SY-OP: The Year Topps Blew Our Minds Forever
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Ask most collectors today about iconic error cards featuring weak-hitting second basemen from famous baseball families and you're sure to get a single answer. They might not tell you the year. They might not tell you the brand. They might not even say the player's name. Instead, they'll simply respond with one short phrase. In any other circumstance, this phrase would be sufficiently abhorrent as to get them decked, but in this context it would be 100% correct, if not reflexive. Their answer would be "F*ck Face."
What they might not realize is that only ten years earlier there was an error card even more mind-blowing. Today this card is all but forgotten, but in 1979 it was more than a card. It was an absolute phenomenon. Whatever effect the most powerful drugs of the 1970s might have had on young minds, triple or quadruple it. This was a Dock Ellis-level dose of cardboard psychedelia, particularly potent at ages 8 to 10, that fundamentally and irreversibly shook reality from all its supposed underpinnings. Compared to the lunch tables of fourth graders tripping out over this card daily, Jim Morrison was a veritable choir boy.
Curiously, the card might have been overlooked entirely by the casual collector, riffling through packs in search of favorite players or simply trying to complete the set. Still, in every neighborhood, on every school playground, in every Little League dugout, there was someone who knew what they had and couldn't wait to initiate their friends to a sight that couldn't be unseen: Bump Wills of the Rangers...on the Blue Jays?!
Collectors who didn't live through it might rightly ask, "What's the big deal? Hadn't they ever seen an error card before?" After all, the Hobby would soon run amok with error cards. Remarkably, however, the answer here was no. Apart from some sloppy Hostess Twinkies cards most of us were too young to own, our entire Hobby experience had been error-free. If it said so on a trading card, you could take it to the bank. We might not believe our parents, our teachers, or even our Bibles, but we damn sure believed our card collections!
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Yet here was Bump Wills on the Blue Jays wearing what was unmistakably a Texas Rangers uniform. (On card three-six-nine no less! Yes, Topps was definitely playing with our minds.) However pedestrian such a thing might seem today, this was not something kids could handle back then. Young collectors of the day would have found themselves less perplexed had Topps presented them with unsolved problems from quantum physics.
In some sense, the Wills card was quantum physics, only in cardboard form. Just as physicists and philosophers puzzled over Schrodinger's Cat at once being dead and alive, fifth graders bent their minds around the son of Maury Wills existing simultaneously in Texas and Toronto. To reject the impossibility as absurd was to question the infallibility of Topps, in other words to hurtle ourselves into an utterly aimless and truthless void without limits. No thanks, right? After all, Topps had never let us down before. Life? Yes. Topps? No. Never.
And then suddenly it happened. A friend, teammate, classmate, or neighbor who somehow hadn't yet completed their 1979 set by the All-Star Break pulled the card that killed our collective daze faster than a late-night traffic stop complete with mag light. Wait, what?! Had we imagined the whole thing? Had we simply been pawns in some massive Topps gaslighting ploy? To borrow from the "Baseball Dates" section on the back of the card, "WHAT HAPPENED?" (And feel free to picture that question mark as gigantic.)
Years later, Topps washed their hands of the whole psy-op, or shall I say "Sy-op?" Here is Bruce Markusen, writing for the National Baseball Hall of Fame's "Card Corner" column:
In 2002, former Topps Chewing Gum president and baseball card legend Sy Berger visited the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown for a 50th anniversary celebration of Topps baseball cards, giving us the opportunity to ask him directly about the reasons behind the Wills error. According to Sy... he had received a call from a friend after the 1978 season, telling him that Wills was about to be traded from the Rangers to the Blue Jays as part of a major trade. Although the trade had yet to be announced, the friend assured Berger that it was a “done deal.”Bruce Murkusen, National Baseball HOF
In truth, Berger's story is almost certainly hogwash. Search newspaper archives as long as you want, and you'll never find even a peep about such a trade. And imagine for a second that such trade discussions had been percolating. What players could have possibly been involved that would qualify this trade as "major?" These were the Blue Jays and Rangers, for God's sake! We're not exactly talking Ted Williams for Joe DiMaggio here. Oh, and if Bump really was changing teams, why not airbrush a Jays uniform and update the back of the card as well?
So yeah, I'm calling B.S. on Berger's whopper, but here's the thing. For those of us who were nine or ten years old in 1979, what even is truth anymore, beyond some robbed and distant relic of childhood, filed away with all other "ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go Bump in the night?" Good Lord, deliver us, from a card that still haunts and leaves us damaged to this day.
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Jason A. Schwartz is a collectibles expert whose work can be found regularly at SABR Baseball Cards, Hobby News Daily, and 1939Bruins.com. His collection of Hank Aaron baseball cards and memorabilia is currently on exhibit at the Atlanta History Center, and his collectibles-themed artwork is on display at the Honus Wagner Museum and PNC Park.