Cards In The Ocean
As you remember, I posted a link to this video a week or two ago:
I’ve received a little bit of pushback from people on YouTube about this video and some of the statements I’ve made. In particular, there are a number of people who claim that Sy Berger told them in person that he dumped 2,000,000 1952 Topps high numbered cards into the ocean. There are a few others who have come out with vague claims that they know Topps employees who were with Berger when the cards were dumped.
I’d argue that most of these statements fall apart under even the most basic scrutiny. The “witnesses” end up being friends of friends, and, of course, Berger told everybody that he dumped the cards into the ocean after he first came up with the story in 1975.
There are a few good reasons to completely doubt the veracity of his story. Here are a few that come to mind:
The dumping story simply doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason that Topps would need to dump the cards in the ocean. It would have made more sense to just burn the cards if they absolutely needed to be disposed of. The cost of renting a barge large enough to hold several massive cases of unsold 1952 Topps baseball cards alone makes this story extremely questionable.
Topps actually did sell high number packs very late into the season. Thanks to the excellent research over at The Topps Archives, we know for a fact that the 1952 high number Topps cards were sold in special packs and only appeared in 5 card packs. See this post, among others, for more details. While it’s not entirely clear how the high numbered cards were distributed, what we do know is that distribution was not all that wide. The cards mostly wound up in the New York, Pennsylvania, and Toronto areas, and seem to have taken months to make it out to the west coast. It seems to me that this was likely because Topps didn’t plan out the 1952 set as well as it should have (most of the star players wound up in the high number series, after all), and that the company was scrambling at the last minute to set up a viable distribution plan.
A significant number of cards wound up in Venezuela. As I noted in the video, quite a few high number 1952 Topps baseball cards wound up in Venezuela. It’s also likely that a number of these packs were sold in Canada; remember that the Topps relationship with O-Pee-Chee wasn’t really formalized until the 1960s. If Topps had these well known avenues for dumping excess product, why would Topps need to go to the expense and trouble to dump a bunch of cards in the ocean?
The Card Collectors Company was a thing. Posts like this one are really important to figuring out what happened. The thing is that we’ve assumed for years that serious baseball card stores didn’t really exist until the early 1970s or so. That’s not true; in fact, there has always been a secondary market for these cards, even going back to the days of Jefferson Burdick in the 1930s. There absolutely was an avenue for Topps to quietly release unsold product into the secondary market; in fact, The Card Collectors Company was located in New York City, not far away from where Topps headquarters was at the time.
Anyway, the more I look into this, the more I believe that the 1975 fire at The Card Collectors Company likely destroyed a bunch of the high number 1952 Topps backlog.
The Sy Berger ocean story has become part of the legend of Topps baseball cards, and there’s a reason why this story comes up again and again. However, there is an unfortunate tendency among card collectors (especially older collectors) to treat Topps as some sort of heavenly entity, as if it were the ultimate say in everything baseball card related. The truth is likely much more mundane than the legend.
Another more modern sports card sleuthing idea you might be interested in pursuing is the 1986 - 87 Fleer Basketball set. I understand these are scarce primarily because of their poor distribution, but you wouldn't have known that if you lived in my area of Central Pennsylvania. You could get them at pretty much any convenience store.
The story about dumping 1952 Topps high numbers into the ocean never made any sense to me, even as a kid. It is bizarre on its face. Considering the fact that Mr. Berger was a businessman, telling a wild story to promote demand for his current products makes more sense.