Before Topps' institutionalized exaltation of players like Pete Rose, Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan, and Mickey Mantle, and Upper Deck's lavishly illustrated Baseball Heroes, hero worship was one of the many options in composing a baseball card set. Witness Fro Joy's 1928 Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig's face and facsimile signature on every card in the 1934 Goudey set. But most of all, feast your eyes on the big wet sloppy kiss on the lips that is Fleer's 80-card set from 1959: Baseball's Greatest, Ted Williams.
Six cards of a guy I can live with (that's about the length of a standard subset). And even 250 cards with Gehrig's little smirking face in the corner isn't bad (Gehrig is just part of the design, not the subject of each card). But 80 cards of the same player? You'd think that would be overkill. Of course, you'd be right. It turns out that you can form a pretty good picture of who Ted Williams was as a ballplayer with just five or six cards, not 80. And you really only need one card to form a solid image of who Ted Williams was as a human being: card #54, "Dec. 1954, Fisherman Ted Hooks a Big One."
From the back:
"Ted is an avid and expert fisherman. He devotes more time to fishing than anything else, except baseball. His status in the fishing world is as renowned as his status in the baseball world. Williams is particularly interested in game fish, such as marlin, tarpon or sailfish. On December 10, 1954 at Cabo Blanco in Peru, Ted caught the 8th largest black marlin ever landed with rod and reel. It weighed 1,235 lbs. Ted calls this 'my greatest fishing thrill.'
(The Best of the Set is Ted Signs for 1959 (card #68). It's by far and away the most valuable card in the set, and the most important for set collectors.)
Fleer made a big splash by signing Williams away from Topps in 1959, and they planned on getting their money's worth out of the deal. The set from 1959 was just the start of Teddy's cardboard coronation as he approached retirement. 1960 saw the first of two Baseball Greats sets of retired players, which lauded Williams as the brightest star among stars.
So then why, if 80 cards is overkill, does this set pull rank on a number of full-bodied sets made up of a season's worth of players? For a number of reasons, not the least being that it was the first post-war set of unabashed hero worship.
Fleer wasn't the first rival of Topps to sign away one of its major stars, but it was the first to do it after Topps swallowed Bowman in 1955. Also, it wasn't just a small-time regional star Fleer built around. It was Ted Williams, The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. I don't know if this is a fair assessment, but if Fleer doesn't land Williams in '59, does it release baseball cards in 1960, 1961, and the aborted series in 1963? I'm not sure those other sets happen without Williams on board. Heck, the whole reason the Baseball Greats sets exist at all was to include cards of Williams as part of his contract.
Also, if this set didn't exist, I'd argue that subsequent hero worship would've looked a lot different. Remember, Topps' Babe Ruth Story subset in the 1962 set came on the heels of Williams' defection to Fleer (and Maris' record-breaking 61 home runs in 1961). Before the BRS subset, Topps had limited experience in the way of hero worship: they gave Ted Williams card #1 three times (1954, 1957, 1958) and within the first five in 1955 and 1956. The only other instance I can think of is Roy Campanella's post-accident 'Symbol of Courage' card (#550) in the 1959 set.
Following the BRS, hero worship was part of the Topps repertoire, to be used in 1974 with Hank Aaron, 1985 and 1986 with Pete Rose, 1990 with Nolan Ryan, and in the recent abyss composed of every Mickey Mantle, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds insert set the company has felt compelled to produce. All of these go back to the Babe Ruth Story subset in 1962 Topps, which in turns goes back to Fleer's 1959 set, Baseball's Greatest, Ted Williams.
The checklist is highlighted by Reggie Jackson's rookie card (#260) and Rollie Fingers' rookie (#597). The set also features an interesting error/variation series of cards with player last names in white instead of yellow (the most notable variation is Mickey Mantle (#500), in his last active card with Topps).
