Our moms threw out a lot of cards, but just as many cards survived the years.

Not many of them survived undamaged, though. When we bought the cards as kids, we played with them and beat them up. We flipped them, put them in our spokes, sorted them every which way, wrote on them, and then tossed them into shoeboxes. I still have some of the cards I bought as a kid, and most of them look as if I kept them in my back pocket. Some of those priceless gems are pictured here.

So, though most cards aren’t rare, they can be scarce in perfect or near-perfect condition. (See G is for Grading.) This is where demand can exceed supply and push prices up. Serious collectors seek cards that look like they’re straight from the pack, and when there are more collectors who want a card than there are high-grade examples of it, the card becomes valuable.

Some cards are rare in any condition–1894 Mayos, for instance–so even the beat-up ones are valuable. If you find one of those behind the fridge, hang onto it. Nobody has asked me to appraise a Mayo, yet, though. Typically it’s a water-stained 1974 Topps Art Malone card with “Jimmy” written on the back.

Factors Affecting Supply

There is no way to know exactly how many copies of a card were printed or how many exist in high grades. There are, however, indicators of supply that people who write price guides take into account when assigning prices to the cards. Some examples:

• Relative scarcity – Though exact print numbers of vintage cards are not known, with experience in the hobby, you can begin to tell which sets were printed in greater numbers than others. My experience tells me, for example, that high-grade 1959 Topps football cards are easier to find than 1958 Topps cards.
• Series – The card companies sometimes released cards in series: Series 1, Series 2, etc. Some series had smaller print runs than the others, so the cards in those series are scarcer. Typically the later series had the smaller print runs, presumably because kids buying the cards lost interest as the season went on.
• Short prints and double prints – Each card typically appeared more than once on an uncut sheet of cards. If a card appeared less often than most of the others, it is called a short print. If it appeared more often than most of the others, it is called a double print. A series can have either short prints or double prints–depending on which were the exception on the sheet–but I’m not aware of any series with both. See my 1963 Fleer Virtual Uncut Sheet page for an example of a sheet containing short prints.
• Errors and Variations – Some cards had errors that were corrected during production, so both the error cards and corrected cards were printed in smaller numbers than the rest of the set. (See E is for Error Cards.) Some cards had two or more variations–for example, Lance Rentzel’s name appeared in either black or red on his 1970 Topps card–and each variation was printed in smaller numbers than the rest of the set.
• First and last cards – Theoretically, the first and last cards of a set got more wear from rubber bands and such, so their supply in high grade is lower. I think it’s bunk, but the price guides price the first and last cards significantly higher because of this assertion.

Another factor that affects a card’s supply in high grade is where it was on an uncut sheet. (See U is for Uncut Sheets.) The corners and edges of uncut sheets tended to get damaged in production, just as the corners and edges of individual cards do when handled. This tendency is hard to quantify, though, and as far as I know, none of the price guides take a card’s sheet position into account. The example I always use of a scarce corner card is the 1960 Fleer Jim Woodward, which you can read about on my 1960 Fleer virtual uncut sheet page. Though all 1960 Fleer cards were printed in equal numbers, the Woodward card, which was on the bottom left corner of the printed sheet, is much scarcer than any of the other cards in the set.

As I said above, to my knowledge, in years past, the card companies did not publish the number of cards they printed. (Perhaps they do now; I don’t know much about modern cards.) The card grading companies, however, keep records of how many of each card they have graded. These records are called population reports. If you have a subscription to PSA’s population report, for example, you can go to their web site and find out how many 1960 Fleer Jim Woodward cards they have graded (eighteen, as of today), and how many they have assigned a grade of 9 (just one). By looking at the population reports, you can get an idea which cards are scarcer than others. Population reports are imprecise indicators of the overall population, though: collectors tend to get expensive cards graded more often than cheaper ones, and sometimes they crack graded cards out of their cases and get them re-graded, throwing off the population numbers. Plus you never know when the person holding all the mint Jim Woodward cards is going to fetch them from his mom’s attic and send them all to PSA.

Factors Affecting Demand

Moving to the buyer’s side of the transaction, here are some of the factors that affect demand. I have discussed most of these in earlier articles.

