The 1981 Topps baseball card set is best remembered for featuring large square “giant photo” cards of the game’s greatest stars. At a time when most cards had small horizontal photos, the 1981 Topps giants stood out with their oversized images that truly spotlighted the players. The giant photo cards were a huge hit with collectors and have gone on to become some of the most sought-after and valuable cards from the early 1980s.
Topps released the standard 660-card 1981 set in May of that year using the standard 3.5″ x 2.5″ card format that had been the norm since the late 1950s. However, Topps also included giant photo cards of 11 elite players sprinkled throughout the base set. The giant cards measured an massive 5.5″ x 7″ and featured full front coverage photos of such superstars as Mike Schmidt, George Brett, Keith Hernandez, Steve Carlton, Dave Winfield, and Nolan Ryan among others.
While some earlier sets dating back to the 1950s had utilized larger card sizes for certain subsets, nothing had been done on the scale of the 1981 giants. Topps pulled out all the stops, using high quality photos in sharp focus that truly allowed collectors to admire every detail of these all-time great players. Rather than cropping the photos to fit traditional card dimensions, Topps let the images spill out to the edges of the giant cards.
Instantly, the 1981 giant photo cards became the most sought-after and valuable cards in the set. Being nearly 3 times larger than a standard card and spotlighting only the very best MLB players, they created a frenzy among collectors. Today, graded mint condition copies of the 1981 Mike Schmidt giant photo regularly sell for over $1,000, showing just how iconic these oversized cards have become.
Part of what made the 1981 giants so special was the unprecedented nature of their large size at the time. Baseball cards had always been pocket-sized up to that point. Suddenly seeing these players nearly life-sized on a card stopped collectors in their tracks. Also notable was how Topps included the giants throughout the base set randomly through the checklist, rather than grouping them all together at the front or back. This created both surprise and a hunt to find them all.
While the giant photo cards were a one-year experiment by Topps in 1981, their success paved the way for future sets to build upon the concept. Starting in 1982, Topps began including smaller-sized but still oversized “photo stars” cards in its regular issues. Other manufacturers like Fleer and Donruss soon followed suit with their own larger highlighted cards. Throughout the 1980s and beyond, variation insert cards spotlighting individual stars with bigger photos became an annual tradition. But the original 1981 Topps giants remain the gold standard among collectors as the set that started it all.
In the 35-plus years since their release, appreciation for the 1981 Topps giant photo cards has only grown exponentially. They are now amongst the most iconic cards produced by Topps during their peak 1970s-80s era and remain incredibly popular with both vintage collectors and today’s investors. Part of why they maintain such staying power is the elite level of talent that was featured, including eventual Hall of Famers like Schmidt, Brett, Carlton, Ryan and Hernandez. But mostly it was the unparalleled, immense photo size on a baseball card that shocked and amazed consumers in 1981. For collectors, the giants represented the pinnacle of what a sports card could be.
In recent years, as card values across the entire vintage collecting hobby have skyrocketed, the 1981 Topps giants have followed suit. Now with population reports showing fewer than 10 PSA/BGS graded copies exist of several of the cards, condition has become everything. Even very nicely centered but lower graded giants can sell for thousands. And as the players age and pass away, the historical significance attached to a complete 1981 giant photo set will only increase further down the road. For these reasons, the Topps giants of ’81 are assured of retaining their iconic status and staggering collectability for future generations to admire and discover. They truly changed the face of the entire baseball card industry forever.