Here’s another analogy (and I’ve been thinking about this one for a lot longer): If you study Topps’ baseball sets from 1969 to 1971, there’s a lot going on there; I’d say it’s one of the company’s most turbulent periods, right up there with 1953-56 and 1980-82. Okay, now look at the plot of the film Midnight Cowboy. Here’s a quick recap: Schlesinger’s 1969 masterpiece centers on Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a young Texan who moves to New York City to ‘make it’, only to wind up a male prostitute, befriending the homeless Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), living with him in an abandoned building and learning a string of horribly depressing life lessons before accompanying Ratso on a trip to Florida (only to have Ratso die en route). It’s a classic and those who haven’t seen it should go out and rent it immediately. 
Hero-Worship. The closest they get is splitting it up between Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente and Harmon Killebrew, but if you ask me, Topps’ heart was never really in it with Killebrew and it kind of seemed like they were always half-assing it with Clemente. In Topps’ eyes, if anybody really deserved it in the early Seventies it was Mays (he’s #600 in 1970 and 1971), though Aaron supplanted him at the same speed he overtook Ruth. 
Like with anything else, it’s easy to make a ton of mistakes, to perform so badly that you limp to the finish line. It’s easier still to quit before you make the finish line, to simply turn around and walk away, leaving a half-assed job behind you. It’s much harder, though, to compete to win and not win, and not only not win, but be bad enough to be very close to the bottom and still not be the worst. And that’s where 1970 Topps will always find itself.
1974 is a classic example of ‘the strongly designed set’, or a set where the main graphical element is present on every card. In ’74’s case, it’s the streamlined pennant (stolen and reconfigured from the classic design of 1965) on nearly every card. Those goddamn pennants…they’re ugly as hell, and you sure do get sick of them after about 20 cards, but you have to hand it to those Topps designers, because six years later in 1980 they take the same tired pennants, skew them 45 degrees and somehow make everything seem pleasing and fresh. 
series Traded series and then put out a special hero-worship subset in the 1975 set. That would’ve catapulted 1975 into the top ten sets ever made. Can you imagine? Cards 653-659 could’ve been ‘Hank Aaron Years’ cards, with card #660—his penultimate regular card, with maybe a photo of him at his car lot down in Atlanta, or smoking a cigar at home plate, or pushing away shaggy Braves fans as he rounded third, or, wait for it, a photo of him as a young call up for the Boston Braves in ’53? How about that?), which is just too bad, because there are a number of signs that this set is the quintessential one-step-away-from-greatness set, the ‘Biding Our Time’ set, the ‘Wait Til Next Year’ set…really, besides the Hank Aaron cards and the Winfield rookie, this set is a load of garbage.
Let me back that wild claim up with some rockhard facts. Not too many subsets, and these Seventies sets almost live or die on their subset inventiveness. 1972 had a late-series ‘Traded’ subset, 1975 had the MVPs through the years, 1977 had ‘Big League Brothers’ featuring the shell-shocked Reuschels. 1976 had the All-Time Team. 1972 had ‘In Action’ and a few ‘Boyhood Photos of the Stars’. 1973 had some more Boyhood Photos, including one of Catfish Hunter clutching a farm animal. What did 1974 have besides the Aaron Hero-Worship to open the set? World Series cards, dual-league leaders, All-Stars and a team variation. I guess you have to also count the Traded series as a subset for this set, but since I’ve already counted it separately, let’s forget it. Also, forget the team variation as a legitimate subset. So that leaves us with three subsets that were by this time pretty tired. OK, next.
awesome and big shots like Elliott Gould, Tom Seaver and Karen Black would come by, like, all the time, and the difference between my place and The Factory would be that instead of sitting around and trying to act all cool in front of each other, we’d sit around and make shit. Hell, we’d sit at long tables and make shit for hours, well, the celebrities would sit, and make stuff, like pot holders and fake designer handbags and leather boots, and I’d sit in my air conditioned office and talk with suppliers on the phone and then come out periodically to make sure that everybody was having a good time. And if they weren’t—and I’m talking big shots here, like Bud Harrelson and Clyde Frazier, Harvey Keitel and Henry Kissinger—well, then I’d launch into a long-winded speech on why Gus Triandos was completely undeserving of a 2nd Tier number in the meritocracy of the Topps checklisting universe of the 1960s…and they'd snap right back to work, because I happen to feel strongly about that and can go on about it for a long time (and really nobody wants that)...
