1971 Topps Baseball is wildly popular based on the player selection, key rookie cards, and the challenge that the sensitive design presents. The 1971 Topps Baseball card set has two major distinctions that set it apart from previous releases. First, the checklist size once again rewrote the record books, delivering a total of 752 cards. Also, the set is widely considered to be the most condition-sensitive of all-time due to Topps’s black border design.
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1971 Topps – Set Design
1971 was a year of drastic design change for Topps baseball cards. This year’s cards sported a black border, with the front of the card displaying the team’s nickname along the top, and the player’s name and field position in lower-case lettering right below it.
A very interesting and well-received change was the player photo in action. Up until this point action photography was used only for Playoff Highlights and World Series subsets, in 1971 however, Topps introduced action shots of players to their base set, accompanied by a facsimile signature right on top of the photo.
Perhaps the most iconic example is Thurman Munson’s All-Star Rookie card, which showcases a close play at home plate with Munson trying to tag out an Oakland Athletics base runner.
Another first for Topps was found on the backs of the cards, which featured a photo of each player over an iconic green background. This however, came at the expense of season-by-season statistics for each player, due to a lack of space to include both.
1971 Topps – How Was It Perceived?
The design of the 1971 Topps baseball cards was received with mixed emotions. The lack of in-depth statistics was unpopular with collectors but what stood out the most was the black border. While aesthetically pleasing for some, it made the cards extremely susceptible to damage, particularly in the form of chipping, fraying, and overall wear of corners and edges. These condition traits are what made the set one of the hardest to fully collect at mint condition. As such, cards with decent, or high grading can yield massive amounts of money as vintage collectors aggressively compete to attain them.
1971 Topps Rookies
Despite being known mainly for big Hall of Fame names, 1971 Topps did not feature many notable rookies. While not absolute superstars, Steve Garvey, Don Baylor, Bert Blyleven, and Dusty Baker, Dave Concepcion, Ken Singleton, and George Foster are the key rookie cards you could find opening 1971 packs.
1971 Topps Wax Boxes
Topps released 2 different types of wax display boxes during 1971, but only offered an additional sale incentive for kids in one of them. The wax boxes for the earliest 1971 had a Topps production code of 1-401-37-01-1.
The 1970 wax box for the later series offered a “real metal baseball coin in each pack”. The Topps production code for this box was 1-402-37-01-1.
1971 Topps Wax Packs & Wrappers
The ’71 set was produced in six series, released about once every four to six weeks. Each wax pack contained ten cards.
The wrapper design is simple yet iconic. Sporting a sky-blue background, the top of the card has a seemingly hand-painted design of a batter ready to receive a pitch. The middle has the Topps logo followed by the word “baseball” in a fun, “bubbly” font. The lower right portion of the pack stands out the most, with a yellow quarter circle, encompassing the words the promotional pack insert with large red letters.
There were 3 variations of wax packs. On the front all packs look identical, the differences start to appear once turned over. Moreover, early series production code 0-401-90-01-1 packs differed from later series production code 0-402-90-01-1 packs in the text displayed at the bottom right corner, as can be seen in the images displayed below.
1971 Topps Cello Boxes & Packs
A 1971 Topps Cello box included 24 cello packs, and the contrast really allowed them to stand out. The box itself was a bright red, with large letters advertising the number of cards within each of the cello packs on the right portion. The lower right of the box also included the price of each pack. The left side of the box also displayed images of the 71 series cards. As for the packs, they came in the form of small blue boxes with 30 cards wrapped in cellophane inside this little “container.”
For the second straight year, Topps had designed cello packs comprised of both a layer of cellophane and a layer of cardboard essentially creating little boxes that kids could also use for transporting their cards around.
1971 Topps Rack Pack
One of the advantages of rack boxes was that kids could choose the racks they wanted by the cards that were showing through the front and backs of the packs.
Like the year prior, 1971 followed a similar business model, essentially offering parents a 28% discount when purchasing a rack pack – consider this:
- Purchase a wax pack, 10 cards for 10 cents – kid pays .01/card
- Purchase a cello pack, 30 cards for 25 cents – kid pays .0083/card (about 4/5ths of a penny per card)
- Purchase a rack pack, 54 cards for 39 cents – kid pays .0072/card (a little less than ¾ of a penny per card)
1971 was the only year Topps made some changes to the display of rack packs and boxes, and these changes were…questionable. The 1971 rack packs lack a header card, do not have production codes on display, do not have their price visible, and there is no double-sided header. Also, the dot on the header portion (used to mark the whole that would be used for hanging) was considerably larger than those of previous and later years (70,72,73).
But why? Why did they go with these changes and why were they never replicated? This might’ve been due to financial reasons, but without further data, one can only speculate.
