Tuesday, December 25, 2012

My top 25 sets #1: 1977 Topps


Set  1977 Topps
Number of cards in set: 660
Affordability: 8
Key RCs:   Andre Dawson, Dale Murphy, Bruce Sutter
Is the set built?: need less than 60 to complete the set

What I like about this set:   I will always love this set.  It is the first set I collected as a child, and thus is one that is near and dear to me.  The card front is simple.  The player's position located in a pennant in the upper right corner of the card.  In the case of Randy Jones above, the N.L. All-Stars notation is in a blue bar below the picture.  The team name in big block letters across the top of the card, in the team's predominant color.  Simple, yet great, at least for me.

The backs have the players name in large lettering across the top, standard biographical information, full career stats, and where there's room available, there's also an interesting statistic below the career stats.  Each card also has a cartoon on the left hand side of the back as well.

 
What I don't like about this set:   Nothing.

This is the first baseball set that I ever remember collecting, and when I saw images of players such as Reggie Jackson and Nolan Ryan on these cards again, the memories just came flooding back.

The strangest memory about this set for me is the Carl Morton card.  I don't know why, but it's the one card that I've always associated with putting this set together.  I had to actually look up Carl's history, and it turns out he was a fairly decent pitcher who won the NL rookie of the year award in 1970.  Carl also died too young, dying of a heart attack while jogging, at the age of 39. 

I hope that everyone out there at least enjoyed reading these posts, I will post a brief epilogue to this series tomorrow to sum up my thoughts regarding the previous 25 posts.

Thanks for reading, Robert

4 comments:

  1. I really enjoyed your countdown, especially the hockey posts. If there is a "weak" spot in my collection, it would have to be hockey. Seeing those OPC sets is making me think I'm going to have another project this year...


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  2. I love reviews of older sets like this. I had a lot of fun over the past couple of weeks pulling out my binder of '80 Topps and flippin through it. Great old pictures, informative card backs and some players who were truly characters. I picked out my favorites and tweeted about them ( @ryanspitch ).....was a lot of fun.

    Good luck on your quest to wrap your #1 set up!

    Ryan

    www.ryanspitch.blogspot.com

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  3. Great countdown... loved seeing your top 25 sets. I didn't start appreciating the 1977 set until recently... but I agree the simplicity is awesome.

    Looking forward to future countdown posts!

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  4. Phenomenal countdown! I'm actually catching up on what's being happening with the various blogs fed through on the Sports Card Blogroll and started going through some of your archives and found this. I just completed this set and made a couple posts about it, with a few more to come. Even featured this card of Randy Jones as well. That '77 made your number one, beating out the visually wild 1972, and the cult status set of 1971 has me tossing you an e-hi-5. BooM.

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