Forever Topps: Celebrating 75 Years of America’s Favorite Baseball Cards

by Jessica Kosinski

These days, baseball card collecting is big business, but that wasn’t always the case. Back in the day, baseball cards were collected mostly for fun. Many of us had them stuck in our bicycle spokes or stored loosely in shoeboxes. Almost nobody thought about what they might be worth 75 years later. We all just enjoyed the fun of trying to trade with friends and complete collections. Putting them in protective plastic sleeves or getting them professionally graded was a totally foreign concept to the average kid. Yet, here we are celebrating 75 years of Topps baseball cards. Of course, today collecting Topps baseball cards or other sports trading cards is a much more serious and often expensive undertaking. Let’s take a peek at how the company built its collectible empire and why people still love Topps cards today.

The Beginning of an Empire
It might surprise you, but Topps didn’t exactly start in a family-friendly way. Originally, it was the American Leaf Tobacco Company based in New York City. The company head, Morris Shorin, retired eventually, allowing his four sons to take over. They rebranded the company in 1938, calling it Topps Chewing Gum Inc. The idea was for the company name to suggest to buyers that their chewing gum was the top chewing gum on the market.

The idea was good in theory, but not as successful as the brothers wanted it to be in practice, at least at first. They wanted to draw more attention away from their chewing gum competitors, so they had to think outside the box well before “think outside the box” was even a popular phrase. In 1947, they got the first creative kick they needed when their competitor, Bazooka, started using wrappers with comics inside. By 1950, the Bowman Gum Company had released some baseball cards alongside their chewing gum, and that cemented the idea for the Shorin brothers. The difference was they wanted to do things better. They worked hard to make their cards more interesting and engaging to kids.

The 1951 and 1952 Topps Baseball Cards
If you are a collector, the 1952 Topps set is probably the first set of Topps baseball cards that
come to mind. Its release was huge at the time, in more ways than one. No company had released a collection as large as the 407-card set. It was divided into six different “series” groups, including local New York heroes. A couple of interesting cards from that set included the #1 and #80 cards, Andy Pafko and Herman Wehmeier, respectively. Kids who collected the set often put it in order and then rubber banded it. Today, it can be somewhat difficult to find either of those cards without rubber band marks.

Even though the 1952 collection is often most thought of, they weren’t the first Topps baseball cards released. Those came out in 1951, which is why I’m writing this article celebrating 75 years of Topps cards. The 1951 cards were in two sets of “Blue Backs” and “Red Backs” consisting of 52 cards each. They were sort of like a normal 52-card deck of playing cards, but each card featured a baseball term like “single” and could be used to play out a baseball game in card form. Each one also featured a player’s picture.

The “Father of the Modern Baseball Card”
In 1951, a WWII veteran named Sy Berger made himself “Father of the Modern Baseball Card” by creating the iconic Topps baseball card design. He designed it at his kitchen table in Brooklyn with help from cartoonist Woody Gelman. Each card had the team name and logo, player name, autograph image, and photo on the front. The back featured each player’s baseball stats, physical features like height, and biography. The format was so popular that it is still used when producing today’s baseball cards.

As for Sy Berger himself, he worked for Topps from 1947 to 1997. During his iconic 50-year career and five extra years as a consultant, he was the face of Topps. He often got players to agree to being featured on cards by paying them in merchandise. He also once got Topps the contract to feature the Beatles on trading cards. All he had to do was travel to London and speak to their manager, Brian Epstein…in Yiddish! It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall during that meeting. Ten years before his death, he got to see the 2004 release of his own Topps card #137 as part of the All-Time Fan Favorites collection, too.

The Most Iconic Topps Baseball Card
If you ask baseball fans who their favorite players are, past or present, you’ll get different answers all the time. Everyone has their own favorites for a wide variety of reasons. Even so, there are some players who just go down in history as the best of the best, and nobody can argue the point. Babe Ruth is one example. Another is the man who features on one of the most iconic Topps cards of all time, Mickey Mantle.

The 1952 Mickey Mantle card is like the unicorn of baseball cards for most collectors. It’s as mythical and out of reach as they come. That’s because high-grade copies of it tend to sell for huge amounts of money at auction. One sold for more than $12 million in 2022. Even Topps itself, which is now owned by Fanatics Inc., featured the Mickey Mantle card during a special
promotion that was part of its 75th-anniversary festivities.

Of course, not every card can be a Mickey Mantle, but every card can always be fun to collect. The hunt is what makes baseball card collecting fun. It doesn’t matter if it’s on a million-dollar scale or not. Many great Topps cards are much more affordable but no less impressive to the right baseball fans.

