Two 1970 Topps Team Sets Looking Good

I don't have much of a hankering to collect the entire 1970 Topps baseball set, but I've been working on getting two team sets completed, one of which I just received the final card for yesterday. That would be the 1970 Seattle Pilots, who had pictures of themselves snapped for their big upcoming 2nd season in Seattle, only weeks before moving before the season to Milwaukee and becoming the Milwaukee Brewers. 

I've slowly picked off each of the Pilots via trades and single-card orders on eBay and Sportlots. This week, the final 3 that I didn't have arrived - Ted Kubiak, manager Dave Bristol, and the 1970 Seattle Pilots team card. I have to say it's a satisfying feeling. I've been able to assemble 1969 and 1970 Pilots sets, along with all sorts of long-tail Pilots ephemera including this set and some strange cards. About the only Pilots card thing I don't have is the 2018 Topps Heritage Seattle Pilots autograph set. Not a single card. They're, uh, pricey. Going on my want list now. Anyway, here were the final 3 cards I needed to complete 1970:

The other 1970 set I'm still working on is - surprise - the 1970 San Francisco Giants. Made a little progress this week with some heavy-hitting Juan Marichal cards and a few other gems. Willie Mays will be the big get in this one, but I was able to land both McCovey cards already.

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.