Q&A – Where Does This Barry Bonds Card Come From?

Question: Where does this Barry Bonds card come from? The design looks like 1997 Topps Baseball, but the photo and card number are different. Please help!

Answer: Cool find. Throughout the 90’s Topps would issue Pre-Production cards promoting that year’s newest card designs. Your Barry Bonds card is one of those cards. Topps issued them to promote the 1997 Topps Baseball design. Various outlets that Topps dealt with received them.

Nine cards (#PP1-#PP9) make up the 1997 Topps Baseball Pre-Production set.

  • Frank Thomas #PP1
  • Brady Anderson #PP2
  • Barry Bonds #PP3
  • Eric Young #PP4
  • Ricky Bottalico #PP5
  • Royce Clayton #PP6
  • Tom Goodwin #PP7
  • Craig Biggio #PP8
  • Ellis Burks #PP9

Each card in the Pre-Production set utilizes the same photo that went on to be used in the main base set EXCEPT for Barry Bonds. The Barry Bonds Pre-Production card and base set card have two different images making it a bit more desirable.

One Response

  1. It’s from the preproduction set, which they did a few years. Sometimes they were included in the previous year’s Factory sets as I recall, maybe some other places too.

    https://lifetimetopps.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/1997-topps-pre-production/

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