1955 Topps Frank Malzone; 1986 Topps Traded Dave Henderson

It's been a while. Let's try to get back into the swing on things.

The last few days have been rough for Sox fans, with the sudden losses of postseason star Dave Henderson and ace third baseman Frank Malzone. I believe Malzone was associated with the Red Sox for close to 70 years in one capacity or another, except for a brief stint with the Angels in 1966. His picture was still in the Red Sox' yearbook as recently as this year.

My favorite line about Malzone comes from the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, just because it sums up the sorry state of the Sox of that era:

"Malzone scored 107 runs for Milford in the Eastern Shore League in 1948, but didn't make the majors for only nine years after that because of a serious injury, military service, assorted bad luck, and the fact that the Red Sox were run for much of the 1950s by morons."

Malzone's rookie card is in the 1955 Bowman set; he and Elston Howard are the most notable rookies in that set. Above is what his 1955 Topps card might have looked like if he had had one. And yes, the small pic is from his 1964 Topps Stand-Up card, a mere nine years later. Best I could do.

In 1957, Malzone was the third baseman on the very first Gold Glove team (there was one combined AL/NL that year only), and is still the only Sox third baseman to win a Gold Glove (sorry, Shea Hillenbrand or Jack Brohamer fans). 

We all know about Hendu and his 1986 ALCS homer. Part of me has always wished he had just made an out to end Game 5; it would have saved a lot of heartbreak later on. On the other hand, in the words of Wayne Brady, it's go big or go home. If you want to win the World Series or the Super Bowl, you're going to have to risk losing in dramatic fashion. If you can't take the heat, go move to Cleveland or something. 

Besides, that homer -- especially with Al Michaels' dramatic call -- puts a smile to my face every time. The photo on his hypothetical '86 Topps card is from that homer. 

1976 Topps World Series (Game 7)

So near, but so far. What impressed me about the '75 Reds was how they bounced back after such a devastating Game 6 loss, when they could have easily folded, much like the '86 Sox or '91 Braves or '13 Spurs. OK, the Braves one might be a little unfair, but still: most teams that suffer a dramatic Game 6 defeat lose Game 7.

And while the Red Sox lost, there was such an incredible feeling of optimism, as anyone who has read Peter Gammons' book/bible "Beyond the Sixth Game" knows. With all that young talent, they were going to be back again and again, right? But of course, as the book says at the end, "tomorrow never came." 

1976 Topps World Series (Game 6)

Really, what more can I add about this game that you don't already know? It's Game 6, it's Carlton Fisk, it's the church bells ringing in Charlestown, N.H. Is there anything profound or thought-provoking I can provide to the discussion? No. So sit back and enjoy the moment!

2010 Topps Heritage Anthony Rizzo

We're going to take a break from our '75 World Series retrospecticus, as the real '75 Series endured an off-day and three straight rainouts. 

Oh, this card breaks my heart. I see this creation and visions of Bart Giamatti's "The Green Fields of the Mind" sling through my head. I see this and I feel like a high schooler dumped at his prom. 

One of the reasons for the Red Sox' post-2007 decline is their lack of long-term thinking. WE-MUST-WIN-NOW!!! This despite three World Series titles, which you think would buy some patience from the Nation. 

And promising young players such as David Murphy, Jose Igleseas, Hanley Ramirez and Justin Masterson are thoughtlessly dumped for the latest shiny object. (Of course, Ramirez and Masterson returned to the Sox after they ceased to be of any use anywhere else.) 

To that list we can add Mr. Rizzo, who was shipped to the Padres as part of the Adrian Gonzalez debacle in 2011 after a decent-but-promising .263/.334/.481 slash at Portland. What's mind-blowing, of course, is that the Padres dumped Rizzo to the Cubs after one year despite a .331/.404/.652 slash in Triple-A. Well, the Padres haven't done much the last few years, either. (Andrew Cashner, who went to the Padres for Rizzo, was 6-16, 4.34 for San Diego this year. Oops.) 

Yeah, I know the Sox have won three World Series titles and I have no right to complain. But it's like looking at the career stats of Ted Williams or Junior Griffey. They're great, but you also wonder what might have been. Think about that when you see Han-Ram butchering the baseball at first base next year at Fenway while Rizzo challenges for a Triple Crown at Wrigley.

