Joy of a Completed Set: 1957 Topps!

I never owned a 1957 Topps card during my original stint as a card collector in the early 90s, with my modest smattering of vintage not stretching back further than 1969 or so. The first 1957 Topps card I acquired was a year or two after I had returned to the hobby, scoring myself a beat-up, miscut Mickey Mantle for $54 in November 2013. Over a decade later, October 18, 2024, I acquired my last 1957 Topps card, coincidentally also a Yankees outfielder, and between those 2 purchases, I tracked down the other 405 cards in the 407-card set. Yep, 1957 Topps is in the books!

My "setbuild bookend" cards are fittingly off-center towards each other. Tony Kubek isn't a big name today, but he won the AL ROY that year, and add to that the "Yankee tax", and his high-numbered rookie card shook out to being my final need, settling for this one.

Fulls stats, write-up, and a comic.. it's a solid card back design. (BTW, Happy Birthday, Mickey Mantle!)

After the Kubek rookie arrived, I queued up a playlist of Billboard's Hot 100 for the year 1957, and thumbed through the cards to confirm they're all there. When they started counting bananas in "Day-O", it nearly threw me off as I mentally checked off card numbers, lol. Then my heart nearly sank when #156 Gus Triandos wasn't in its place, but thankfully ol' Gus had just been misfiled a couple cards back.

All cards were accounted for, happy to report. The set is in a box, not binder-- apologies to you purists out there-- but I've got several graded cards in there anyways. I'm no "slab bro" or anything, but I plan to keep them encased for safety.

Billy Pierce is my highest-graded card at PSA 7, and turned out to be the only dupe that slipped into my set, also finding a creased raw copy in the box during my verification process. Pierce's upgrade and the PSA 6 Wally Post were scored in a trade with Chris the Collector in 2019. Luis Aparicio (previous pic) was a contest win, I believe, but I think the rest of these slabs were purchases. For a while I was trying to get big names in graded form just to be careful in regards to counterfeits. Not sure I'd bother quite as much today, but no regrets.

My set is a basic "one of each card number" set, not a master set. There are unnumbered checklists (with variations) and contest cards that I don't really have interest in. Same for the one error variation and a "lucky penny keychain offer" card. As it stands, I just have the one above contest card as a representative for the unnumbered appendix stuff. I've thrown the other stuff on my TCDB wantlist just in case, as I wouldn't mind trading for them, but I don't want to pay big bucks for boring cards that are only expensive today because kids back in '57 understandably threw them away with the wrappers most of the time.

Some more big cards that are too good for just a penny sleeve's protection. Another quirk of my set is that the Duke Snider is a buyback auto from 2004 Topps Originals. But hey, that's a real 1957 Topps card, so I count it. If I were one to grade cards, I'd be very curious what that Brooks Robinson rookie I lucked into would score. It seems pretty sharp for one of the top cards in the checklist, and isn't very representative of my set as a whole. For instance..

Consecutively near the front of the set at #8 and 9 are these well-loved specimens. There are several beaters in my set, can't deny. Looks like I've got 155 cards currently logged in a status of "upgrade would be nice" on my spreadsheet. Sure, I wouldn't mind upgrading them someday, but I'm also totally fine if that day never comes. I can truthfully make the claim that I've completed a set of 1957 Topps Baseball, and that's enough for me!

And an even bigger big-picture collecting goal for me wraps up now too: I've now completed my original vintage setbuilding goal of my personal "holy trinity" of favorite sets, one from each decade of the Topps golden era. First for me was 1973 Topps (started circa 11/28/2013, finished  9/26/2015-- my 1st ever completed full-sized set), then came 1965 Topps (kicked off 8/14/2015 and completed 1/7/2018). And now finally, I've completed my trifecta of personal favorites with 1957. 

The Mantle was originally purchased as part of my little Mickey Mantle PC-- no intention to ever complete the set at the time. But soon thereafter I started attending the local monthly card show and would always grab '57s when I found them in the sub-dollar bins. The earliest post I found with the "1957 Topps" label on my blog is a card show recap from August 2015: "I was especially happy to score the two 57s. That's a definite 'maybe someday I'll work on completing that set' dream set for me." 

Hey, dreams do come true! :) It's also kind of neat how I tried to keep track of the source of each card on the spreadsheet, helping to tell the story of how this particular set came together... via trades, card shows, and online purchases. As for the cards themselves, I love the "non-design" of the set and how for the first time Topps let the photograph be the card without much bells or whistles getting in the way. The set makes for terrific snapshots into the game at the time.

I hit the '57 wantlist hard for the next few years at the monthly card show, as longtime readers might recall-- (post titled "Wanna see more '57 Topps pickups? Too bad, here they are anyway" lol). Then when covid hit, I stopped going to the card show, and haven't been inspired to return since. Now here in 2024 I realized if I was gonna finish the set, I'd need to get more proactive and start picking off needs at COMC and eBay. And so I did, and a few months later, here we are. I'm glad I did the heavy lifting before the pandemic pumped up vintage prices. It's safe to say this will remain as my oldest completed set from here on out. I have half-hearted whims of pursuing 1959 Topps someday if prices drop or my ship comes in, but besides that, I still have 1964 Topps stalled at 76% and would like to complete that one eventually before my collecting career wraps up. But my focus is jumping back up to the 70s now, aiming to complete a run of that decade's flagship Topps sets. The pesky high-numbers of 1972 Topps, in particular, are currently in my crosshairs. In fact...

The final 1957 card was won from a Greg Morris auction, and if you're familiar with that seller, you know if you win one card from him you should try to snag a few more cards within the next few days before you pay because it's a flat shipping cost for all cards won within a week or something. I scored a bunch of '72 needs, including the 4 highlights above (Finally have the real Ron Cey rookie card!). From my experience, you want to find his auctions that end in the middle of the night (like these)-- his auctions ending in the afternoon/evening seem to end higher (than they probably should) with last minute bids, which I guess makes sense, but something I should try to keep in mind when bidding on his stuff. People might overpay a bit since they know it's still an ok deal with the combined shipping considered, plus he's a trusted vintage dealer not some rando who might try to slip you a fake or try funny business regarding condition issues.

But yeah, before I expanded to include all of the 70s, my longterm vintage collecting goal was completing the '57/'65/'73 trifecta of my favorite sets, so it's a great feeling to wrap that up. Thanks for following along, folks!