Cardboard Fenway: 1974 Topps Luis Tiant

Cardboard Fenway - #89. 1974 Topps Luis Tiant

The 9 Coolest Red Sox Players Ever
1. Luis Tiant
2. Carl Yastrzemski
3. Babe Ruth
4. Ted Williams
5. Carlton Fisk
6. Jim Rice
7. Pedro Martinez
8. David Ortiz
9. Dwight Evans

Cardboard Fenway: 1974 Topps John Curtis

Cardboard Fenway - #9. 1974 Topps John Curtis

Here's a great shot of the scoreboard and the Green Monster.

Babe Ruth is Not My Doppelgänger

What if you looked like a famous person, someone known the world over? Would you spend your days sipping mixed drinks by the pool, charging everything to the real Carrot Top's tab? Or possibly signing glossy 8x10s to enthusiastic diner owners, hoping for free sandwiches?

When I look in the mirror, I only see Ben looking back. No big deal. My coworkers don't do double-takes when I walk to the copier. 

But Gary Nolan Circa 1974? Gary Nolan Circa 1974 has the same rosy-cherub face as Babe Ruth Circa 1918. And if I didn't know that Nolan was, in fact, a real person, I might believe you if you told me that this photo was part of an elaborate practical joke played on Sparky Anderson—a wax figure of the Babe done up in a sporty wig and Cincinnati jersey, posed in front of a locker, the athlete's natural habitat.

I hope Gary used his uncanny resemblance to the Babe to his advantage. I'm talking about free artery-clogging food, free beer, free cigars, poorly thought-out endorsement deals, lots of showgirls, getting his stomach pumped on the train between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, and generally carrying on with a devil-may-care attitude and little regard for his long-term health—like any celebrity doppelgänger should. I mean, who would squander a free pass to push a piano into a pond? 

Not me, my friend. Not me.

Fun fact I learned on the back of this card: Gary's full name is Gary Lynn Nolan. Can you name another famous baseball player with a similar name? That's right: Lynn Nolan Ryan. So really, Gary should change his name to Gary Lynn Nolan Ryan. Or better yet, let's start a petition for him to change it to Gary Fred Lynn Nolan Ryan. 

I bet we could get like a million signatures. 

In the Spirit of Waving Tiny American Flags

Fantastic Card of the Day

Today's fantastic card is one of my favorites: 1974 Topps Traded Juan Marichal. Some guys navigated the 1970s with ease: they grew a mustache, combed their hair, and kept the instances of being photographed with a shiny warmup shirt on under their jersey at a minimum (see Gene Garber's cards from the decade and for a good example).

Other guys were not so lucky. Let me rephrase that. For some guys, the fashions of the 1970s were a reason for reporting for duty every day. Open shirts, wide lapels, unfortunate haircuts--all of it was bad news. So that brings us to Juan Marichal's crazy sideburns.

Actually, in this pose you can't tell if there's a matching burn down his left cheek, which swings heavily in Marichal's favor for the title of Weirdest Facial Hair Decision.

Another reason I love this card is because of the back. Besides the poor Topps' copywriter's minor headline coup ("Marichal Makes Bosox Juanderful"), the lead sentence states, and I quote:

"The Boston Red Sox, claiming that they're 'sick of losing,' today acquired Juan Marichal from the San Francisco Giants."

This is brilliant because many people forget just how bad a team the Red Sox were for most of the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, in the period following their World Series loss to the Cardinals in 1946 to their World Series loss to the Cardinals in 1967 (a span of 21 seasons), the team finished in the top 3 of their league only 7 times. It was only really in 1972 that the team started to show life, finishing the season a half-game out of first.

And though Marichal's the biggest name to appear in the 1974 Traded series, he gave the Red Sox just 11 starts, going 5-1 and posting an ERA of 4.87, by far the highest of his career (if we don't count his ERA for two appearances with the Dodgers the following year).

Countdown #42: 1974 Topps

First, a little background to give this set a sense of history in terms of design, checklist and overall make up. This set was the last to do a dual-league all-star by position subset (until the mid-Nineties), the last to feature the landscape orientation on regular base cards (until 1991 or 1992, I can never remember which) and it was the set that showed Topps how to properly perform hero worship on a still-active player (Hank Aaron), so successful in fact, that it emulated it to near-perfection twelve years later with Pete Rose in 1986.

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.

The ’74 backs were hard to read, set in a dark green, and, despite their misgivings, managed to establish their own place in history: they laid the groundwork for 1982’s not-quite-as-hard-but-still-hard-to-read dark green backs.

Finally, the checklist: You got a second-year Schmidt in there, plus early career Fisk, Munson, Reggie, and all the other great early Seventies stars from the A’s, Reds and everywhere in between, plus a few nice subsets. As I mentioned before, the dual-league All-Star cards are cool, and that subset wasn’t done again—by Topps or anyone else—until Topps brought it back in 1993.

Aaron was rightly worshipped with his own subset, and really this is his set (and it’s too bad, too, that Hank couldn’t have accomplished his homer heroics in the Summer of ’74, so that Topps could’ve put out a commemorative card in the late-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.

