1984 Nestle Cubs

Topps has worked with other companies to produce team sets. Burger King had sets of a few teams in the late '70s. The cards had the same design as the regular Topps cards, though some pictures were cropped a little differently. The card numbers were different, too, as the Burger King cards were just numbered for the particular team, usually 1-22. No Cubs sets were made, so I don't have any of these cards.

In 1981 Topps partner with Coca Cola to produce team sets for 12 teams, including the Cubs. I've got a post about the Coke set here.

The cards again used the '81 Topps template, but also added a Coke logo.

Three years later Topps greatly expanded their partnership cards by producing an entire set of 1984 cards with Nestle. The odd thing about the Nestle cards is that they weren't produced as individual cards. Instead, they were available in 132 card sheets. According to the Standard Catalog, however, a huge chunk of the sheets were bought by a few dealers who had the sheets cut into cards. Full sheets are available on Ebay.

Topps got a little lazy with the card design. If you look in the right corner of the Topps cards, you'll see how the border was notched to trace around the "T" in Topps. That's fine.

Now look at a Nestle card.

The Topps logo has been replaced by a Nestle logo, but the notch for the Topps "T" remains. That looks dumb.

It reported that only about 4,000 sets of the Nestle cards were made, which I'm guessing would have been a pretty small press run. It probably wasn't worth the cost for Topps to redesign the card to match the Nestle logo.

It was worth it to me!

I've been keeping an eye out for a reasonably priced Cubs Nestle set for a while, and recently picked up the entire 26 card set.

This is the team leader card. The 1983 Cubs were not very good, as evidenced by the team best ERA 0f 4.30.

I've got the other 25 cards for you in one shot. Since these are Nestle cards that were sold in sheets, here is a sheet of 25 cards, all with a bad notch in the corner!