Topps Baseball Cards as Time Capsules
Topps baseball cards are not just cards. They changed with the changing times, making them like small handheld time capsules in a sense. For example, there was a switch to brighter colors between the 1950s and ‘60s. Then those bright colors got even bolder with psychedelic styles in the 1970s. You can collect enough of them to document popular culture and style trend changes through the decades.

There is also more than just the border coloring or styles of the cards themselves to consider. One of the biggest reasons Topps cards are collected as both baseball memorabilia and bits of Americana is the change in subject matter the cards showed over the years. Everything from photography styles to hairstyles can be tracked using Topps cards. There are also interesting bits of hidden history on each card. For example, some featured advertising or vintage uniforms not seen for decades. Others included pictures taken in stadiums that have since been completely redesigned or torn down entirely. That makes those cards extra interesting to sports history enthusiasts.

The Appeal of Rookie Cards
Baseball cards featuring rookies have been popular since Topps first produced them. A player’s rookie year is a huge gamble. Sometimes a rookie becomes one of the biggest players in history. Players like Hank Aaron, Shohei Ohtani, Derek Jeter, Cal Ripken Jr., and Mickey Mantle were all rookies once.

To this day, people love to collect rookie cards as they are released or well after the fact. Many of them are affordable, especially during the players’ rookie years. As their careers are established, the cards often go up in value. Although still a bit of a gamble, that often makes those cards more likely to gain value over time. Fill a binder with rookie cards from decades past and enjoy having a time capsule you can show off to friends at your fingertips.

Casual Topps Baseball Card Collecting
Although baseball cards can be an investment, the best advice isn’t to collect them with that in mind. Instead, just collect the cards you enjoy. If you enjoy them, chances are someone else will too if you ever choose to sell them. In the meantime, you’ll have a collection you actually love.

Some popular ways to collect Topps baseball cards for the enjoyment alone include going by team or decade. For example, some collectors like cards released when they themselves were kids for the nostalgia factor. Others like to focus on a specific team but collect cards from different decades. Then there are those who prefer to focus on Hall of Famer cards. Once you decide which cards to collect, you can focus on just learning all you can about those cards, rather than trying to memorize every card Topps ever produced.

As for condition, how much to focus on it depends on your end goal. If you’re just collecting casually, you should know that other casual collectors actually expect and often like cards that show basic wear. In that case, just steer clear of major issues like water damage or severe creases. If you want to be more of a stickler for condition, expect to pay more for the best of the best.

From Wax Packs to Sets to Modern Collecting
Another way to collect is to focus on a particular collecting goal. You might prefer the thrill of finding and opening vintage wax packs, for instance. It can take you right back to your childhood and give you the surprise of not knowing exactly what you’ll find inside. You could also choose to collect them and leave them unopened, of course.

Instead, you might decide you want to chase the idea of collecting a complete set of cards. If so, you’re better off to buy one specific card at a time. That is, unless you come across someone selling a whole set at once. The sets produced from the 1960s onward tend to be easier and less expensive to complete than the earliest Topps sets. Keep that in mind before starting your collection. You’ll learn a lot about individual players and baseball history in general when you try to find complete sets.

Of course, modern collecting is also an option. The Topps cards of today are bound to be considered classic collectibles in the future. In fact, Topps has already released a lot of
75th-anniversary-themed products this year. From autograph sets to commemorative inserts, those collect-ibles marking this Topps milestone are already popular with collectors. Imagine how popular they’ll be 25 or 50 years from now.

Forever Topps
Topps got its name because its founders wanted it to be tops in the gum industry. Maybe it’s no longer known for its gum, but the company has still stood the test of time. It was able to adapt to the changing times and stay relevant. Beginning as a tobacco company, transitioning to gum, and then being famous for baseball cards is quite the story. Not every company is able to adapt as well, which is why many don’t last for 75 years and why this year’s milestone is so historic.

The beauty of Topps baseball cards is they never go out of style. If anything, they gain more and more popularity with each passing year. That’s because they aren’t just cards. They are baseball itself. It’s like there can be no game without them because so many of us have grown up with the two intertwined. That’s why Topps will be forever tops and collecting Topps cards will be forever fun.

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Jessica Kosinski has been a freelance researcher and writer since 2001. She developed a passion for pre-1990s television and films as a child and she has never grown out of it. Recently, she turned that passion into a retro TV and film blog. Follow along with her at https://medium.com/@jkos_writing, as she dives deep into the characters, actors, quirks, and trivia that brought us some of the greatest films and shows in TV history and also discusses some of the more obscure films and shows most of us may have forgotten.