Topps

• 1. Introduction

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  Topps began as a chewing gum company founded in 1938 by four brothers named Abram, Ira, Philip, and Joseph Shorin. The name they chose was deliberate: they wanted to be "tops" in whatever field they entered. They could not have guessed that the field would eventually make them custodians of some of the most valuable pieces of cardboard ever printed. On the 28th of August 2022, a single baseball card bearing Mickey Mantle's image sold for $12.6 million. That card was number 311 in a set Topps designed on a kitchen table in Brooklyn in the autumn of 1951. How did a gum company from Brooklyn end up defining what a baseball card looks like, shaping the economics of professional sports, and building a cultural empire spanning everything from Star Wars to Garbage Pail Kids? The answers run through a garbage boat off the New Jersey coast, a Yiddish conversation in London, and a federal judge who finally broke a monopoly that lasted a quarter-century.

• 2. Bazooka and the Card Idea

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  Topps's signature early product was Bazooka bubble gum, introduced in 1947 as a bar of gum that sold for five cents. It came in patriotic red, white, and blue packaging and was distinctive from the gum the company would later bundle with baseball cards. Bazooka was good enough to stand on its own. In 1953, the company added a small Bazooka Joe comic strip to the wrapper as an extra draw. The pairing of a small treat with a printed paper keepsake would become the template for everything that followed.

  The idea of combining gum with trading cards came from watching a star of early television named William Boyd, better known as Hopalong Cassidy. Starting in 1950, Topps packaged its gum alongside cards featuring Boyd's Western character. Boyd was appearing in newspaper articles and on magazine covers at the time, and a significant amount of Hoppy merchandise was already in circulation. The gum-plus-card experiment worked well enough that the company tried it next with baseball players. The results made it immediately clear where the company's future lay.

• 3. The Kitchen Table in Brooklyn

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  Sy Berger is called the "father of the modern baseball card," and the title is earned. In the autumn of 1951, Berger was a 28-year-old veteran of World War II when he sat down with Woody Gelman at the kitchen table of his apartment on Alabama Avenue in Brooklyn and designed the 1952 Topps baseball card set. The design placed the player's name, photo, facsimile autograph, and team name and logo on the front. The back held height, weight, batting and throwing hand, birthplace, birthday, statistics, and a short biography. The basic layout is still in use today.

  Berger stayed at Topps from 1947 to 1997, then served as a consultant for another five years. He became the visible face of Topps to major league players, signing them up annually and paying them in merchandise ranging from refrigerators to carpeting. The Shorin family recognized his abilities far beyond card design. In 1964 they sent him to London to negotiate the rights to produce Beatles trading cards. He arrived without an appointment and succeeded by speaking in Yiddish to the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein.

  One of Berger's less celebrated decisions had enormous unintended consequences. He hired a garbage boat to remove leftover boxes of 1952 baseball cards from a Topps warehouse, rode with them as a tugboat pulled the load offshore, and watched as the cards were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. Those discarded cards included Mickey Mantle's first Topps card. Nobody at the time suspected what collectors would one day pay for them.

• 4. The War for Player Contracts

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  Bowman Gum had built a commanding position in the baseball card market by the time Topps arrived, doing it through exclusive contracts that locked players to Bowman's product. Those contracts specifically covered the sale of cards paired with chewing gum, a pairing that had been established in the 1930s. Topps found a way in: it sold its 1951 cards with caramel candy instead of gum, sidestepping Bowman's contract language while it quietly locked players into its own future gum rights starting in 1952.

  Bowman sued Topps in federal court, alleging trademark infringement, unfair competition, and contractual interference. The court rejected Bowman's claim to a trademark on the word "baseball" in connection with gum sales. The contract dispute was messier, hinging on the precise dates when individual players had signed with each company. Several Topps sets from these years had "missing" cards where numbers were skipped because the courts had not yet sorted out who had rights to particular players. The competition ended in 1956 when Topps simply bought Bowman outright.

  The next challenger was Fleer, which signed Ted Williams to an exclusive contract in 1959. Williams retired the following year, limiting Fleer's usefulness. When Fleer pushed through the Federal Trade Commission for a ruling against Topps's exclusive contracts, a hearing examiner ruled against Topps in 1965. The Commission reversed the decision on appeal, finding that competition was still possible as long as cards were sold with something other than gum. Fleer, rather than test that logic, sold its remaining player contracts to Topps for $395,000 in 1966.

• 5. The Players Push Back

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  With Fleer neutralized, Topps held every major league player under contract, generally for five years plus renewal options. The challenge that finally cost the company its comfortable position came not from a competitor but from the players themselves. The Major League Baseball Players Association, still developing as an institution, discovered it could generate significant income by pooling its members' publicity rights and offering companies a group license. After landing Coca-Cola bottlecap rights for $120,000, the union decided Topps was not paying its players adequately.

