The Rare 1954 Topps Ted Williams "Card", Only 3 Are Known Currently
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According to Trading Card Database, Ted Williams has eight different baseball cards from 1954. Two of the cards are well known among Ted Williams collectors, as well as hobbyists in general, for being particularly tough. The first of these owes its scarcity not to Williams himself but to the fact that more or less every card in the set is a tough one.
1954 Wilson Franks
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The 1954 Wilson Franks card, as the name may suggest, was packaged with hot dogs. The full set included 20 stars of the era and seven future Hall of Famers, among them Roy Campanella, Bob Feller, and Ted Williams. Just how tough is the Wilson Franks card of Teddy Ballgame? Here's one way to look at it. Ted's 1954 Topps card #1 has been graded by PSA more than 5000 times to date. His Wilson Franks card has been graded only 218 times.
1954 Bowman Ted Williams
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The second famous 1954 Ted Williams rarity is one that should never have existed. Prior to the 1954 season, Teddy Ballgame signed an exclusive contract with Topps, one that precluded his use in the Bowman set. Capitalizing on their coup, Topps bookended its set with two cards of Williams, numbered 1 and 250. Over at Bowman, however, it seems no one got the memo! Of course once lawyers talked to lawyers, Bowman pulled the Williams card from its first series, replacing it with Ted's Red Sox teammate Jim Piersall.
The result, ironically enough, is that today collectors regard the Bowman as a grail card while considering the Splinter's Topps cards relatively ho-hum in comparison. In truth, this is a card that may not be quite as rare as the Hobby once believed. Even still, PSA has only graded the card 1461 times, or about a third as often as Teddy's 1954 Topps #1.
The rarest 1954 Teddy of them all?
In 1954, Williams did not simply have two cards in the Topps set but was also featured on the product's packaging and advertisements. Though the boxes the cards came in are incredibly collectible and extremely scarce today, no collector would regard them as baseball cards. Yes, they're made of cardboard, and yes, they have Ted Williams on them, but at best they would be classified as baseball card-adjacent.
Though outside the strictest definitions of a baseball card, the store advertising displays for 1954 Topps might be viewed differently by at least some collectors. True, at 7" by 11" it would be one of the bigger baseball cards out there, but it's rectangular, it has a nice card-like border, and it's simply a great looking piece.
Current PSA population on the item is 0, which may reflect its rarity but could also reflect the grading company's avoidance of such pieces. Therefore a better measure of the scarcity of the item comes in simply looking for one online. Unless you are an absolute master when it comes to Google searches, there's a very good chance you will find either no results or perhaps just the Collectibles on SI article you're reading right now! That said, a search on X will at least turn up this one result:
Miss the first issue of The Post War Cards Newsletter this morning? I kicked it off with a rare look at a 1954 Topps Ted Williams Advertising Sign-I know of only two examples in the hobby!
— Post War Cards (@PostWarCards) September 26, 2024
Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next one: https://t.co/W4F7Ybkhmx pic.twitter.com/lh3U73HU0W
As with the 1954 Bowman Ted Williams, this may be another Williams piece not quite as rare as previously believed. Where the original tweet on X indicated knowledge of only two such posters, one person replying to the tweet claimed to have one, fabled Red Sox collector Mark Hoyle owns another, and the author of the article owns a third. Still, the "card" is almost certainly rarer than Ted's Bowman and Wilson Franks cards and would appear to be the rarest of all his 1954 issues.
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.