• Set popularity – Some sets are more desirable to collectors because of their design and the players they include. For example, most football card collectors really like the 1955 Topps All-American set.
• Player popularity – Some players are more popular than others, naturally. Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, and players who were famous outside of football (e.g., Jack Kemp) are usually more in demand than average players.
• Player potential – This is much bigger factor for players who are still playing, but it can also affect retired players who are Hall of Fame candidates. If a retired player–for example, Jerry Kramer–still has a good shot at the Hall of Fame, the prices of his cards will tend to be higher than the cards of a player who is not being considered.
• Rookie cards vs. non-rookie cards – Collectors like to collect rookie cards, especially of Hall of Famers. (See R is for Rookies.)
• Team popularity – As I wrote in an earlier article, some teams have a larger following than others. I find that Packers, Raiders, and Cowboys cards sell more readily than cards from other teams.
• News – A player’s death or a team’s performance can increase the demand for that player’s or team’s cards, though this effect is usually temporary.

Price Guides

I presume that to assign the prices to the cards in a given set, people who write price guides gather a sample of actual retail card prices, then consider the factors above to get the prices for the rest of the cards. The assigned prices are usually in the ballpark, but there are plenty of cases where they are not. Often cards are much scarcer in high grades than the price guides indicate, and sometimes they are far less in demand than the price guides appear to think they are.

In addition to price guides, there are services that provide a history of the prices realized for graded cards on eBay and in other auctions. The services are useful, but their sample sizes are often small. If three PSA 8 1967 Philadelphia Atlanta Falcons logo cards sold on eBay in the last year, and their selling prices were $72, $49, and $25, what should you expect to pay for one? And are you willing to search eBay each week and wait for the next one to appear? I use these services, but I also consider other factors when deciding what to pay: the prices realized for similar cards, how frequently the card is available for sale, the person selling the card, and how nice the card is for the grade. To me, a PSA 7 that is well-centered is worth a premium over one that is noticeably off-center.

The bottom line is that no price guide or pricing service is perfect. They will usually get you in the ballpark, but keep in mind that the prices can be based on small samples or large generalizations, so the prices for some cards can be off by multiples. As with anything, the more educated you are and the harder you shop, the better bargains you can find. Personally, I try not to sweat it: if I pay a reasonable price for a card I want, I’m happy. Sometimes I’m happy even if I pay an unreasonable price. For some people, the thrill is in getting cards as cheaply as possible; for me, fretting over a few dollars takes the fun out of it. To each his own, of course.

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• All of the ABCs

In 1964, the Philadelphia Gum Company obtained the rights to print cards of NFL players, and they did so from 1964 to 1967. (See P is for Philadelphia.) For those four years, Topps switched to printing cards of AFL players. The cards that the two companies produced reflected the images of the leagues: Philadelphia’s NFL cards were conservative and consistent, and Topps’s AFL cards were colorful and innnovative.

In 1968, after the NFL and AFL agreed to merge, Topps obtained the rights to both leagues, and Philadelphia stopped printing football cards. Topps closed out the decade with two colorful sets containing both NFL and AFL players.

1964 Topps

The 1964 Topps set contains 176 cards, a large number for only eight AFL teams. 166 are cards of individual players (the others are team cards and checklists), so there are 20 or 21 player cards for each team. At the time, that was about twice the usual number of players per team, so Topps was able to include more cards of non-stars than usual. Give or take a card or two, there are 73 rookie cards in the set! Among the rookie cards are these bookend Hall of Famers, Bobby Bell and Buck Buchanan of the Kansas City Chiefs.

The 1964 Topps cards have colored backgrounds and colored stars around the borders. I don’t see a pattern to the colors Topps chose for the backgrounds, except that each card has a background color different from the player’s jersey color. Most of the cards have the player’s name, position, and team in white letters on a black background, but a handful–such as the Bobby Bell card–have either white-on-blue or white-and-black-on-red labels. If there is any significance to the alternate label colors, I don’t see it.

The 176 cards in the 1964 set would have been printed on two 132-card sheets, with 88 cards repeated. That means that there are either 88 double prints or 88 short prints in the set, depending on whether your glass is half-full or half-empty.

There is one mistaken identity in the 1964 Topps set: Ray Abruzzese’s card actually pictures Ed Rutkowski. Topps evidently was focused on spelling his name correctly.

