1986 Topps Baseball Forum

https://www.tcdb.com/ViewCard.cfm/sid/8733/cid/563576

Might as well post the positive ID evidence for when I update the card page. (I'll also do the NL card so that technically all the team cards for this set will have been done.)

Front Row, left to right: Alex Grammas / Tom Kelly / Dick Tracewski

Second Row, left to right: George Brett / Eddie Murray / Carlton Fisk / Dave Winfield / Sparky Anderson / Dick Howser / Bobby Cox / Cal Ripken / Jim Rice / Lou Whitaker / Rickey Henderson

Third Row, left to right: Gary Ward / Wade Boggs / Harold Baines / Bert Blyleven / Dan Petry / Tom Brunansky / Jay Howell / Jack Morris / Cecil Cooper / Ernie Whitt / Rich Gedman

Back Row, left to right: Paul Molitor / Donnie Moore / Phil Bradley / Jimmy Key / Willie Hernandez / Damaso Garcia / Don Mattingly / Dave Stieb / Alan Trammell

(Sidenote: The struggle to distinguish between Lance Parrish and Dan Petry was real, hahaha. Both Tigers, both moustached, both pale, both longish faces, both the same height. It came down to inspecting minute differences in facial ratios and moustache size and neck thickness, lol, seriously. In the end, it could only be Petry. Parrish was not part of the photo.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Major_League_Baseball_All-Star_Game

Brett, Murray, Fisk, Winfield, Sparky, Cox, Ripken, Rice, Rickey, Boggs, Baines, Blyleven, Morris, Molitor, Trammell.

That's 13 HOF players and 2 HOF coaches, for a grand total of 15.

It obviously just became the record-holder after the questionable induction of Baines, and hadn't become a major candidate for the top spot until Morris and Trammell were inducted, but still...15 is 15. Even if one limits the question to active HOF players, the total of 13 is still a record. And there might be more, if Whitaker is voted in by the vets.

The record for the most HOFers on one card for a single franchise is the 1973 Topps/POC Canadiens team card, with 14. The search for most HOFers on one card period began with some obvious candidates: All Star Game team cards, Pro Bowl Game team cards, and the Dream Team team cards.

The most I could find on a Dream Team team card was 12. 11 players, and Chuck Daly. But even if Shaq had taken Laettner's place, the total only would've been 13. A team card that included assistant coaches Krzyzewski and Wilkens would've brought the total to 14, but I could find no such card.

Pro Bowl team cards were the most obvious candidate, given the huge rosters, but oddly enough I couldn't find a single Pro Bowl team card. Plenty of 8×10 team photos, but no cards. If anyone knows of an obscure oddball one, let me know, it might supplant this 1986 Topps AL All Star team card.

As for other All Star team cards, there were a few such basketball cards in the early 90s, and they were packed with HOFers, but given the relatively small rosters in basketball, none of the cards threatened to match or surpass the total of this one, from either the East or the West. Couldn't find any All Star hockey team cards. (EDIT: Wait...I didn't check for Team Canada team cards...I might have posted this thread too soon, lol.) All Star games in baseball have featured oodles of HOFers, most famously the 1971 game and the very first official game in 1933. But while the HOFer total of the 1971 and 1933 games were a little higher than the 1985 game, there were no cards. No official cards. No oddballs. No team card for the 1971 game, not even a team photo for it, which was a jaw-dropping missed opportunity. There were a couple of 1983 postcards commemorating the 1933 game, but I didn't count tribute cards for this search, because tomorrow Panini could suddenly decide to produce a tribute card featuring 30 or 40 or (however tiny) 100 HOFers. No, the real contest was to find a card produced organically while the HOFers were active in the game, as either players or coaches or executives. But even if you count either of those 1933 AL or NL tribute postcards, this 1986 Topps card still wins! The AL tribute postcard has the most of the two, 12 players and 2 coaches...only 14 HOFers. "Only", lol.

https://www.tcdb.com/ViewCard.cfm/sid/159463/cid/10254767/1983-TCMA-Renata-Galasso-1933-All-Stars-NNO-American-League-All-Star-Team

The one mammoth chance that card companies had for possibly setting this record, albeit while most of the HOFers were retired, was the 1999 baseball All Century Team ceremony at the All Star Game. But apparently nobody thought a team photo of all those retired and active HOFers was worth taking. No card company even produced a wide shot of the ceremony on the field or the crowd of All Stars surrounding Ted Williams. Inexplicable.

Anyway, if anyone knows of a higher total than 15, let us know, of course. Maybe I missed something. Or maybe there's a tennis or NASCAR card or whatever that eclipses this one.

