The amazing 1959 Topps Baseball card set wraps up the ‘50s decade for us very nicely. An argument could be made that this set is the greatest to finish any decade, considering the star power and the colorful design that graces these slices of cardboard!
How great was this 1959 Topps Baseball set? A fella named Phil Coffin wrote a book about it! Well, not just about the set specifically, but he wrote a book about every single card in the set! The book is called “When Baseball Was Still Topps – Portraits of the Game in 1959, Card by Card,” which came out in 2023 and is available on Amazon.
With 572 cards in the 1959 Topps Baseball set, the most from Topps up to that point, you can imagine that there are plenty of interesting stories that come out of Coffin’s book.
The book description sets our article up nicely, as we prepare to discuss the Top 10 Cards in the 1959 Topps Baseball set.
“That season was in the heart of a period of turmoil: milestones in integration, franchise shifts to the West Coast, a potential rival league, the major leagues’ expansion, and labor issues that included paying young prospects not to play.”
— When Baseball Was Still Topps – Portraits of the Game in 1959, Card by Card,” by Phil Coffin
The cards help tell the players’ stories, too.
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Once again, Topps continued to expand their sets, and this one came close to 600 cards, coming in seven different series.
Much like some of Topps’ earlier sets, they used super colorful backgrounds to really help distinguish cards from each other. Each player’s photo, though, was inset, which isn’t a beloved feature by many, but it is distinctive. When you see a card from 1959 Topps, you know it’s a 1959 Topps Baseball card instantly.
While there aren’t two handfuls of great rookie cards from the 1959 Topps Baseball set (or even one handful), there is one awesome rookie card in Bob Gibson.
But there’s not a Maury Wills rookie card!
Interestingly, Topps didn’t think enough of the slim 26-year-old rookie shortstop to offer him a $5 contract, which was the standard pay to get your face on cardboard that year. Wills would eventually replace an injured Don Zimmer at the position for good in 1960. Wills led the NL in stolen bases six times in his career, including a 104-SB season in 1962, helping him win the NL MVP Award that season over Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson!
Topps’ decision not to sign Wills upset him enough to sign a deal with Fleer, but even they didn’t get their first card out of him (for varying reasons) until 1963, so his 1963 Fleer card is now considered his true rookie card.
It would be another four years before Topps and Wills would make up and join together for cardboard excellence in the 1967 Topps Baseball set.
Another interesting “rookie card” from this set is Card No. 1 Ford Frick, the Commissioner of Baseball at the time.
While Topps missed out on Wills’ rookie card in 1959, they were able to finally get a regular issue base card of Stan Musial in this set (they had an All-Star card of him in the 1958 Topps Baseball set, though).
Speaking of the Musial, stick around to the end of this article when we share a great piece of Stan Musial trivia!
For our card value rankings, we’re only talking about PSA 5 slabs of these cards, and we used the values from PSA’s online price guide. The card images are provided by BuySportsCards.com. We’re not going to share weird, random cards that are expensive because of a variation.
Closing out the decade, Mantle is once again the best card of the bunch, with the cherry red background. There’s something about the red that just makes it even better. Had they chosen a yellow background, or even blue, this card wouldn’t be as fantastic. Eye appeal on this card is important. While we’d all take any ’59 Mantle, a card with a bright red background, as opposed to a dull, faded red, makes a big difference.
Gibson, considered one of the greatest competitors of his era, was the first African-American player inducted into Cooperstown who didn’t start his career playing in the Negro Leagues! He is one of just 14 pitchers to have won more than one Cy Young Award (’68 and ’70), which started being handed out in 1956.
The pink background on his rookie card, along with his cheerful smile and disposition in the photo, makes it difficult to think of just how ornery and tough Gibson was on the mound!
Something I found interesting about Gibby’s 1959 Topps rookie card is that his MLB career started in 1959. It was rare back then for a player’s rookie card to come out in the same year he debuted in the majors! (Harmon Killebrew (’55 Topps) debuted in 1954, (Frank Robinson (’57 Topps) debuted in 1956, and Roger Maris (’58 Topps) debuted in 1957.)
