Card Sleuth: 1955 Topps Misprint

I got out of work early yesterday in anticipation of the holiday weekend, and headed over to Bay State Coin on Bromfield Street in Downtown Crossing, a shopping district of Boston. I asked to go through their box of off-condition 1956's, and found this 1955 Topps card of Joe Frazier in there for $1.



Nothing special on the front, just a lot of creases, tears, and paper-loss goodness. As you can see in the scans, the back is the real star of the card. It's my first misprint from 1955 Topps. I say 'misprint' rather than 'miscut' because only the back of the card is wrong; the front's as it should be.

On the T ride home, I got to thinking: how hard would it be to figure out the other player from just his stats? So when I got home, I pulled my Baseball Encyclopedia (1990 edition) from the shelf and scanned the 1954 season stats. And lo and behold, I found a match: New York Yankees third baseman Andy Carey.

And wouldn't you know it, Carey's stat line on his 1955 Topps card matches the one I found on the misprinted Frazier, like this:



So I imagine that during the printing process of Series 1 of 1955 Topps, Carey appeared directly above Frazier on the sheet, and at least one sheet was misprinted.


Thinking about misprints and miscuts is funny to me. For the longest time I felt that Topps should've been more careful not to let screw-ups make it out of the factory. But the more cards shows I went to, the more I realized that printing errors have been around forever, and that nobody really cared too much to catch them. I think they provide insight to the printing process, but to a little kid in the Fifties, how crappy would it have been when one card in your pack of one card was screwed up? How are you supposed to trade that?

Fantastic Misprint of the Day

I give you 1968 Topps #38, Tony Pierce, with razor-sharp sides and corners, and I-swear-it's-original-gloss. It's well-centered on the front and the tid-bit of fantastical info on the back is incredible (Tony once struck out 5 batters in one inning at high school). But best of all, you'll go blind looking at it.

This particular piece of cardboard badly misaligned when it was time to hit the blue rollers in the printing process, resulting in an almost 3-D effect on the team name and missing ink in other areas. It all feels like a waste, too, since the photo is so boring (it looks like the photographer asked Tony to take his hat off and gaze stoically into the distance, like a tired farmer at the edge of a field). If only this had happened to a card featuring a more dynamically posed player... but this was 1968, so I guess that rules out Vicente Romo doing jazz hands (1970), or Dock Ellis thrusting the ball at the camera in an attempt to get the viewer as high as he was (1969).