1971 Giants - Complete!

This was a fun little set to cobble together, and definitely not as easy as I'd thought it would be. To finish my collection of Topps 1971 Giants without spending a fortune, I bought the Willie Mays card you see here. Final piece in the puzzle. It's certainly not in the best shape; it's off-centered a bit, and yet at $8, it was the only '71 Mays I could find that wasn't in the $25+ range.

But hey! The 1971 Giants, your National League West champions, are now complete! I wrote a bit about this set - and that team - here. Mays. McCovey. Marichal. Bonds (Bobby). The whole 1971 NL West Champs. When I was growing up in the late 70s, that was the refracted glow I had to bask in, all the way until we finally did it again in 1987 and 1989.

I had two other cards I had to take care of to complete the set since the last time I posted about my epic quest. The first was Bob Heise (high number card! #691!), whom I'd never heard of before. Turns out Heise played 11 years in the majors, up until 1977, and in his 1,232 lifetime plate appearances, smacked one home run - and it was for your '71 Giants. Here he is, on his one and only Giants card:

Folks, I have to get better with my scanner. Unlike the Mays card above, that really is off-center a bit, the Heise card is that way simply because I'm not so good at using my scanner's software. The other card I needed was the Juan Marichal "Play Baseball Scratch Off" insert. I got it via CardBarrel for really not very much dinero:

I thought I'd scan a few others that I didn't include in the last post. Check out John Cumberland's bad-ass logo-free black hat, and enjoy the other '71 Giants, whose set I may have mentioned I have now completed.

1971 Topps San Francisco Giants Progress

I guess I'm simultaneously trying to collect the 1971 San Francisco Giants Topps team set while also trying to collect the entire Topps '71 set as well. Let's just say the former is nearly at hand, while the latter is a long ways off. All I really need from the '71 Giants set is the Mays card and one from someone named Bob Heise, and then this Juan Marichal Scratch-Off and then I'm good to go.

This was a stacked Giants team that finally won their division after 9 years since their previous postseason appearance; it would be another 16 years before they'd get into the playoffs again (losing to the Cardinals in the NLCS in 1987). Not just the 4 hall of famers Mays, McCovey, Marichal and Gaylord Perry, but a phenomenal breakout year from Bobby Bonds, then tagged to be "the next Mays" (one could argue it would be his son Barry instead).

I would have loved to have seen this team play at windy Candlestick Park that season. You can watch the Pirates beat them in the 1971 NLCS here. Alas, I was 3 that year, but when I became a Giants diehard a good 5-6 years later, I schooled myself with the memory of our most recent team in the playoffs, and hoped for more soon. That I had to wait until my junior year of college made it all the more sweet, I guess.

Here are some of those '71 NLDS champs, immortalized by Topps at the start of the season.