Breaking Down 1972 Topps By Team

Last week I wrote about the 47-card 1972 Topps Mets team set, the largest team set in 1972 Topps and quite possibly of any “flagship” set.

As I was writing that post, I got to wondering…  There can’t be this many cards for all the teams, not without the entire set going well over 1,000 cards.  So if that’s the case, who else is up near the top?  How quickly does it drop off?  And which teams have relatively small sets to keep the entirety of 1972 at 797 cards?

You see, after spending the work week doing research and analysis, I like to kick back by coming home and doing research and analysis.  I’m weird that way.

So I did a little poking around and got some numbers…

…And just to be clear about something:  Although these numbers are, to the best of my knowledge, correct, please do not take them as gospel.  I can’t swear that they are absolutely correct.

Let  me put it this way;  if  you’re trying to cross the Bridge Of Death and the bridgekeeper asks you “How many California Angels cards are there in the 1972 Topps set?”  my advice to you is this — RUN AWAY!  RUN AWAY!

The most well-represented teams in 1972 Topps are the Mets (47 cards), Pirates (46), A’s (41), Orioles (40) and Giants (37).

FYI, I counted all eight World Series cards for both the Orioles and Pirates, even though 5 cards have photos of just a Pirate and 2 have just an Oriole. I figured that a Pirates or Orioles collector is going to want to collect all of the World Series cards, regardless of who’s featured.

I had expected the least number of cards to come from one of the four teams that had been expansion teams 3 years prior – the Expos, Padres, Royals and Brewers.  That was surprisingly not the case.

The award for the fewest cards overall goes to the Cleveland Indians with 26.

Just above them are the Angels, Rangers and Brewers with 28.

That’s a big disparity; going from 47 Mets to 26 Indians…but  the real story here is how the Mets came to have 21 cards more than the Indians.

If you count just the “regular” cards – team cards, managers, players and team-specific “Rookie Stars” cards – the disparity isn’t all that notable.  When you take out the League Leaders, “In Action” and “Boyhood Photos”, the Mets have 29 “regular” cards.  The Royals surprisingly have the most “regular” cards with 32, and the Tigers, Twins and Padres have the fewest with 25.

Obviously, what I getting at is that the big difference among teams comes from the subsets.  Nobody on the Indians, Astros, Rangers or Brewers was among the league leaders, was ever “in action” or even had a “boyhood”.

Where it really gets interesting is in the breakdown of the “In Action” cards.

Since I started working on this set , I knew that there was a disparity in the way these cards were assigned — certain players get overlooked while less-deserving players get chosen, certain teams better represented than others – but I had no idea it was as “unfair” as it turned out to be.  Check out the way the “In Action” cards are broken down by team:
11: Mets
10: Giants
5: Pirates, A’s, Reds, Yankees, Padres
4: Red Sox, Cubs, Twins
2: White Sox, Braves, Tigers, Dodgers, Phillies, Royals
1: Expos, Angels
0: Orioles, Cardinals, Astros, Brewers, Rangers, Indians

The reason the Mets and Giants are so heavily represented is because many of the photos used were taken in Shea Stadium or Candlestick Park… even when the card didn’t feature a Met or Giant, like with the In Action cards of Hank Aaron, Maury Wills or Willie Stargell.  I can only guess that Topps’ best “Action” photographers mainly worked out of those two ballparks.

A little later in the week, I’ll feature some of these In Action cards which were photographed in Shea or Candlestick.

---

Just a reminder that today is Election Day in the United States. It’s the duty of all Americans to go to your local polling place and cast your ballot for the candidate you think will do the least harm.

An Overview of 1975 – 1979 Hostess Cards

In light of the apparent demise of Hostess as a entity – and don’t worry, Twinkies and Ho-Ho’s and the like will resurface, it’s just a matter of who purchases the brands and when they gear up production – I thought this might be as good a time as any to give you a run-through of the 5 years of Hostess baseball cards.

Hostess cards were printed on the bottom of “family sized” boxes of Hostess snack cakes from 1975 to 1979.  Each year’s set consists of either 150 cards (if you’re me) or 50 3-card panels (if you’re looking for a greater challenge and have a greater budget).

Certain cards/panels are somewhat rarer if they were printed on the box for a less-popular snack cake (i.e. Chocodiles).

Topps provided the images, and did the airbrushing as needed, like on the above 1975 Joe Torre.

The 1976 set had bold red, white and blue stripes, because it was THE BICENTENNIAL and you couldn’t not do something to commemorate the fact that the country was 200 years old.  I think there was a federal mandate or something.

Business as usual for 1977;  I find this set the least appealing, but that’s a matter of relativity;  none of the sets are what you’d call beautiful in and of themselves, but the card design is not why I collect these.

1978 was more subdued than the previous two years, but not bad looking in a minimalist sort of way.

1979 just took the footer and moved it to the header.

You’ll see references to Hostess Twinkies cards…  There’s not a huge difference between Hostess cards and Twinkies cards.  Hostess cards were sold on the box itself, Twinkies cards were inserted into the individually-sold Twinkies packages (and they often have Twinkie stains on them).

Twinkies can be distinguished by the black stripe on the back, and the fact that they come in single panels rather than panels of three.

Hostess cards don’t have the black stripe, but every year’s card looks pretty much like this:

If you collect individual cards, there’s almost no reason to distinguish between Hostess and Twinkies, and not everybody does. I don’t, and I’ve noticed that COMC.com doesn’t.

Not every card has a Twinkie counterpart; In 1975 and 1976, there were only 60 cards which were Twinkified, and there aren’t any Twinkies cards from 1978 or 1979.

If you really want to go crazy, or have a larger collecting budget than I do, negatives used for Hostess sets have turned up in Topps Vault auctions.

The mid-to-late 1970’s were my peak collecting years as a kid, but I long ago completed the Topps sets from 1974 to 1978.  Collecting Hostess cards allows me to keep collecting the players of my youth without getting into some of the more arcane sets of the era.