1960 Topps 49ers Team Set

If you are interested, I am still running a contest until the end of the week, you can find it here.  There have been a couple close guesses but nobody has hit is spot on yet.

Fairly recently I decided to expand my 49er collection.  I had been focusing on vintage sets from the 1950s-1970s and decided to go after the Topps base sets through 2015.   While I have picked up some cards in the newer range, I want to continue to work on those vintage sets as well.  I was down to 1 card for the 1960 Topps set and set up a search with notifications on eBay to track down the last card.

I was able to find a copy in reasonably good condition (good enough for my collection) and add it to my collection and thought I would share it and the entire team set.

First off, here is the last card of HOFer Y.A. Tittle:

As you can see this card has a crease near his left elbow.  I will say that it is much less visible to the naked eye.  Regardless a crease like that doesn't even go through to the back fits nicely with the other cards this old in my collection.  For the price discount over a NM or graded card, I will gladly take a small crease.

As I tend to do when I finish a vintage team set, how about I show the entire set together:

The team set is only 10 cards strong with 9 players and a team card/checklist.  This half of the team set features 3 total HOFers with Perry and McElhenny sitting along side Tittle in Canton.  This design isn't my favorite but it isn't too bad.  The name, team and position are all enclosed in a colorful football shape in the bottom right hand corner.  I don't have any other 1960 cards so I am not sure if there is any theme to the colors.  Seven of the Niners nine players have the blue football with white letters, the Tittle and Wilson are the outliers.

Here is a look at the backs.  As you can see, the cards of each team are numbered consecutively with Tittle being the first.  The green backs with the white letters make these easy to read.  Each player has a year of stats along with the lifetime stats.  A couple of the Footballs Funnies appear to have been scratched but are tough to read.  I wonder if the status of the scratching impacts the grade of a card when sent in for grading?

Here are the final four players along with the team card and we see two more HOFers in St. Clair and Nomellini.  Pretty impressive to have a team with five of nine featured in the team set being HOFers.  In both 1959 and 1960 the team finished with a 7-5 record in the NFL West Division, once finishing 3rd, the other year 2nd.  Might have thought for a better result with a semi-stacked team.

Here are the final backs and as you can see the team cards is also a checklist.  While it has the 49ers on here, the checklist features other teams as well.  Looks like these teams have between 8-10 players featured.

Overall a pretty solid team set and it is nice to have one finished that is this old.  I have a few to catch up on that I have finished but still quite a few I am working on.  If interested in checking out some completed team sets, click on the Vintage 49ers tag.