1965 Topps

I described the classic 1965 Topps set in J is for Joe Namath–and the 1965 Topps Tall Boys, so I won’t cover it again here. On to 1966…

1966 Topps

In 1966, Topps used the “little television” design previously seen on 1955 Bowman baseball cards and on the highlight cards in the 1961 Topps football set. I imagine that by the third time around, it had lost its cuteness. (I noticed today that even the checklists in the 1966 Topps set are in the shape of TVs.)

Though the Dolphins joined the AFL in 1966 and were included in this set, Topps reduced the set size to 132 cards. They also wasted one on the Funny Ring Checklist. Because of the reduced set size, there are only 13 rookie cards in the set, and there are no Hall of Famers among the rookie cards. I’d call the set a letdown after 1965.

So, what’s interesting about the 1966 Topps cards? Well, the brown borders show wear easily, so finding high-grade cards is a challenge, and challenges are always fun. Also, some cards, such as the John Farris card shown here, can be found with a stripe along one edge. (I’ve seen yellow, red, and black stripes.) The stripes don’t seem to affect the grades that PSA assigns the cards, but to me they’re distracting, and I prefer cards without them. I presume that cards with a stripe were on the edge of the sheet, but I have not seen an uncut sheet to verify that.

Since the set fit perfectly on a 132-card sheet, none of the cards are short prints. The backs of some cards are white, and the backs of others have a yellowish-brownish tone, suggesting that some sheets were printed on different paper stock than others. Here again, I prefer cards with white backs to those with toning, but PSA does not appear to discriminate.

1967 Topps

In 1967, Topps returned to bright colors, and the 1967 Topps cards resemble some of the psychedelic art of the time. (The Peace poster shown here is from cafepress.com.) This is another 132-card set with no short prints, no Hall of Fame rookie cards, and no real oddities. I think, though, that it captures the spirit of the AFL and the country better than any of the other 60s sets.

As I wrote in an earlier article, 33 of the 1967 Topps football cards were reprinted in 1969 for a Milton Bradley game called Win-A-Card. The backs of the Milton Bradley cards have a slightly lighter color than the regular cards (yellow v. orange), and some of them, along their borders, show parts of other cards that were included in the game–such as 1968 Topps baseball cards.

1968 Topps and 1969 Topps

As I said at the top, the 1968 Topps and 1969 Topps sets contain both NFL and AFL players. Topps made these sets bigger to accommodate the larger number of teams, and it released each set in two series. Like most of the Topps cards of the 60s, the 1968 and 1969 sets are colorful and bright.

For more detailed information on these sets, see my virtual uncut sheet pages. Here are the links:

• 1968 Topps virtual uncut sheets
• 1969 Topps virtual uncut sheets

More of the ABCs:

• Previous: T is for Topps, Part 2: 1960-1963
• Next: T is for Topps, Part 4: The 1970s
• All of the ABCs

I ran across this card the other day, a 1969 Topps Ben Davidson, and I thought it was funny that he posed carrying the ball. As far as I knew, he had played only defense. So I looked up his entry at pro-football-reference.com, thinking that maybe he played tight end on occasion. But no, the only positions he ever played were defensive end and defensive tackle.

Maybe he was pretending to run back an interception or a fumble? Unfortunately, he never got a chance in a game: surprisingly, he had no interceptions in his 11-year career, and just two fumble recoveries, neither of which he returned.

Davidson did a lot of acting after his football career, too, appearing in Conan the Barbarian, Necessary Roughness, and a host of primetime TV shows. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a film clip, just a photo of Ben playing Rexor in Conan.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when the card companies were still marketing to kids, they tried to make the cards interactive and fun to play with. They made cards you could punch out and stand up, they put puzzles on the backs of the cards, and they inserted stamps, stickers, and decals into the packs with the regular cards. They also liked to put scratch-off cartoons and quizzes on the card backs.

1951 Topps Magic cards were the first football cards with scratch-off backs, the scratch-offs accounting for the “magic” in the name. The material Topps used for the scratch-offs was similar to that used on today’s lottery tickets: a silver-gray coating that crumbled off when you scratched it. Scratching off the crumbly coating revealed a picture of the player’s school, and the school’s name. The feature was evidently a hit, because most 1951 Topps cards I see have been scratched.

The next football cards with scratch-off backs were 1958 Topps cards. Topps used a different material this time, a white substance that revealed a gray picture when rubbed, but that didn’t come off of the card. All of the player cards in the set had scratch-off backs, but, as shown on this Sonny Jurgensen rookie card, the questions and answers were not about the players on the cards. Even now, I’m disappointed.