So, what do folks think? Is this a significant card, or is it just a curious bit of card trivia?

Geez, all those Hall Of Famers, and they still lost the game to the National League!

🤣 True!

They lost the first Home Run Derby, too!

I found a couple of team cards that would beat this record, if they weren't tribute cards. The '91-92 Future Trends cards for the '72 and '76 Team Canada teams each picture more than 15 HOFers. Like I said, though, I don't think tribute cards should count for this record. But if you happen to be someone who values tribute cards the same as other cards, here ya go:

https://www.tcdb.com/ViewCard.cfm/sid/59488/cid/3294814/1992-Future-Trends-'76-Canada-Cup-123-Team-Canada (24 HOFers pictured)

https://www.tcdb.com/ViewCard.cfm/sid/78525/cid/5569597/1991-92-Future-Trends-Canada-’72-8-Team-Canada (16 HOFers pictured)

Because of the overproduction of the era this doesn't really make this card anything more than a good trivia question. But the extent of your research on all these various team card projects you have done is tremendous and very noteworthy!

Here's the evidence for the NL card...

Front Row, left to right: Harry Dunlop / Deacon Jones / Jack Krol / Ozzie Virgil Sr.

Second Row, left to right: Steve Garvey / Tom Herr / Graig Nettles / Darryl Strawberry / Dick Williams / Jim Frey / Bob Lillis / Dale Murphy / Terry Kennedy / Tony Gwynn / Ozzie Smith

Third Row, left to right: Nolan Ryan / Ron Darling / Jack Clark / Dwight Gooden / Scott Garrelts / Dave Parker / Rich Gossage / LaMarr Hoyt / Tim Wallach / Ryne Sandberg / Jeff Reardon

Back Row, left to right: Willie McGee / Fernando Valenzuela / Garry Templeton / Tony Pena / Jose Cruz / Ozzie Virgil Jr. / Glenn Wilson / Pedro Guerrero / Pete Rose / Tim Raines

6 HOF players, 1 HOF coach.

(In case anyone was wondering why he wasn't there, Mike Schmidt had a weak first half that year. The only HOFer in the AL who had a case that he was snubbed was Tom Seaver, who had a good first half, but his numbers in that first half were the type that wouldn't be truly appreciated until sabermetrics, at the time people were fixated on wins and strikeout totals and raw ERA. Same could said for Eckersley in the NL, who would've been a SABER All Star. Lee Smith had a good first half, and Bruce Sutter had a decent first half, but there could only be so many relievers chosen for the All Star team. Puckett and Clemens were a year away from being shoo-ins for the AL, and Rollie Fingers was enduring a wretched final season.)

Once again, the roster:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Major_League_Baseball_All-Star_Game

Unlike regular team cards, there is no risk of a random callup entering the picture, the only players who will possibly appear in the photo are on that roster. To make it even easier than regular team cards for a single franchise, most of the people can be distinguished by their jersey alone, given the variety of teams. The instances where multiple players from the same team appear can be resolved by close inspection, e.g., it's wicked easy to distinguish between moustached Wade Boggs, not-pale Jim Rice, and block-shaped Rich Gedman. There are harder cases, such as distinguishing between Garry Templeton and Tony Gwynn, but thankfully Templeton had much bigger hair, which is clearly visible in the photo.

What was very difficult was distinguishing between Graig Nettles, Scott Garrelts, Rich Gossage, and Terry Kennedy. There are many Padres, but some of them have a very distinct look, like Steve Garvey. Those four, however, were the ones left after I had done all my easy IDs and exhausted (or so I thought) the process of elimination. You'd think it'd be easy to pick out Garrelts since he's a Giant not a Padre, but the color schemes and logos are almost identical. It took a while, I needed to watch the introductions before the 1985 All Star Game on YouTube, I had to really zoom in on the minutest details, but I am now 100% confident that I've individually identified all four. Even if I hadn't, it would still be possible to say with certainty that they appear on the card. But the rules of positive identification as I understood them was that each person must be individually confirmed, so I did that.

The gruesome highlights of what distinguishes them:

- Nettles is only 6'0", so he can't be the tall guy between Gooden and Parker.

- Garrelts has a longer face than Gossage.

- Garrelts is slightly taller than Gossage.

- You can ever-so-barely detect the presence of glasses on Garrelts.

- Gossage wears his hat lower and seems to have posed with a closer's stare, versus Garrelts who wears his hat higher and stands taller.

