Set apart from the rest
The “modern-era” of mainstream vintage sports cards ran from 1948-1980, with the Bowman and Leaf companies sprinting out of the starting gate; Topps joined the race just a few years later. Individual player cards from the early part of the period came in many shapes, sizes and “looks.”
In 1958, Topps was the only major card game in town and that year it rolled out the inaugural modern-era “subset,” for our purposes a burst of consecutively numbered cards with a different look and a “theme,” in this case Sport magazine All-Stars.
The first card from the initial subset featured the managers of the 1957 World Series: Casey Stengel (New
