Favorite/best and least fav/worst '53 to '79 vintage complete sets?

[jgannon]

Originally Posted by nolemmings

I'll grant you the design from Topps 1954 set is beautiful. But when more than one out of ten cards in a set is a coach or a manager, I have to believe the youngsters were unhappy. Can you imagine 60-80 managers and coaches in the Topps sets from the 1960's and 1970's? Even then, you'd still have 500+ other cards to enjoy, rather than the 224 that Topps issued in 1954.

As for the Tribe, maybe no one could predict 111 wins and a pennant, but how do you not include any of their four future HOF pitchers--Feller, Wynn, Lemon and Newhouser? Kids are opening Topps packs during that baseball season in anticipation (no checklists) and the sole Cleveland pitcher they see is Dave Hoskins? Yes, that Dave Hoskins. Not Dave Hollins or Clem Haskins, but Dave Hoskins. No offense to Mr. Hoskins, but yuck. Great design or not, as a kid I want to see and read the cardbacks of the guys making the newspapers and radio every day, not a bunch of grandpas and sometimes players.

Yeah, good point about there not being a lot of the star players from the Indians that year, not to mention stars from other teams. Maybe the info is out there, but I wonder what went into who was signed and included on certain sets. I'm only beginning to look into these kind of things.

And yeah, I think I made the same point about the coaches perhaps being more "acceptable" to the kids of the day if there had been more cards in the set. And certainly if negative receptions did exist regarding the high number of coach cards, the dearth of some of the obvious stars I imagine would also have had to have been a part of that.