O-Pee-Chee

O-Pee-Chee is a collectibles company based in London, ON that issued a number of baseball card sets destined for the Canadian market over the years. Founded in 1911, the company got into the cards business by issuing hockey cards, and in 1958 came to a mutually-profitable agreement with the Topps company, by which it would distribute Topps baseball sets under license in Canada, while Topps would distribute its hockey cards in select American markets (hockey was still very much a niche sport in the U.S. at the time).

The main difference between Topps and O-Pee-Chee cards are found on the card backs, as O-Pee-Chee cards usually feature bilingual text (in English and French). In a few rare cases, the O-Pee-Chee set featured some different cards. This was especially notable in the case of the 1977 set - the first one to feature members of the expansion Toronto Blue Jays. The Canadian set, while much smaller than the full U.S. set, featured a few Toronto players not found in the U.S. set - Tom Bruno, Leon Hooten and Doug Howard - as well as cards depicting the coaching staffs of both the Blue Jays and the Montreal Expos.

The company still exists to this day, although it stopped distributing baseball card sets in the mid-1990s, when the market became saturated. It still issues hockey card sets, however, its licensing deal now being with Upper Deck.