1968 Topps Mike McCormick - White Team Name

[deweyinthehall]

So, as I crawl ever nearer to completing the basic and master set of 1968s, I'd like to poll the combined wisdom of this assembly on this subject.

What is the best guess we have on this question:

Is the McCormick error (and please forgive my lack of proper printing process vocabulary):
1) a case where the yellow simply didn't get applied as it was supposed to in a small number of passes, making it an error in the printing process itself, or
2) a case where the sheets were sent to print with the team name in white (like the Red Sox, Angels and others), only to be discovered during QC, requiring someone to change the color, making it a design error.

I'm thinking perhaps the former - the other two teams with green circles don't have white names (Senators have yellow like the Giants and Orioles have black), so someone wouldn't have confused it for a card of another team.

This is an important question to me as my master sets include only design variations, not printing flaws, so there's a bit of my own green, so to speak, riding on how this comes out.

Thanks!

[Kevvyg1026]

Interestingly, although they are in different print runs, both the Brinkman & McCormick card are in Column 7 of their respective sheets. Cox is in C3.

The cards in the row containing McCormick are (from C1 to C11): 414 401 405 449 439 409 400 404 396 388 444.

If it was a print flaw (i.e., yellow didn't get applied), would other cards in that row (like Lolich, Washburn, Fisher) also show some missing (or at least partially missing) yellow?

[savedfrommyspokes]

In the past, I have asked this same question about how the McCormick card ended up with the white team letters, IE what caused this variation to occur. Whatever the reason, likely it is the same reason that more than 20+ separate 1969 WLs exist.

With the 69s there were multiple cards that ended up with the WL variation, while the McCormick is the only card in the 1968 set with this variation. The McCormick card is obviously far more rare than any of the 1969 WLs, and generally more valuable than any of the 69 WLs other than the 69 WL Mantle.

With the 1968 Cox and Brinkman cards, the color differences on the team name are ONLY due to the fact that both cards were part of the Milton Bradley Win a Card game/set.

https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=165264

[bobsbbcards]

I consider it a design change much like the 1969 Topps whiter letter variations. Nothing about the card image suggests that yellow was missing from the image itself. Here's both versions for comparison:




Edited to add: Larry beat me by two minutes.

[ALR-bishop]

I collect recurring print defects as well as cards that are true variations resulting from an intentional change in the card by the manufacturer. In a great many cases I think it is impossible to ever know if a recurring print defect was a temporary defect that resolved without intervention or was remedied. And the hobby itself has clearly in the past adopted several unintentional print defects as “variations”

Mostly the way I collect it does not matter, but as an ungraded collector if I was trying to hold the line I would include in a master set any variant listed by SCD, Beckett or PSA in their master checklists, because for good or bad those cards have been adopted by the hobby as variations. If I was a graded collector I would stick with the PSA master/super lists

[deweyinthehall]

Thanks all for the observations - well, the cost of assembling a master 1968 set according to my own standards just went up a few hundred.

I tend to be VERY less stringent about condition on the variations I need than on the correct versions, so I'll probably be looking for a McCormick white letters in the G-VG range sometime soon.

[ALR-bishop]

By the way, very nice cards Bob

[toppcat]

This may not be the 100% correct description but something like White/Yellow with McCormick seems like a masking issue that was corrected.

[riggs336]

This one's not for sale but this is a good place to show it off.
I didn't realize I had this until I was going through my 1968 set a couple of years ago.
The autograph looked legit to me so I sent it to PSA. I have no idea how or when I acquired it since I put the set together in the 1990's

[deweyinthehall]

Originally Posted by toppcat

This may not be the 100% correct description but something like White/Yellow with McCormick seems like a masking issue that was corrected.

Thanks - can you explain what a "masking issue" is?

In general, the production process of Topps cards is still largely a mystery to me - some sites have offered up general descriptions of printing processes in general, but it would be helpful to understand precisely how Topps manufactured it's cards from start to finish each year in the vintage era. Are they any guides which provide this?

[toppcat]

Originally Posted by deweyinthehall

Thanks - can you explain what a "masking issue" is?

In general, the production process of Topps cards is still largely a mystery to me - some sites have offered up general descriptions of printing processes in general, but it would be helpful to understand precisely how Topps manufactured it's cards from start to finish each year in the vintage era. Are they any guides which provide this?

A mask would prevent ink from being applied on a certain color run in the offset printing process. Steve Birmingham is the go to guy for this stuff but I think in the case the yellow pass was likely impacted by an inadvertent part of the mask being left in place over the team name that was later corrected in the press run, or in second run, and allowed the team name to be properly inked in yellow once the offending portion of the mask was removed.

[steve B]

It probably is a mask issue. Which isn't exactly as described, but it's pretty close.

The mask is the plate sized negative, often a composite of several smaller ones that is used to make the plate.

For yellow letters they would have simply had the yellow print area be round. then have the blue with the team name unprinted go over that.

They probably had several team name negatives and just inserted the right ones. If they used one intended for the blue plate on the yellow plate mask, it would have unprinted areas in both for the team name, and white letters.

It's not missing yellow, if it was the team name circle would be blue.

[ALR-bishop]

I wonder what anyone associated with the Topps printing process back then would think about this quaint group of people here who speculate and worry about such stuff today

Always appreciate Dave and Steve’s input on print differences in cards

[cardinalcollector]

I discovered the Mike McCormick variation in 1986. Ralph Nozaki had a column in Baseball Hobby News back then. He was the Variation expert and the author of "The Mistake Manual" the first book on variations. I mailed both cards to him for verification and he wrote an article about it, I believe in the summer of 1986. I have since lost the article, but perhaps someone on Net54 can locate it and show it here? The funny thing about it was that my personal collection had the rare white version. I stumbled upon the yellow common version by sheer luck. At the time, I thought yellow was the rare one.