1976 Topps World Series (Game 5)

Tony Perez, who had been 0-for-15 through the first four games of the 1975 World Series, couldn't be held silent any longer, as blasted two homers and put the Red Sox on the brink (just as the card above says).

Perez is, I believe, one of two members of the '75 Reds who went on to play for the Red Sox (Jack Billingham was the other). His election to the Hall of Fame in 2000 was not met with universal praise, as he was considered a guy who piled up tons of RBIs and benefitted from the great table-setters in front of him in the batting order (Rose, Morgan). Baseball-reference's JAWS leaders has Doggie ranked as the 27th-best first baseman of all time, behind the likes of Keith Hernandez, John Olerud and Will Clark, who are more likely to be inducted into the Hall of Pretty Darn Good than Cooperstown any time soon. 

Still, being a fondly remembered member of a great team isn't too shabby, even if it shouldn't automatically make you a hall of famer.

In five days: Game 6. You might have heard about this one.

1976 Topps World Series (Game 4)

Pitch counts weren't a big deal in the 1970s, but even the most grizzled fans were impressed by Luis Tiant's 163-pitch, complete-game effort as the Red Sox evened the '75 series at two games apiece.

Remember what I said in my Game 1 post about baseball card magazine writers complaining about how 1980s-90s baseball wasn't what it was in the 1950s-60s? For fans who grew up on '70s baseball, this is one of their smoking guns when they complain about how today's baseball isn't what it used to be. Let's face it: Some pitchers' arms are indestructible, and others' will fall off at the slightest wear and tear. And pitch count or not, Luis Tiant  (who was allegedly 34 during the series) had a bionic arm.

Tomorrow: Game 5.

1976 Topps World Series (Game 3)

Ah, the Ed Armbrister interference game, which overshadowed the Red Sox' rally from a 5-1 deficit, highlighted by Dwight Evans' game-tying, two-run ninth-inning homer. You can read the gory details here.

For what it's worth, Bob Montgomery, longtime Red Sox backup catcher and color analyst of my youth, always thought home plate umpire Larry Barnett made the right call. He might be the only one in New England who feels that way. I wish I had a copy, but the New York Daily News' back page the next day said it was the wrong call. Can you imagine a New York paper criticizing a bad call against a Boston team now?

Tomorrow: Game 5.

1976 Topps World Series (Game 2)

We're continuing along with our '76 Topps World Series set, with each card posted on the 40th anniversary of that day's '75 World Series game.

In Game 2, the Red Sox led 2-1 before the Reds scored two runs off Sox starter Bill Lee (did someone check the pitch count?) and reliever Dick Drago. In the card above, Dave Concepcion is scoring the winning run on Ken Griffey's double.

Game 3 in two days.

1976 Topps World Series (Game 1)

Topps could not have picked a worse time to de-emphasize World Series cards. From 1960-75 (oddly skipping 1966), Topps issued a World Series subset that covered every game individually. Imagine how fans must have felt when they ripped open their packs of '76 Topps and found this instead, especially coming off a series for the ages:

I mean, how can you condense such an experience into one tiny card? And that's Carlton Fisk in the upper left, but that sure as hell isn't his Game 6 home run -- he's being greeted at the dugout, not home plate, and if you look closely, the Sox are wearing their road grays with "BOSTON" across the front.

When I was growing up, this was one of smoking guns the baseball card-magazine writers used when they'd write one of their tired regular "Topps isn't as good as it used to be" broadsides, which seemed to alternate every other month with that other perennial favorite of the time, "baseball isn't as good as it used to be."

Anyway, let's give the '75 series some justice and make a worthy World Series subset, starting with Game 1, 40 years ago today. (Each card will be posted on the anniversary of the game in question.) Boston's Luis Tiant pitched a 5-hitter and had a memorable jaunt around the bases in a 6-0 win. All six runs were scored in the seventh in a rally that began with Tiant's single.

I liked both pictures, so I made two cards of No. 23 in action.

Tomorrow, Game 2.

1975 Topps Jim Rice

Well, if we do a card for one Gold Dust Twin, we have to do the other, right? As with Freddie Lynn, Jim Rice was stuck in a 4-in-1 rookie timeshare card. Here's Jim Ed in his rightful solo glory.