Landscaped base cards. You may think that that would be a good thing, and in theory I’d agree with you—1960 is one my favorite designs. But the photography is especially bad in this set, and it’s a doubly bad sin, since most of the cards are action shots...out of control, out of focus action shots. Topps did a courageous thing three years earlier with the 1971 set: they moved out of the dugout and off the sidelines and incorporated action shots onto base cards. Then, in 1972 they introduced ‘In Action’ and corralled the action shot into a more manageable subset. 1973 was dominated by headshots and posed action sideline shots with actual action shots tossed in to make a strong mix. The photo quality suggested a special color front-page newspaper photo, or a spread in Sport. Then between 1973 and 1974 it’s like the Topps photo and art departments had a collective nervous breakdown, hit the bottle and just gave up. Really, if it had been me, I would’ve quit after producing the masterful Yellow Submarine, Electric Company 1972 set and not even had to stoop to producing the whitebread IBM punchcard 1973 design. If it were up to me, I would’ve commissioned Andy Warhol to do his take on the 1949 Leaf design, and then after shelling out three-quarters of the year’s budget, he’d probably just show me the same design, I’d call it Brilliant!, and we’d go from there. I’d start hanging out at The Factory, get kicked out for being a grown man and always talking about baseball cards while not being high, then start my own hip inner circle drop-in-hang-out-print-fume-inhalation-room place on the other side of Union Square and call in The Sweatshop. It would be totally
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)...

Anyway, the photography (action, sideline, all and every kind) wasn’t very good in the 1974 set and I think there was something wrong with the color.

Finally, 1974’s rookie class is one of the weakest of the decade, if not the weakest. It hurt the make up of the set that Topps didn’t do team rookie cards in ’74. Instead there are a handful of by-position major-league rookies at the end of the set and base cards for the rest of the set. If some of them happened to be rookies (like Dave Winfield and Dave Parker), well, that’s cool, but still. I would rate the rookie class of the 1974 just below that of 1976, and even 1976 was pretty weak.

Here’s how the rookies of 1974 stack up against those from the rest of the decade.

Worthwhile 1974 Rookies
Dave Winfield
Dave Parker
Bill Madlock
Frank Tanana
Ken Griffey
Frank White
Manny Trillo
Brian Downing
Bake McBride
Bucky Dent
Gorman Thomas
Gene Garber
Steve Rogers
Randy Jones
Bill Campbell


Granted, fifteen’s not a bad number. Hell, there are more rookies than that in the set, but you know, no offense, but you have to draw the line at Elias Sosa and Dick Ruthven. Anyway, if you really wanted to be strict about calling rookies ‘worthwhile’, you’d probably have to trim that list at least in half. Now let’s look at it again:

Worthwhile 1974 Rookies
Dave Winfield (HOF)
Dave Parker
Bill Madlock
Frank Tanana
Ken Griffey
Frank White
Manny Trillo

Not so great anymore, huh? Just one HOFer, and I don’t know if Parker will ever get there even after a thousand years on the Veterans Committee ballot, assuming he’s on there. Anyway, the point is, this is one heck of a weak rookie class…though you know, the more I think about the Seventies, the more I’m realizing that those years were really hit or miss in terms of rookie classes. I bet that if we go set by set from 1970 to 1979 about half would have a Worthwhile Rookie Checklist about as long as 1974 and the other half maybe a little longer. I’m going to guess that 1972, 1975 and 1978 will have the longest lists, 1973 and 1979 will have the shortest, and 1974 and 1976 will still be tied for the weakest.

Worthwhile 1970 Rookies
Bill Buckner
Bill Lee
Vida Blue
Gene Tenace
Jerry Reuss
Thurman Munson
Darrell Evans
Reggie Cleveland

Worthwhile 1971 Rookies
George Foster
Dave Concepcion
Bert Blyleven
Ken Singleton
Ted Simmons
Dusty Baker
Don Baylor
Steve Garvey

Worthwhile 1972 Rookies
Carlton Fisk (HOF)
Cecil Cooper
Darrell Porter
J.R. Richard
Chris Chambliss
Richie Zisk
Steve Stone
Rick Dempsey
Ron Cey
Ben Ogilvie

Worthwhile 1973 Rookies
Mike Schmidt (HOF)
Dwight Evans
Rich Gossage
Buddy Bell
Jorge Orta (Mexican HOF)
Dave Lopes
Bob Boone

Worthwhile 1974 Rookies
See above


Worthwhile 1975 Rookies
George Brett (HOF)
Robin Yount (HOF)
Jim Rice
Fred Lynn
Gary Carter (HOF)
Keith Hernandez
Rick Burleson

Worthwhile 1976 Rookies
Dennis Eckersley (HOF)
Mike Flanagan
Ron Guidry
Willie Randolph
Chet Lemon
Jerry Remy

Worthwhile 1977 Rookies
Bruce Sutter (HOF)
Dale Murphy
Andre Dawson
Garry Templeton
Mark Fidrych
Tony Armas
Dennis Martinez
Jack Clark
Len Barker

Worthwhile 1978 Rookies
Eddie Murray (HOF)
Paul Molitor (HOF)
Alan Trammell
Jack Morris
Lou Whitaker
Lance Parrish
Willie Hernandez
Warren Cromartie (big in Japan)

Worthwhile 1979 Rookies
Ozzie Smith (HOF)
Pedro Guerrero
Lonnie Smith
Dwayne Murphy
Bob Welch
Willie Wilson
Bob Horner (wanted to be big in Japan)

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.

