Once the smell of 60 year old cardboard hits your nose, you can’t forget it.  

Every time I open a monster box and catch a whiff of that glorious aroma, I say to myself, “Ahhh, vintage”.

Earlier this year I finished off the 572 card monster that is the 1960 Topps baseball set and throughout the process I found myself surrounded by vintage cards and my love of the golden age of cardboard(credit to Mike Moynihan) grew by the day.

The Details

For the second year in a row, the Topps set included 572 cards and they were spread across seven series.  As with other sets from the era, the “high numbers” are a bit more difficult to find and carry with them a higher price tag.  

The vast majority of the cards have a horizontal orientation, but there are a number of multiplayer cards and manager cards which are vertical.   The card stock on the back of the cards came in three different shades.  Cream, Gray, and White backs span the seven series, and the fifth series actually contains all three.

One of my favorite aspects of the set is the checklist.  There are about 58 cards of Hall of Famers are found which makes this a great set to capture the history of the game.  Mantle, Aaron, Mays, Clemente, and Banks are a few of my favorites, and the rookie cards of Carl Yastrzemski and Willie McCovey are solid additions.

The set also provides a good deal of visual variety with several themed subsets.  World Series Highlights, Combo Cards, Sport Magazine Rookie Stars, Topps All-Star Rookies,  Team Checklists, Managers, Coaches, and the quite pricey high numbered Sport Magazine All-Star cards round out the list.

My set build started with the purchase of a big vintage lot of 1959-1963 cards.  I was fortunate to find about 400 of the 1960 checklist in the lot and about half of the high numbers were already there.  That went a long way to keep this set affordable, but since I still needed to buy the Mantle, Clemente, Aaron and Yaz, my final spend still added up.  

I often get asked where I source my vintage singles when I’m filling out sets.  Well, I used a combination of Sportlots, COMC, and eBay for the purchases.  All of them were raw except for the four big names listed above, and I went with SGC graded cards for those.

I’m fairly cost conscious, so I compared the options across the three sites to determine which card to buy on which site.  

There are a couple things I love about vintage sets.  When you get a vintage card, it’s like owning a small piece of history.  These are 63 year old pieces of cardboard which have been passed on from collector to collector.  They have created countless collecting stories from the hands they have passed through.  With every crease and rounded corner, a new story was created.

Even though I never saw any of these players play, the cards are still meaningful to me because they represent the legends of the game.  It’s a way for me to connect to those legends today.

We hear a lot about the future of the hobby, and that the kids today won’t care about Ken Griffey Jr., Derek Jeter, or Michael Jordan because they never saw them play.  Well, there are quite a few of us who still love to collect Aaron, Mantle, Mays, and Ruth and many of us never saw them play.  If we do our job in teaching the history of the game, future generations will still desire to own a piece of that history.

Showing Them Off

My set has cards with conditions from poor to excellent, check out every card in the video below!

Also, if you haven’t heard, I started a Podcast called the WaxPackHero Sports Card Minute!  It’s available here directly on the site at the Podcast link at the top of the page, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Google Play, and TuneIn!  Check it out, let me know what you think, and tell your friends!