Unlike the 1951 Topps cards, most of the 1958 Topps cards I see have not been rubbed. Perhaps it’s because the pictures were not as clear as on the 1951 cards. Or perhaps scraping the little silver-gray pellets onto the floor had been part of the fun. For whatever reason, after 1951, the magic was gone.

The scratch-offs on 1959 Topps football cards were also unrelated to the player, but they differed a bit from 1958′s. Part of the picture on each card was visible before rubbing, and you rubbed the card to reveal the rest. Maybe Topps exposed part of the picture to entice kids to rub the card, but I don’t see many 1959 Topps cards that are rubbed, either. To my knowledge, this was the only set in which parts of the pictures were already showing.

The backs of player cards in the 1960 Topps football set also had scratch-offs, but this time there were no questions and answers, just “Football Funnies” cartoons. I have just one rubbed card, the Matt Hazeltine card pictured here, and the cartoon on it isn’t even related to football. I know they were selling to kids, but I think Topps should have just printed the players’ stats, instead.

Topps persisted with the scratch-offs in 1961. Rubbing the back of a 1961 Topps card revealed a generic cartoon of a player in action, labeled with the name of the player on the card. Though the cartoons were generic, Topps at least took care to get the players’ numbers right. Elbert Dubenion, whose card is shown here, indeed wore number 44.

After 1961, Topps took a break from scratch-offs, instead simply printing cartoons on the card backs. The Philadelphia Gum Company picked up the slack, using the scratch-off feature on their cards in 1965 and 1967. Scratching a 1965 Philadelphia card revealed a picture of one player, and the name of another. To find the name of the pictured player, the card back directed you to a different card, which had the answer. This was a bit convoluted for a kid, I’d say. Philadelphia dispensed with the scratch-offs in 1966, but retained the picture-on-one-card, name-on-another quiz.
In 1967, Philadelphia again put scratch-offs on their cards, but this time they used simple questions and answers related to the player on the card. I don’t know how well the scratch-offs worked back then, but I recently rubbed the Dale Hackbart card shown here, and I can barely see the answer. (It’s “He teaches school.”)

Topps returned to scratch-offs in 1968, but they didn’t put them on every card. Only about 20% of the cards have the “Coin Rub” on the back, and the other 80% have cartoons about the players printed on them. I imagine that limiting the number of scratch-offs was a cost saving measure: someone at Topps wanted the scratch-offs, and someone else said “Why? The kids don’t scratch them, anyway.” And so they compromised. Rubbing the Coin Rub backs reveals cartoons like those on the other cards.

Cards with Coin Rub backs appear in both series of 1968 Topps cards. I thought that Topps might have arranged the Coin Rub cards in a pattern on the uncut sheets–perhaps all in the same row or column, for instance–but they appear to have scattered them randomly on the sheets.

In 1969 and 1970, Topps again put scratch-offs on only a small number of cards. As in 1968, the scratch-offs revealed cartoons about the players, like those on the other cards. In 1969 and 1970, though, the scratch-offs appeared only in the second series of each set. Perhaps this was an effort to boost interest in the second series, after kids had burned themselves out trying to complete the first series. To my knowledge, 1970 Topps is the last set containing cards with scratch-off backs.

Considering how few scratch-offs actually got scratched after 1951, I am surprised that Topps put them on cards for as long as they did. Maybe they assumed that kids were busy scratching them, and didn’t know otherwise until years later, when old cards started coming out of attics. Collectors today don’t appreciate the scratch-offs, either: customers often ask me whether the backs of cards I am selling have been scratched.

I am also surprised, considering collectors’ aversion to scratched cards, that PSA is not harsher when grading them. I often see PSA 7s that have been rubbed, and the 1958 Topps Sonny Jurgensen card above is a PSA 8 OC. To me, a rubbed card ought to grade excellent at best, since an exposed cartoon is certainly more distracting than, say, a quarter-inch hairline crease. What do you think?

• Previous: R is for Rookie Cards
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• All of the ABCs

Thanks to my friend Pat for pointing out this auction: an ungraded 1969 Topps Bob Brown card that sold for $96.45. Why so much? Well, 1969 Topps is a popular set in the PSA set registry, and I’m guessing that a couple of registry participants wanted this high grade example to submit to PSA. Buying ungraded cards on eBay is risky, since sellers often overgrade them, so the seller of the Brown card must have a reputation for being an accurate grader.