  MLBPA executive director Marvin Miller approached Joel Shorin, Topps president, about renegotiating the contracts. Shorin declined. After extended back-and-forth, the union before the 1968 season instructed members to stop signing Topps renewals and offered competing companies the chance to make cards of most players starting in 1973. Though Fleer passed on this arrangement, the pressure was enough. By the end of 1968, Topps had agreed to double its per-player payment from $125 to $250 and began paying a percentage of overall sales as well. Individual player contracts eventually rose to $500 per player.

  As a result of this history, Topps continued using individual player contracts even as all other manufacturers moved to group MLBPA licenses. The difference had real consequences. Alex Rodriguez went without a Topps card early in his career because he declined to sign an individual contract. Barry Bonds, who opted out of group licensing in 2004, went without cards from most manufacturers. Topps, able to negotiate individually, eventually produced a 2004 Bonds card.

• 6. The Monopoly Breaks

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  Federal judge Clarence Charles Newcomer ended Topps Chewing Gum's exclusive right to sell baseball cards in 1980, opening the market to the Fleer Corporation. Fleer and another company, Donruss, both entered the market in 1981. When an appeals court reversed Newcomer's ruling in August 1981, it appeared Topps had regained control. Instead, both Fleer and Donruss restructured their products to avoid the prohibition, packaging cards with logo stickers and cardboard puzzle pieces respectively rather than gum. The Donruss puzzles, created by baseball artist Dick Perez for Perez Steele, depicted players including Warren Spahn, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle.

  The competition pushed Topps to introduce what it called "Traded" sets, featuring players who had changed teams after the main annual set was printed. These sets became increasingly important because they contained rookie cards. The 1982 Topps Traded set, for instance, was the first to show Cal Ripken Jr. on a card by himself. Topps also produced the first card of Mark McGwire before he reached the major leagues, using a license for the U.S. Olympic baseball team. The McGwire card first appeared in the 1985 regular set, featuring players from the 1984 Olympic squad. By 1989, the competitive pressure prompted Topps to resurrect Bowman, the company it had bought out decades earlier, now as its own subsidiary brand aimed at young prospects.

  Upper Deck's entry into the market also in 1989 accelerated a quality arms race. Topps responded with Stadium Club in 1991, its first premium card line. The resulting proliferation of sets eventually became severe enough that the MLBPA announced for 2006 it would only grant licenses to Topps and Upper Deck, limit the number of products, and bar cards of players before they reached the major leagues.

• 7. Beyond Baseball

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  Topps extended its reach into non-sports cards with consistent creativity. The Space Race prompted a set of Space Cards in 1958. In 1962, the Mars Attacks card series, sketched by Wally Wood and Bob Powell and painted by Norman Saunders, later inspired a Tim Burton film. A 1994 tie-in with that film produced a new card series plus a 100-card archive set reprinting the original 55 cards alongside 45 new images, including work by Saunders' daughter Zina Saunders.

  Art Spiegelman joined Topps as a teenager and served as the company's main staff cartoonist for more than 20 years. Creative directors Woody Gelman and Len Brown gave freelance assignments to comics artists Jack Davis, Wally Wood, and Bob Powell, and also brought in contributors from the underground comix movement including Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, and Robert Crumb. Future screenwriter Gary Gerani joined the company in 1972 and edited virtually all film and television tie-in products, including the numerous Star Wars card series, and created the original 1988 Dinosaurs Attack! property.

  For a period beginning in 1973, Wacky Packages outsold Topps baseball cards, becoming the first Topps product to do so since the company's purely gum-focused early years. Pokemon cards repeated the feat starting in 1999. In 1993 Topps created a comic book publishing division, Topps Comics, whose longest-running title was The X-Files. The division published through 1998 before withdrawing from comics.

  In 2003, Topps acquired the game company WizKids for $29.4 million in cash, gaining ownership of the BattleTech and Shadowrun gaming universes. WizKids managed to reach profitability by inventing a new niche called the constructible strategy game through Pirates of the Spanish Main. Topps shut WizKids down in November 2008, and NECA acquired the brand in September 2009.

• 8. Fanatics and What Came After

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  Topps's exclusive relationship with Major League Baseball, formalized in 2009 and extended in 2013 and again in 2018, gave the company a position no competitor could match for over a decade. Then in August 2021 came the news that Fanatics, Inc. had secured future exclusive licenses with both Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association. In January 2022, Fanatics announced it had acquired Topps outright for $500 million.

  The transaction separated Topps's trading card and entertainment properties from its candy business. The confectionery side was spun off as Bazooka Brands, still held by the previous owners. The Topps name and card business passed to Fanatics.

  In May 2026, Fanatics, operating through the Topps brand, signed an exclusive collective licensing deal with FIFA to become the licensee for collectible cards, stickers, and card games tied to the World Cup and other FIFA events, effective from 2031 onward. The deal ended a partnership between FIFA and Panini that had lasted more than five decades. Meanwhile, on the 1st of April 2026, Topps was granted an exclusive license by the NFL for producing football cards, returning it to the American football market it had exited after the 2015 season.