- Gossage was one of only three All Star reserves (McGee and Wilson the other two) whose arms were folded when the camera panned to him, and he immediately refolded his arms after tipping his cap. All the other players had their arms hanging at their side, or their hands on their hips, or their hands behind their back. Folding his arms was Gossage's thing. It may seem like a silly thing to notice, but these are the kind of behavioral habits that law enforcement detectives sometimes use to identify criminals. There's only one person in the NL team photo folding his arms.

- Gossage has bad posture, hunches forward, making him appear shorter than 6'3", which threw me off at first because Parker looks about 4 inches taller than him.

- Kennedy has a big bright smile, with wider lower facial features than Nettles and thinner eyes, whereas Nettles often has a mean/blank mug.

- Belatedly, I realized that the players sitting down were in the starting lineup and the reserves were standing behind them, so that meant those two had to be either Nettles or Kennedy.

- It turns out that if you really zoom in, you can tell the difference between a SF logo and SD logo.

I'll post pics substantiating the above, if anyone cares. Gimme a sec. I know this is way beyond the call of duty, lol, but I thought it'd be interesting to share the process, which was like solving a logic puzzle. Not a matter of "Looks like that guy", but "It must be that guy", right?

Thank you!

Since they're 1986 Topps cards, one would assume they were massively overproduced. But I wonder how many of these particular cards Glossy All Star inserts were produced. Only available in rack packs. Only 1 card per rack pack. Is there anywhere that estimates specifically how many rack packs were released/sold? This particular AL team card would only appear in 1 out of every 22 rack packs.

I think you have Gossage and Garrelts names reversed in the third row. The person with arms crossed is not between Gooden and Parker.  Was fun to read your detective work, cuz those tiny faces are hard to see. 

You're right! Thanks. Will edit. Must've pasted my initial guess at all the players.

As for how many of these Glossy AL team cards exist, I'd love to know how many cases of rack packs were put out there in the world. There were 24 rack packs per box, which averages about 1.1 Glossy AL team card per box. There were 6 boxes per case, which averages about 6.5 Glossy AL team cards per case.

Let's pretend for a moment that Topps produced 10 million of each card, and that every card was sold in a rack pack. 10 million, times 792 = 7,920,000,000, divided by about 7,000 cards in a rack pack case = About 1,131,000 rack pack cases, divided by about 6.5...

Even in that imaginary maximum rack pack scenario, there'd only ("only", lol) be about 174,000 Glossy AL team cards produced.

But rack packs weren't the only, or even the primary method of distribution. So let's assume that at least half of those 7.92 or so billion cards were sold in wax boxes, and let's at least cut that number in half: 87,000 cards. Would that be a lot? Definitely not a short print, haha, but compared to the rest of the Junk Era, it's fairly rare. EDIT: Now let's say that instead of 10 million of each card, which is apparently on the very high end of how many cards people guess Topps made that year, it's half. Now we'd possibly be looking at about 44,000 cards. Some people guess Topps made only a million ("only", lol) of each card that year, which might bring the total number of Glossy AL team cards to under 10,000. What'd be the threshold for when a card turns from an overproduced piece of trivia into a significant card?

 

Tscastle wrote:

I think you have Gossage and Garrelts names reversed in the third row. The person with arms crossed is not between Gooden and Parker.  Was fun to read your detective work, cuz those tiny faces are hard to see. 

 

Mmmm, I am not too good at math. I divided by 6.5 when I should have multiplied, yikes, lmao. So yeah, the rack packs would've needed to be a much smaller percentage of distribution for this card to be significant. Gonna bother the folks at Blowout and see if anyone can help me figure out the wax/rack/cello/split and therefore estimate how many of these cards were produced.

Lemme try to re-do the math. Bear with me...

Working with 1 million for every regular 1986 Topps card, I will first assume that they were all sold via rack packs only.

792,000,000 cards

Divided by 7,056 cards per case of rack pack boxes.

112,244 cases of rack packs.

6.5 Glossy AL team cards per case.

Which means 112,244 multiplied by 6.

About 792,000 Glossy AL team cards if all the 1986 Topps were sold only via rack pack. It wouldn't have been much less overproduced than the regular cards if rack pack had been the only distribution method.

So the extent to which the card was overproduced or relatively-scarce is almost purely a byproduct of what percentage of 1986 Topps cards were sold via rack packs. If it were theoretically 100%, then 792,000. If it had been 50%, then 396,000. If it had been 10%, then about 72,929. If it had been 5%, then about 36,749. My hunch is that it's in that 5-10% range, based on nothing but how many unopened rack packs I'm seeing for sale online versus unopened wax packs, not just for 1986 but for any year in that era. It might be more, it might be less, who knows. Well, somebody might know.