Giants Team Set Completion - 1957 Topps

I can honestly say that when I started my quest to seek out as many Giants cards as possible, I had little to no hope of finishing the 1957 team set.  It is a 25 card set, which isn't too many cards but the team set included a few high numbers including a tough to get Giants team card. The real limiter however was the Willie Mays card - actually for most Giants team sets Mays is the limiter (I am not sure how Yankees fans deal with the Mantle effect, it would drive me nuts).

The Mays challenge was dealt with earlier this year in an Epic trade you can read about here.  I have finally but the finishing touches on this team set and wanted to share my final pick ups and the overall team set.

I picked up the Gail Harris card prior to my move an shortly after getting the Mays in the trade and this brought me to within 2 cards of the team set.

Recently I started looking for the last couple cards on eBay and was able to find this high number double print of Max Surkont at a very reasonable price.  Doesn't this guy look like he is about 60 in this photo?

This left me with just 1 card to go, the high number, high valued team card. I looked on several sites to see if I could score one at a reasonable price and struck out.  The cards on eBay were going for Buy It Now in the $35-$60 range and I couldn't even find an auction with a low starting point to battle to the end.

Finally I found a lot of 9 cards from the 1957 set.  Most of them were in pretty rough shape but the Giants team card was included in pretty nice shape.  I got the entire lot for $16.50 which I was pretty happy about. Here is the team card:

If you are interested in trading for a 1957 card, here are the others from the lot, protect your eyes a couple of them are very rough:

Here is the 1957 Topps Giants team set in all its glory:

As you can see my pages also have a "card that never was" of Jackie Robinson.  I picked that up from Bob Lemke.  He has a great blog and makes his own cards.  He used to sell them but recently decided not to - apparently people are selling them for very high prices on the secondary market.  I picked up a few Giants and several USC Trojans several years back and am very glad I did as they are great additions to my collection. 

Well there you have it.  I had a goal of finishing 5 sets from the 60s this year, never imaging I could complete a 1950s set.  Still have a little more work to do if I am going to meet that goal but so happy to have this team set complete.