The 1966 Bowman baseball card set was issued during a transitional period for the classic and historic Bowman brand. After over 50 years in business producing some of the earliest and most collectible baseball cards of all-time, Topps had won an exclusive license with Major League Baseball in 1963, leaving Bowman and other smaller companies scrambling to find creative ways to still produce cards featuring professional players.
The 1966 set marked Bowman’s return to the baseball card market after a one-year hiatus. With Topps now alone in distributing officially licensed MLB cards through their deals with both the players association and the league itself, Bowman had to rely on creative photography and design to feature the games biggest stars, while carefully avoiding any logos, uniforms or other imagery that might infringe on Topps’ exclusive rights.
The set contains 369 total cards and is considered by collectors to be one of the more visually appealing Bowman issues of the 1960s due to its colorful photo-heavy design approach. With Topps beginning to shift toward simpler cartoony illustrations in some of their contemporary sets, Bowman leaned hard into showcasing actual action photography on nearly every card. Though players could not be depicted in team uniforms, many cards feature crisp action shots that captured the excitement and emotion of on-field play.
Some of the more iconic and valuable cards from the 1966 Bowman set include the Nolan Ryan rookie card, widely considered one of the key chases for vintage collectors. Ryan’s immense Hall of Fame career and status as one of the game’s all-time great pitchers makes his rookie one of the most sought after from the entire decade. Other star rookies like Reggie Jackson also debuted in the 1966 set and remain highly valuable to this day.
Veteran stars of the era like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax also have iconic cards from the ’66 Bowman set. Aaron’s card shows him rounding third base mid-home run trot in a long action shot. Mays’ card depicts him leaping high against the wall making an over-the-shoulder basket catch. And Koufax’s card dramatized his dominant left-handed windup and delivery. There are also engaging action shots of pitching duels between the era’s best hurlers like Koufax, Don Drysdale, Jim Bunning and Bob Gibson among others.
In addition to the player photography, each card featured typeset statistics on the reverse along with a generic clip-art style baseball illustration in the background. The fronts and backs used a color scheme of red, white and blue that contributed to the patriotic and nostalgic aesthetic Bowman established across many of their 1960s issues. The uniform-less action shots managed to still clearly convey which teams each player represented through visual contexts like home ballparks, dugout shots and distinctive batting stances.
The 1966 set came packaged in traditional wax paper wrapped pack or bundled in larger wax paper outer-sheet packs. They retailed for 5 or 10 cents per pack, typical pricing for the time. Production and distribution was handled by the Fleer Chewing Gum company for Bowman during the mid 1960s. In later years, Topps would come to fully acquire the Bowman brand and rights to their older libraries of imagery and designs after Fleer lost the MLB license. But in 1966, Bowman still maintained autonomy as an independent third-party producer of unofficial MLB cards.
Condition and centering quality varies significantly across surviving examples of the 1966 Bowman set due to the thin, low-grade paper stock used at the time. Near-mint examples of even commons are scarce and premium graded gem mint rookies like Ryan’s or Jackson’s easily fetch thousands of dollars. The set has longtime appeal with both vintage collectors and investors chasing rookie talents from what is considered a prime era of baseball in the 1960s. Its bright photography and handsome tri-color design scheme also give the 1966 Bowman issue lasting pop on vintage card and merchandise platforms to this day. While no longer carrying official trademarks, the release managed to deftly featured the biggest stars and compete against Topps through clever imagery alone during baseball cards’ classic golden age.
