1958 Topps Sport Magazine All Stars, National League edition

And the other shoe drops today. Here's the '58 Topps National League Squad as selected by Sport Magazine.

Manager Fred Haney appeared yesterday and we don't want him to get a swelled head so we will skip right to the players, and what a crew it is:

That outfield! Robby, Willie and the Hammer. I wouldn't care who you had, if that was my outfield I'd beat you 75% of the time. 

And there are three more Hall of Famers on the infield. Add in Warren Spahn and you have 7 of 10 guys who have a plaque in Cooperstown. Really hard to pick a favorite card out of the NL group. I tend to favor the Stan Musial. It's different than any of the others and Musial has that nice guy smile that I always associate him with.  

Of the eleven Hall of Famers in the complete subset I missed seeing two in person, Musial and Ted Williams. Musial retired after the '63 season and I'm pretty sure I never saw him play in person. The few Mets' games I saw in the Polo Grounds were against the Giants and Dodgers. Williams played through 1960 and, while I saw the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium in the early 60s, I don't think it was before Williams was gone.

I like the Spahn card almost as much as the Musial. There really is no such thing as a non-cool Spahn card. He's all angles and crooked lines and almost always in the classic Braves uni.

This was a fun subset to chase (after I finally had the Mantle in hand!). The rest were easy to find and not very costly. To my eye they are the best part of the '58 Topps set. Now I am free to chase Baltimore Colt cards for awhile. When I get back to Topps subsets I think I'll look to finish one or two others of the 1960 and 1961 subsets that I like, the '61 MVPs or the '60 rookie sets are possibilities.