Mantle’s ’58 Sporting News All-Star card is about 10x more attractive than his ’59 version, but that didn’t keep it from getting this high of a ranking. The ’59 version has a blue background, and the picture sits inside a badge outline. The National League All-Stars got the red backgrounds this time.
If you have a starting pitcher you like in 2026, and no one else seems to agree, then I have good news for you. Maybe your guy has been mediocre up to now, maybe he came up in 2022, and he has just one winning season so far, and you can easily find his parallels and what-not in the dollar bins at card shows.
Let me introduce you now to young Sanford Koufax in 1959: a 23-year-old left-handed pitcher for the recently relocated Los Angeles Dodgers, who had yet to start dominating in his career the way we think of him now.
This 1959 card of his was one where he was having quite a lovely day – maybe he got 7 Chicken McNuggets in his bag instead of 6 that day, maybe he met someone with an even girlier name than his? Maybe someone told him he would someday win three Cy Young Awards!
The string of “Bob Clemente” cards continues for another year, but this close-up shot of the Pittsburgh right fielder is one of his best looking shots. At 24 years old, Clemente was still a year away from making an All-Star team, and he had not yet hit more than seven home runs in a season! By 1960, that would all change!
(Three yellow cards in a row!?!) There’s something calming and soothing about Hank Aaron cards, have you ever noticed that? In this sunny, yellow 1959 version of Hammerin’ Hank, he’s looking off wistfully into the distance, no doubt thinking about one of the 140 home runs he had already hit up to this point – or the 615 home runs he was going to hit over the next 18 years. The only two years Aaron didn’t make the All-Star Game was his rookie year – and his final year, when he played just 85 games.
From the great red background to the awesome batting stance to the absolutely gorgeous facsimile Yogi Berra autograph across his uniform, this card is bee-yoo-tee-ful! Sadly, from a baseball perspective, Yogi was still a solid ballplayer (five years away from becoming a manager) and 1959 was his last year posting a WAR above 3.0.
While Musial’s first Topps card came one year earlier in the 1958 Topps set, “Stan the Man” didn’t get his first traditional base card with Topps until 1959! The light blue background is nice with his Cardinals uniform, but I feel like they could’ve gotten a better photo than this one.
Remember to stay to the end, when we share some great Stan Musial trivia!
Another All-Star card, this Hank Aaron one with the red background is one of the best looking All-Star cards of the entire Sporting News subset. Hammerin’ Hank still looks super young, and the photo is of him on the follow-through, after he might have smashed one over left field! There is only one of these cards graded a PSA 10! Most of these that were submitted graded out as PSA 6s. It’s way cooler than his base card headshot.
The Mick’s third card in this set, his “Baseball Thrills” action shot memorializes his 42nd home run of the season, which gave him the AL crown over runner-up Rocky Colavito. The back of the card explains how this home run crown chase was one of Mantle’s toughest up to that point, considering he was 20 homers ahead of second-place Vic Wertz for the 1956 crown.
Topps didn’t make a card for Campanella in 1958 after he was paralyzed in a card accident. But they made this one in 1959, with a photo of Campanella in his wheelchair, titled “A Symbol of Courage.” National League President Warren Giles wrote an essay on the back of his 1959 Topps card explaining how kids playing baseball should emulate someone like Campanella. Very cool.
Not only did “Stan the Man” play in a record 24 consecutive MLB All-Star Games, but for his career, he got 3,630 hits — and they he had a perfect home/away split! He hit exactly 1,815 hits at home and 1,815 hits on the road!
This is a series where we look at the most valuable baseball cards from different years in Topps Baseball history! Here are the years we’ve already covered:
Do you own any of the best 1959 Topps Baseball cards, or are you still looking to get some of these gems, like me?
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