1957 Topps Basketball Cards

One of 3 known 1957 Topps boxes along with a 1957 Topps wrapper and unopened pack.

1. Short Prints

Some cards within this set were short-printed and are therefore harder to find. These cards should carry a premium. The following are the list of the 32 short-printed cards in the set:

#19 Tom Heinsohn - Boston Celtics 

#20 Bill Thieben - Detroit Pistons 

#22 Tom Marshall - Cincinnati Royals 

#23 Dick Garmaker - Minneapolis Lakers 

#28 Vern Mikkelsen - Minneapolis Lakers 

#29 Willie Naulls - New York Knicks 

#32 John Kerr - Syracuse Nationals 

#35 Ray Felix - New York Knicks 

#36 Ernie Beck - Philadelphia Warriors 

#37 Cliff Hagan - St. Louis Hawks 

#39 Jim Loscutoff - Boston Celtics 

#41 Joe Graboski - Philadelphia Warriors 

#45 Med Park - St. Louis Hawks 

#49 Walt Davis - Philadelphia Warriors 

#50 Richie Regan - Cincinnati Royals 

#53 Bob Hopkins - Syracuse Nationals 

#54 Earl Lloyd - Syracuse Nationals 

#58 Ed Conlin - Syracuse Nationals 

#59 Al Bianchi - Syracuse Nationals 

#60 George Dempsey - Philadelphia Warriors 

#61 Chuck Share - St. Louis Hawks 

#63 Bob Harrison - Syracuse Nationals 

#67 Jack George - Philadelphia Warriors 

#69 Ron Sobie - New York Knicks 

#70 Jack Coleman - St. Louis Hawks 

#72 Paul Seymour - Syracuse Nationals 

#73 Jim Paxson - Cincinnati Royals 

#74 Bob Leonard - Minneapolis Lakers 

#75 Andy Phillip - Boston Celtics 

#76 Joe Holup - Syracuse Nationals 

#77 Bill Russell - Boston Celtics 

#80 Dick Schnittker - Minneapolis Lakers 

2. Snow

The 1957 Topps set has a unique blemish that significantly impacts eye appeal ... snow.  Due to problems with the printing process back then, some cards have mild to moderate white marks in the image.  I always try to avoid cards with too much snow.

3. Print Marks

Many cards in the 1957 Topps have small red and blue print marks.  These can be easily missed as they sometimes blend into the background.  

4. Registration

Registration issues are caused by the printing press process back in the day. Everything was done manually making it very difficult to align everything on a four-color printing press. At the beginning of each shift, the printer would do a few test runs to make sure that a) all the four colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) were solid and b) everything was aligned well. But it was common for inks to run low and, as the machines ran, for the sheets of paper being ran through the four-color printing press to  have all the printing plates stamp the cards on the exact same spots.

The key is to look at the borders such as in this Dick Garmaker card below.  The red line on the top of this card is actually the magenta and the line on the bottom is yellow. It was very difficult to run a sheet of paper through the four-color printing press and have all the printing plates stamp the cards on the exact same spots causing less than clear imagery and/or coloring.

5. Known Defects

A few of the cards from the 1957 set have print issues. It is critical to know which print issues are present on all cards of this player, or just some.  For those universally-found issues, there should absolutely be no devaluation of the card (despite the flaw). On the other hand, a few cards have commonly-seen issues but those issues are not found on all cards. These should impact on your evaluation of such cards.  #77 - Bill Russell - the key card in the set has a small white notch on the top border.  It is found in all of his cards.

6. Recency of Grade

PSA's grading standards have tightened up through the years. Therefore, a recent slab with the same grade as an older one often (but not always) is a better condition card. In fact, we've seen recently-graded slabs with lower grades that appear nicer than some older slabs with higher grades. If you really are forward thinking, when AI becomes mainstream in card grading, these lower graded cards could earn a higher grade than their older predecessors. To identify a newer slab, look for the red, white, and blue PSA logo in the middle, bottom portion of the label.  Also, usually the higher slab numbers are more recent than lower numbers.

7. POP Realignment

A PSA 8 Topps basketball card (total of 1,945) is like a PSA 10.  This is because, as of 7/1/22, PSA has handed out relatively few PSA 8.5, 9 and 10 grades for this set.  Specifically, there is ONLY one PSA 10 grade for any 1957 Topps basketball card ... Dick Athan #14.  There are only 100 and 71 PSA 9s and PSA 8.5s, respectively, out of the entire 80-card set.  Larry Costello #33 and Bill Sharman #5 have the most PSA 9s with 6 and 5. The remainder of the cards in the set have only between 0 and 4 PSA 9s samples.