(Check out our 1983 Topps baseball cards videos over on our YouTube channel.)
As pitchers and catchers dusted the grime of the previous season off their gear and the snow from their driveways to make their way south for Spring Training in 1983, Americans of all ilk labored under an increasing infatuation with Star Wars of various types.
Fans of the George Lucas franchise were anxious for summer to arrive, bringing with it the “last” installment of the good v. evil blockbuster series that had been absent from theaters for three years.
In Washington, President Ronald Reagan unleashed his plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), including the proposed construction of a web of lasers that would shoot down any missiles hurled our way from, say, the Soviet Union. The high-tech nature of the idea caused politicians on the other side of the aisle to scoff and prompted Ted Kennedy to dub the scheme, yes, “Star Wars.”
Against this background of Cold War posturing and box office anticipation, baseball fans were happy to dig out of another cold winter to find their game on the brink of another round of its own brand of Star Wars.
Stars are Born!
The 1982 season had seen the emergence of a few players, not merely to star status, but into the stratosphere of superstars. As Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves and Robin Yount of the Milwaukee Brewers hammered the competition en route to taking the NL and AL MVP awards, respectively, they also lifted their teams to division championships.
Joining those teams in the playoffs were the aging but powerful California Angels and the perennially-contending St. Louis Cardinals, led by flashy shortstop Ozzie Smith.
While the Cards swept Atlanta in the NLCS, it took the Brewers five full games to dispatch California in the ALCS. A thrilling seven-game World Series followed, leaving the Cardinals as world champions and the Brewers as favorites of “working men” everywhere.
And fans greeted the new season with a gripping question: would the Brewers — or some other upstart — shatter baseball’s traditional power structure, or would the staid franchises of the past regain the pedestals from which they’d fallen during that gritty season of 1982?
Though it would take most of the summer of 1983 to answer that question, baseball card collectors found out early that spring that their world was changing for the better.
Because, after two years of increased competition following Fleer’s landmark court victory in 1980 led to a string of dismal cardboard issues, the first ripped wax wrapper in the new year revealed a ray of light.
No matter what the upcoming season had in store, 1983 Topps baseball cards were a bright beacon that would draw us back to our shoebox treasures all year long, and for decades to come.
PICTURE-IN-PICTURE
George Lucas and Ronald Reagan weren’t the only technological innovators in 1983, as it turned out.
As cable television subscriptions proliferated across America and viewers struggled to cope with the flood of new channels available to them, television manufacturer Philips decided to try something new to help out the market — and, of course, to capitalize on the market.
In particular, Philips endowed its high-end sets that year with “picture-in-picture” (PIP) technology, first piloted in 1976 by Quantel in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. The idea was that you could watch one program on the large main screen of your TV and then load up another channel in a small box that lay overtop a small portion of the full panel.
Whether Topps confabbed with Philips on the idea of “picture-in-picture” is not clear from our vantage point all these years later, but what is certain is that The Old Gum Company brought a pasteboard version of PIP to their baseball cards that year.
First, the “Picture” …
Each card front in the 1983 Topps set is dominated by a large, full-color photo of the player in question, covering roughly the upper 80% of available real estate. That image is surrounded by a tiny black border and then a thin line in one of the team’s colors, with the Topps logo in the upper right-hand corner.
Under the main photo is a box bordered by another team-related color, with the team name embedded in a thick band toward the bottom of the card. In a white swath above the team name, the player’s name appears in the same color as the upper border, and his position is listed in black type.
As was the norm in those days, the entire thing is set off by a fairly thick white border.
Then, the “-in-Picture” …
What wasn’t typical at all, and what sets 1983 Topps apart from the drab issues that came before it and opened up an array of artistic possibilities, was the round headshot of the player that juts into the main photo and is positioned either to the lower left or the lower right.
It’s similar to the layout Topps used in 1963, but with a flip in emphasis.
Whereas the inset in the 1963 Topps set generally showed a player in a posed “action” shot, the 1983 cameo is all head and face. At the same time, Topps replaced the portraits used in the main panel for most 1963 cards with some of the best action photography collectors had ever seen in regular base issues to that point.
The result is an aesthetic winner that gives collectors a sense of both the player and the action on the field and represented a marked improvement over just about every card issued in 1981 and 1982.
Adding to that general impression of quality was the fact that most of the action photos in 1983 Topps were snapped on sunny days, flooding each card with bright, crisp imagery.
The combination of these factors makes 1983 Topps sparkle in comparison to other issues of the era.
Some Things Never Change, but …
The back of the 1983 cards is all Topps, from the gray-brown cardboard to the season highlights box.
Each horizontally-oriented card back starts with the card number in small black type against a gray background in the upper left-hand corner. The player’s name appears in large black block letters across the top of the card.
Nestled near the card number, an orange silhouette of a batter protrudes from a lighter orange box containing vital information. Beneath that is the usual complete statistical record that fans came to love and depend upon in the days before Baseball-Reference.com