Brown is in the Hall of Fame, but that would account for only a small part of the premium the buyer paid. As you can see on my 1969 Topps virtual uncut sheet page, though, the Brown card is on the edge of the sheet, and edge cards tend to be scarcer in top condition than other cards. Edge cards evidently were damaged more often in the printing and packaging process than cards on the interior of the sheet. There are lots of lower-grade examples of the card on eBay, but apparently high-grade examples don’t appear regularly.

Brown also has a stamp on a 1969 Topps 4-in-1 insert card, but the picture isn’t him, it’s Bob Brown of the Packers.

A few months ago I wrote about how the card companies misspelled Herb Adderley’s name on many of his cards. I noticed yesterday that Topps had trouble with Jerrel Wilson’s name, too. Between 1969 and 1973, they got it wrong four times, spelling it with two L’s. I don’t have his cards from 1975 to 1978, so it’s possible that some of those are incorrect, as well.

Pictured here is one of the error cards, Wilson’s 1969 Topps rookie card. Interestingly, though my old Beckett catalog documents all sorts of picky errors–such as typos in stats–it doesn’t have the Wilson cards marked as errors.

Wilson, by the way, was a darn good punter. In 16 years in the AFL and NFL, he averaged 43 yards a punt. He led the AFL in punting average twice, he led the NFL in average three times, and he was a three-time Pro Bowler.

Today I put together another virtual uncut sheet page, this time for 1969 Topps football cards. The page includes both the first and second series sheets. These are the first sheets I’ve seen where half of the cards were printed upside down.

(Click on the image to see both full sheets.)

Errors on vintage football cards are common, presumably because the card companies intended the cards for kids, and they did not worry much about quality control. The errors range from incorrect player positions and statistics to reversed images and cards that picture the wrong player.

The most common error on vintage cards is probably misspelling of the player’s name. Pictured here is one example, Brian Piccolo’s 1969 Topps rookie card, which has his name misspelled Bryon on the front and Bryan on the back. Some players’ names were especially problematic: Sonny Jurgensen‘s name is misspelled on at least two cards, and so is Woodley Lewis‘s. Philadelphia Gum misspelled Herb Adderley’s name four years in a row, and Topps also misspelled it once. (How about Bob Hoernschemeyer, you ask? Well, guess what, Bowman got that one right every time!)

People sometimes ask me if error cards are valuable. The answer: usually not. Most errors were not corrected in production, so the error cards are no scarcer than the other cards in the set. (Price guides refer to these as uncorrected errors, abbreviated UER.) If a card company did correct an error in production, one version or the other–the error or the corrected card–can be much scarcer than the other cards in the set, and hence more valuable. Two examples come to mind: First, in the 1955 Topps All-American set, some of Byron White‘s cards were printed with Gaynell Tinsley‘s bio on the back, and some of Tinsley’s were printed with White’s. Topps corrected these errors after production began, and the incorrect versions are scarcer and more valuable than the corrected ones. Second, in the 1957 Topps set, some copies of Will Sherman‘s card have white space where “BACK – RAMS” was supposed to go. Topps also corrected this error in production, and the “No Rams” version is scarcer and more valuable than the corrected version.

In regard to pricing, then, the error and corrected versions of a card are really just considered variations of the card. When a card has two variations, some collectors will desire both, and the scarcer one is generally worth more. It’s the same with errors and corrected cards.

Occasionally people send me scans of what they think are error cards, but what they actually have are cards with printing or processing problems: off-centering, double images, print marks, etc. These production flaws are not considered errors, and in most cases they hurt the value of the card. If a production flaw is particularly bad–say the card is miscut so badly that it includes part of the next card–a collector might pay a bit for the novelty, but usually the card will be worth far less than a card without the flaw.

Also, now and then someone will list a card on eBay that has been mislabeled by a grading company, claiming that it is a valuable error. It’s not. At least one grading company makes these so-called “mechanical errors” frequently, and the errors are just a nuisance to get corrected.

As I wrote a while back, the Advanced Search page in the Vintage Football Card Gallery supports searches for error cards. I have most of the major errors identified in the Gallery, and I am gradually adding the minor ones.

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