Topps has done baseball cards since 1951 and they've always included team logos, except for those nasty looking cards for players with airbrushed hats when they played for a new team.
But I found a Topps set that goes the way of MSA, and includes no logos.
This is from a set Topps produced for Nestle in 2002. There are just six cards in the set. Was it too expensive to get an MLB license for just six cards? For whatever the reason, Nestle didn't get one and so Topps had to fire up the airbrush.
I must admit that Topps did a much better job of removing the logos compared to the work they did in the late '60s and early '70s.
Besides the Nestle cards, I can come up with only one other Topps product with no logos.
Can anyone come up with another besides the 1973 candy lids?
That's weird that Topps couldn't use the MLB logos for that 2002 Nestle card. I have the Ichiro from that set that is still attached to the Nestle Crunch ice cream bar box.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that when you see Topps do cards without logos, it's not that they wouldn't pay for the use of the logos, but that they weren't available because of an existing deal. In this case, probably some other company was the "official candy bar of Major League Baseball" or some such thing, and had the exclusive right to use team logos on ice cream products, so Nestle couldn't use them.
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