Well, I was wrong. I would have to say that 1975 and dark horse 1971 are tied for strongest rookie class, though 1977 is by far my favorite. Any set boasting rookies of Barker, Templeton and The Bird—all three of which I can probably purchase for under a dollar combined—is a friend of mine. But anyway, you see what I mean about the Seventies: these sets don’t have more than one or two worthwhile rookies each, which is a shame. Especially in the case of 1974, since there aren’t many other reasons to collect it.
If I let my romantic tendencies get the best of me, this set would be in the top twenty. The limited vocabulary newspaper headlines on the back, the unbelievably bad airbrushing on the front, plus the original torn-from-the-headlines look on the front of the card—it all combines for a breathtaking card, a venerable feat of design that accurately captures an era of gap-toothed ballplayers with big glasses, bad unis and even worse hair.
It was brief, but it did happen, and Topps had not one but two opportunities to show him in an Orioles uniform. Instead, there’s a ridiculous gap. What Topps should have been doing was extending production time until late June, keeping the presses out in Pennsylvania open at least a little while in the summer, and then releasing a true Traded series in late September. That way they would have players in the series who’d been traded anywhere from just before the season began to up to two months into the season. Sure, it’s a tall order to fill, but they owned their own press, so even if you factor in all the other jobs over the course of the year, from the other sports to non-sports to regionals to other small sets, I’m sure there was a couple days when they could’ve found the time.
I don’t know what it is about MLB 2006: The Show, but I’m beyond addicted to it. And while almost every other part of my life has suffered because of it, one facet hasn’t. 
In a brilliant move, Leaf sold these—in the same wrapper—with marbles. It’s a miracle any of these cards survived even the first trip from the factory to the drugstore. Packaging aside, this is a neat little set, with overly candid black and white photos probably taken by a high school yearbook photographer on his lunchbreak. I’m serious—if one of the players included in this set ever ended up on the lam, post offices around the country could just tack that player’s card from this set to their wall. This set is an open textbook on the art of proper mug shot photography. 
If you're not familiar with this set, Fleer put out a flurry of small competitor sets to Topps in the late 1950s and early 1960s in baseball, football and basketball (actually, basketball is a special case, as sets from this time period are few and far between: Bowman put out a set in 1948, Topps put out a set for the 1957-58 season, and then Fleer came out with a set for 1961-62. So to call them competitors in this particular sport is not exactly accurate. But Topps and Fleer were competitors in baseball, so let's not discuss basketball, if that's okay). 
I'm not trying to say that this is the worst set--in the grand scheme of cards this set (series? subset of regular set? its own set?) is rather important. But 'grand scheme' symbolic strength and actual, measurable set strength are two very different things. This set is ugly. And ugliness matters. So does checklist strength. Despite a checklist of 40 cards (relatively big for a late-season subset), there are only seven big names: Marichal, Santo, Felipe Alou, Lou Piniella, Mike Marshall, Reggie Cleveland and Willie Davis. Then there's Nelson Briles, Tommie Agee, Steve Stone and Lindy McDaniel (of 'Lindy Shows Larry' fame). After that you're scraping the commons barrel (actually, you're scraping the commons barrel nowadays from Mike Marshall on, but for the sake of argument, let's forget that all but two or three of these cards can be had for less than a dime). Anyway, that line-up may have looked impressive as a launching checklist for Topps in 1974, but it translates to a success rate of just 28% for the set (success rate = # of good cards / total # of cards in set). Even when we factor in the coolness factor of getting a Traded card in your pack, well, it's still not that great. I can think of only one reason why Topps expanded the neat little Traded subset from 1972 into its own series: to sell more cards at the end of the summer, a time when kids have moved on to football cards, hockey cards, sniffing glue or whatever it is little kids do at the end of summers.