Recently I received a bunch of
1971 Topps cards in really nice shape that I bought. In opening the package, sweat was pouring profusely off of my forehead, and I felt nervous as hell, like Indiana Jones trying to figure out how to remove that golden idol from the ancient tomb. I'm sure every collector has the exact same feeling whenever they are attempting to remove a 1971 card from a top-loader or album.
But this made me think. Because of how widespread the collecting of graded cards has become, I’ve recently begun to see the 1971 Topps set in a brand new, entirely different light. If there was ever a set created to be housed in fortified plastic bunkers, it is undoubtedly the black bordered cards of 1971.
Outside of holders, let’s face it, the cards are god-awful. That is only because they cannot survive in the real world outside of a protective bubble. Putting them in shoe boxes was akin to placing them in a blender. If you excitedly came home from the stationery store with a prized pile of Topps packs, the worst thing you could possibly do was open them!! Simply looking at a 1971 card the wrong way would make the corners start turning white right before your very eyes. If a car horn sounded outside, the vibrations would make the sides of the cards chip. If someone was watching an episode of ‘Gunsmoke’ too loudly in the next room, the corners of your cards would start deteriorating. If a Cassowary in Indonesia flapped its useless wings, the air currents would eventually make their way across the globe and erode all four sides of your 1971 cards, turning them into something akin to muddied snow. To save time, Topps should have used a belt sander on the cards before inserting them into packs.
Not to further belabor the point, but giving a child black bordered baseball cards was tantamount to blindfolding him and forcing him to juggle a bunch of large crystal balls and not expecting the ground to be littered with shards of broken glass. And further compounding the problem was the fact that many of the ‘regular’ cards now featured in-game action shots for the first time ever. That was like sounding the alarm to get every kid rampaging through stacks of cards, seeking out those outstandingly wondrous new beauties. And the damage a rubber band would do? Do I even need to go down that road?
But being housed in plastic slabs is like a rebirth for this set. Now you can handle them as much as you want without any sort of consequences. Hell, laugh away the day throwing your slabs at the wall. No problem. Even for people who consider centering to be the most important aspect of a card must’ve shifted their focus to now look upon the strength of the corners and edges to be the most important features. What’s the sense of having a well-centered card if it resembles a black and white cookie?
Sure, the set has the usual multitude of ugly headshots, trite ‘fielding’ and ‘batting’ poses, but the black borders sort of guide your eyes into the colorful pictures, which was a huge improvement over the borefest of the 1970 grey bordered cards...
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Although so many of the action photos were taken from afar, they are real (more sharply focused) action shots. You almost have to wear a carpenter's mask when looking them over, because the clouds of dust and dirt are flying all over the place...
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...and some of them were very cool horizontal shots...
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On the downside, though, the airbrushing was apparently done by the residents of a Duryea, PA, glaucoma treatment facility during ‘arts & crafts’ hour...
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And finally, the dark, nearly illegible backs are terrible (here’s where someone is going to chime in about how great the OPC backs were that year) whether they are in or out of slabs, but they are generally easy to ignore. If you want to check on a player’s hometown, see a cool cartoon, or examine some stats, you had piles of cards from other years to scan through.
I think I'm going to start trying to pick up more and more of these guys, centering be damned!!
Technical note: everything pictured here save #651 Robertson are random screenshots and not my personal cards.