I kicked off what I thought might be a regular series last February with "Joy of a subset," hoping to regularly recognize a forgotten yearly component of Topps sets.
I kind of forgot about it, as I often do, until reviewing my posts for the previous year. I'm always looking for post content so, let's revive this thing right away!
This time I'm featuring a league leaders subset that is one of my favorites and rather unique in its own way, although the practice was actually started during the 1960s when I wasn't collecting.
Is this the first time Topps used pyramid-style league leaders cards, in 1964? I don't have the time to do a full-scale investigation. Immediately prior to '64, Topps was preoccupied with floating heads leader cards.
Pyramid leader cards continued through some '60s sets and into the 1970s with 1970 and 1971 and one example in 1973.
Then Topps waited until 1976 to spring this on me:
I was devoted instantly. I loved these. In looking back on them, they are a little odd. The photos don't fill the space like the earlier pyramid leaders cards. Instead the photo boxes are shaped like a true pyramid with the larger top square balancing on the two smaller squares.
This leaves a ton of white space on the cards, which I noticed right away. The position-drawing theme continues on the leaders cards, kind of creatively in the stolen bases case. I want to say this is the most white space on a Topps front, although there are probably other examples (and nobody beats '80s Fleer for white space on the back).
But I really enjoyed seeing three stars per league. This was a lot more photo content than the 1975 Topps leaders, which merely showed the AL leader and NL leader on the same card -- the more traditional style from my childhood and what I'm used to, which is why '76 is still so wild to me.
Can't move on without addressing the backs, which contained every single yearly leader for each category from the start of each league. That is a phenomenal presentation of a ton of information, and 1976 Topps was an expert on that (I've already written about the 1976 record breakers subset). This puts any current set of the last, like 35 years, to shame.
There were lots of pyramid-style pitching cards as well. The Randy Jones one is the most familiar to me, I still have a beat-up copy from collecting in 1976. The Frank Tanana card was the last one I needed to finish the subset.
You 1976 Topps experts know that I left out a couple of leader cards, because they don't fit into the pyramid scheme.
In each case, two players tied for the lead, sharing the top podium spot so Topps went with the horizontal treatment.
Then there's the "Leading Firemen" card, which Topps apparently didn't think was worth separate cards for the AL and NL. MLB was using the old points style system for evaluating relievers (think the Rolaids Relief Man award days).
The '76 leaders set is one of the larger ones due to the dedication to each league. Topps splits up the leagues with its leaders cards to this day (i.e. Big League) but it's a much more mindless orientation (I was sick of the "three batters in action in consecutive shots" in 2009).
This is why the '76 subset stands out to me after all these years.
You can even make a pyramid out of the whole set!
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