Card Critic's Countdown: 1948 to 1979

It's time to start this countdown. And I know, I've been putting this off for a while. But I haven't exactly been sitting around doing nothing (though I have been doing plenty of that too). I've been doing a lot of thinking, thinking that needs to be done now before I'm knee-deep into this thing and I find myself having to defend a set that isn't generally regarded as a 'classic'. Here are a few things I've come up with and some ground rules for the listing and reasoning in general.

This is a post-war countdown. And the problem with comparing post-war sets is that there are three distinct eras: pre-Mantle, Mantle, and post-Mantle. When it comes to ranking the merits of a set, the most gut of gut reactions is to side with the Mantle and rank it higher than those sets without. To quote William Shatner in Airplane! II, he's the big man, the top dog, the big cheese--how can you even fairly assess and rank the 'star power' of a set like 1973 Topps against one like 1962 Topps? It's not fair. That is, unless we determine a value system to the players in the set, assess them by how they did the year before, the level of their regional influence, and whether or not they were national star quality. Luckily, we don't have to do all that extra work. We're talking about classic Topps here (mostly), and classic Topps sets have already done this for us with their numbering system.

For example, from 1948 to 1953 there wasn't a clear-cut Mantle equivalent. From 1954 to 1957 Topps' Mantle was Ted Williams, and from 1959 to 1969, Mantle was Mantle. 1970 and beyond it gets tricky again, with no one stand out, though in 1977, Topps christened George Brett it's Mantle for the year. Anyway, I'd rather not get too bogged down in this right now. Just remember that I have no qualms about ranking a set without a Mantle higher than one with if it's a stronger set.

In other words, the sets in this countdown (like the sets ranked in the 1980s countdown) are not seeded by personal likes or dislikes (with the exception of the design element). Also, and this is important, the sets listed here are not ranked by value. Card value will rarely be mentioned, and does not have any bearing on the ranking of a set. Case in point: I have not ranked the 1966 Topps set #38 (out of 47) because there are very few high-value cards (high value = over $400, Mantle era pricing). I have it ranked that low because the design is really very average, the rookie crop is less than stellar, and the rookie that the set is generally known for (the Palmer) was double-printed, so everybody and their brother had a copy. Also, when you review the checklist, the set borders on mundane. It's incredible that Topps didn't hit a home run with this set, as it was bookended by the pennant-raising design of 1965 and 1967, a set featuring the largest photo space on a card since 1957 Topps and 1953 Bowman.

I have the sets ranked on the strength of their checklist, the strength of design, the rookie crop, the subsets (generally falling under 'checklist'), and the historical importance of the set or an element essential to the hobby that the set was first to introduce (like the all-star card subset of 1958 Topps or the 4-headed rookie of 1963 Topps).

I've also been spending the last few days trying to poke holes in my top 10, and the only thing I can come with is that the years represented are not diverse enough. For all my thoughts on fair and balanced ranking, could it be that the best sets really were the ones that came first? I don't know. But I do know one thing: the best set was not Topps' 1974 Traded set. Cross that one off the list right now... Jeez, even with Juan Marichal and Ron 'This Old Cub' Santo, it's just depressing. Thankfully, it's only 40 cards.

Right. On to the countdown.

47. 1974 Topps Traded
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.

And yet, despite its weak star power, mine's not such a vast conspiracy that I think Topps had a deciding vote in who'd be traded. If anything, I think this set came about because of Marichal--and because it was time for an innovation, no matter how small. In retrospect this series can almost be viewed as a pre-emptive strike to SSPC and any other competitor Topps thought it might have had, like a one-sided, baseball card version of the Cold War arms race,a big old fuck you, let's see you balance a full year of cards and a traded series, you faceless bastards! kind of thing. Who knew that it would spawn a whole generation of Traded sets? Sure, you could make the argument that 1981 Traded was really the first, modern Traded set in the most traditional sense: 132 card sets that could only be purchased in those little color-coded boxes, but 1974 was the first time that Topps found a way to make commons desirable and to sell cards probably all the way through to November.

By the way, if you haven't noticed, my images have been getting worse lately (my computer died and took my scanner with it). That's why today's post features a nice scan of Randy Hundley from Blake Meyer's TwinsCards.com , and that great 'Card That Never Was' of Satchel Paige is from Dan Austin's Virtual Card Collection, which can be found here.


More Set Countdown Coming Soon After Christmas