As part of 2021’s ongoing celebration of 70 years of Topps baseball cards, the company has teamed up with Sports Illustrated to create a 70 card set which celebrates some MLB superstars who have appeared on the magazine’s cover.

This is not the first time SI has teamed up with a sports card manufacturer. In both 1997 and 1998 Fleer produced a Sports Illustrated set which included cards utilizing past magazine covers. In fact, the 2021 Topps card #3 of Kirby Puckett is the same cover used in the 1998 Fleer Then & Now Covers insert #2C. At the time of this original post, four cards have been released. Mike Trout, Duke Snider, Kirby Puckett, and Larry Walker were the first four subjects.

69. Shohei Ohtani
70. Derek Jeter

Buy Now

Each week, two cards will be released on Topps.com and will only be available for that week’s order window. Print runs will be based on the number of orders and will be announced after the window closes. Past print runs can be found below in the photo archive! Individual cards are priced at $9.99 with discounts available for bulk purchases. In addition, a weekly two card bundle containing both of the week’s releases is available for a discounted price of $17.49.

In addition to the standard base cards, four different parallels will be randomly inserted with each print run.

White with Red Stripes /70

Canary Yellow /25

Orange /10

Red /5

Silver 1/1

It will be interesting to see the demand and secondary market sustainability for this product. The concept is interesting, but Topps has really ramped up the direct print to order releases in 2021, and despite the overall market growth, there may be signs we are reaching a saturation point. There are a dozen or more on demand products currently competing for customer dollars, and many of them have had mixed results on the secondary market.

I plan to make bulk purchases of the entire run, but will be adjusting the quantity purchased based on how sales come in both on Sportlots and eBay.

Summary of the Full Product Run

This was a fun project. I really enjoyed seeing all the different images which were chosen for the cards. Seeing the SI logo change over the years made each cover interesting. I also appreciate that Topps chose some covers which featured fresh players. We don’t see a lot of products featuring Al Kaline, Catfish Hunter, or Tim Lincecum at this point!

Print runs ranged from a high of Mike Trout’s 17,936 for card #1, to a low of 842 with Randy Johnson’s card #68.

When looking at the secondary market, this product never really caught on. Most cards can be found on eBay for $6-$8 which is right about the direct cost from Topps. The parallels sold for a bit more, and will probably be the reason I end up making a small profit after all my inventory is sold.