Remembering 1962 Topps Baseball Stamps! Mail Day!
We put our stamp of approval on this awesome insert Topps slipped into their wax packs over 60 years ago!
Each Happy Hobby Sports Card Newsletter For Collectors has a handful of great sports card subjects, helping sports card collectors working with limited budgets!
This Week’s Newsletter Highlights!
⚾ REMEMBERING 1962 TOPPS STAMPS! MAIL DAY!
⚾ BASEBALL CARD TRIVIA!
⚾🏈🏀 CARDS THAT MAKE US HAPPY!
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⚾ REMEMBERING 1962 TOPPS STAMPS! MAIL DAY!
, one of our Happy Hobbyists from the Happy Hobby Sports Cards Chat, penned this piece about the 1962 Topps Stamps series. It gets our stamp of approval! (oh boy.)Like so many other American boys in the 1950s and 1960s, the vast majority of my Dad’s Topps baseball and football card collection from 1958 onward was thrown out by his mom. As I understand it, my Dad just left the large box sitting somewhere it wasn't supposed to be in their house, and by the time he got home from school, it was thrown out -- and the garbage had already been picked up.
The only things spared from the purge were in a small separate box. In that box, the only survivors were Bill Mazeroski cards, my Dad’s favorite Pittsburgh Pirates player, along with about 15-20 random Topps football cards. But there was also a small eye-glasses band box that housed a stack of stamps with baseball players on them.
I remember seeing those stamps as a young boy and carefully flipping through them once, but I didn't realize until years later that they were actually made by Topps. They were inserted into wax packs along with the cards and gum.
Maybe Topps was trying to get stamp collectors into the baseball card world?
Topps first tried this in 1961 with a 200-stamp set. The one-color stamp designs resembled stuffy, boring, U.S. Treasury-esque postage stamps -- with photos of ballplayers instead of presidents.
In 1962, however, the stamp design was in full color, and they were inserted into packs with the iconic wood-bordered 1962 Topps Baseball card set. These stamps closer resembled a clean, simple baseball card with bright background colors, similar to the 1958 or 1959 Topps baseball card designs.
The 1962 Topps stamps set had a 200-stamp checklist, and it consisted of 180 players and 20 team logos. Topps made them again in 1963 and 1964, under the Bazooka umbrella, but then stopped after a four-year run as bonus inserts in wax packs with gum.
The 1962 Topps stamps feature a chest-up headshot portrait of all players, with a solid bright color background of either yellow or red, with the player’s name, team, and position at the bottom.
These stamps are an extremely tough grade because they came in a panel of two, and you had to carefully rip them apart without damaging or ripping any pointy edges. The printing registration is also very hit or miss.
The centering is also often far off centered or miscut. That means even if you were luckily to have some protected in a small box all these years, very bad registration or centering quickly drops grades down to a PSA 5 or 6.
A huge thanks goes to
for sharing that story about his Dad’s baseball stamps! Have you ever seen these at card shows? Which stamp would you want for your collection?⚾ BASEBALL CARD TRIVIA!
Send me the answer to this question – you could win this free card from me: 2018 Topps Francisco Lindor Topps Throwback 1977 Topps Football #108 card!
Which year is the first design that Topps chose to not have a white border (not including the 1953 or 1954 sets, which had a white border on three sides)?
Email your answer to gonoscards@gmail.com and you can win this 2018 Topps Francisco Lindor Topps Throwback 1977 Topps Football #108 card! Rather than take the first person who answers it right, I will do a random drawing of all the people who answer correctly before midnight, Friday, July 4. The winner will be announced in the July 10 newsletter.
From June 19 newsletter: Topps Gold parallels started being numbered to the year they were manufactured in what year? Prize: 1986 Topps Pete Rose Record Breaker #206 card. Answer this question before midnight, Friday, June 27. The winner will be announced in the July 3 newsletter.
From June 12 newsletter: Which card did broadcaster Bob Costas famously say he kept in his wallet for years? Answer: 1958 Topps Mickey Mantle. Prize: 1981 Donruss Willie Stargell #132 card. Winner: Matthew Dobbs! Congrats again, Matthew, back-to-back wins!
⚾ CARDS THAT MAKE US HAPPY! 2014 Topps Update Mookie Betts US-26
There are few players that play baseball with more happiness than Markus Lynn “Mookie” Betts, whose career started in Boston over a decade ago.
This card is a must-have for collectors — partly because it marks the debut of a generational talent, and partly because it immortalizes one of the most jaw-dropping “what were they thinking?” moments in Red Sox history.
Let’s be honest, the Red Sox trading Betts and David Price to the Los Angeles Dodgers in February of 2020 for Jeter Downs, Alex Verdugo and Connor Wong is rough. It’s like when you traded a 1989 Sportflics Steve Sax card to your little brother for his 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. card. Brutal. Babe Ruth-to-the-Yankees brutal.
Collectors everywhere watched in disbelief as Boston shipped off a future Hall of Famer in his prime, and Dodgers fans gleefully welcomed him with open arms. Owning this card is like owning a receipt for one of baseball’s biggest heists.
The card’s greatness isn’t just about front office blunders, though. Mookie Betts’ career is the stuff of legend: MVP awards, Gold Gloves, Silver Sluggers, and more highlight reels than the Red Sox front office has regrets. He’s dominated in both leagues, won multiple championships, and he has eight All-Star appearances so far.
Mookie made history in 2018 as the first player ever to win the MVP, Silver Slugger, Gold Glove, batting title, and World Series in a single season! Then he got traded less than two years later.
Note that his 74-plus career WAR ranks him first among active right fielders in Jay Jaffe’s JAWS score, which rates a player’s Hall-of-Fame worthiness. He also ranks eighth among all right fielders ever, in just 12 seasons (about 10 fewer seasons than most of the RFs ahead of him (including Al Kaline, Stan Musial, Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth!).
For sports card collectors, Betts’ 2014 Topps Update rookie is a trophy, a conversation starter, and a gentle reminder to never, ever trade away your best card.
Coming Next Week!
⚾🏈🏀🏒 IS YOUR GRAIL CARD CLOSER THAN YOU THINK!?!
⚾ BASEBALL CARD TRIVIA!
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Great article Randy! I didnt know these existed and the photo shows Lew Burdette! This is one of my PC players, he’s a relative, never got to meet him but I’m on ebay looking to add this to my pc!
Great job on this guys!!! Love the education on the stamps, never knew about them, but now it makes sense in that I have a few pins somewhere from my childhood that were of stamps of famous players. They are metal pins that you could put on something I guess. Hard to hear about the cards being tosses, but at least the Maz cards survived.
David, gotta ask, was that Griffey Jr. trade an actual trade with your brother? It sounds like it may have been.