Advanced 1970s-80s Red Sox collectors will notice I swiped this Rice pic from the 1980 Topps Superstar Photo set, with the blue facsimile sig changed to black. This photo might be from spring training 1979, when the Red Sox ditched their 1975-78 red hats for the classic blue versions, but kept the pullover jerseys until opening day, when they returned to the pre-1972 button-down jerseys and belted pants.

Chad Finn's wonderful countdown/nostalgia trip of the Top 50 Red Sox Prospects of the Past 50 Years ranks Rice at No. 1.

Speaking of the Spirit of '75, we're going to celebrate the 1975 World Series soon with a series of 1976 Topps World Series cards. Each card will be posted on the 40th anniversary of the day the game was was played, which means Game 1 is coming up in two days. Check it out!

1975 Topps Fred Lynn

So I heard this guy had a pretty decent rookie year in '75? Despite his awesomeness, he's stuck in a four-in-one rookie card with Ed "Interference, My Ass" Armbrister, Tom "Traded to Boston for George Scott" Poquette and Terry "Can't Think of a Snarky Nickname" Whitfield.

I admit to cheating with this one. A proper '75 Topps card would show the Red Sox in the previous year's uniforms, which used blue hats instead of the red ones they adopted for '75. Unfortunately, it's easier to find photos of Bernie Sanders smiling than color photos of Fred Lynn from '74, so I took a later Lynn photo at Gimped his hat blue.

One of the misconceptions about Lynn's career is that his numbers were helped by Fenway, and had he stayed with the Red Sox his whole career, he could have piled up stats that would have put him in Cooperstown. Not that WAR is the end-all, be-all of baseball stats, but a quick check to baseball-reference shows that five of Lynn's top six WARs came with the Red Sox. Wanna try OPS+ (OPS adjusted to the ballpark)? Lynn's top three came with the Sox. That his best numbers were in Boston was no ballpark illusion.

1965 Topps Jim Lonborg

Forty-eight years ago this week, the 1967 "Impossible Dream" Red Sox clinched the American League pennant with a 5-3 win over Minnesota Twins one year after finishing a half-game out of last place. Boston's Jim Lonborg fired a seven-hitter (and added two hits at the plate himself) to complete his AL Cy Young-Award winning season. But you all know that already.

Lonborg's rookie card is in the 1965 Topps set, shoehorned with three other guys (Jerry Moses, Mike Ryan and Bill "One career game, one at-bat" Schlesinger). Let's fix that. I couldn't decide which Lonborg photo to use, so of course I used both.

Lonborg is often thought of a one-year wonder because of his December '67 ski accident that basically ruined his last four seasons with the Sox, but he went to have several solid seasons with the Phillies as part of Steve Carlton's supporting cast; in fact, he won more games with the Phillies (75) than with the Red Sox (68). He fished his career with a 157-137 record, hardly that of a one-year wonder.

1954 Topps Harry Agganis

So much has been written and said about "The Golden Greek," I quite frankly have little to add about this tragic athlete who is beloved by New England fans more than six decades after his untimely death. For this card, I used the head shot from his '55 Topps card and added a posed black-and-white shot. Considering Topps was in a war for player contracts with Bowman and was stuffing players who never played in the major leagues in its sets (paging Angel Scull), I'm mildly surprised no one made a '54 Agganis.

One other note: Agganis played football and baseball at Boston University, which named its hockey arena for him. Also, BU dropped football and baseball in the 1990s, which means the arena is named for someone who not just didn't play hockey, but played two sports the school doesn't even sponsor anymore!

1975 Hostess Burleson, Carbo, Wise

Here are three more fantasy 1975 Hostess cards, which were introduced in an earlier post. I took the Burleson and Wise photos from my 1974 Red Sox yearbook, while Carbo was an interwebs find. 

Carbo and Wise were, of course, two of the key figures in Game 6 of the '75 World Series; Carbo's three-run homer in the eighth inning tied the score, and Wise was the winning pitcher. For some reason, Wise was my mom's favorite Red Sox player in the 1970s. But hey, this is an Alex Cora fan writing this, and Wise had a much better career than Cora, so who am I to judge? Wise is also known for:

• His membership in the Buffalo Head Gang, the delightful, irreverent group dedicated to giving manager Don Zimmer headaches (Carbo was a member, too);
• Throwing a no-hitter for the Phillies while blasting two homers; and ...
• For being traded to the Cardinals from the Phillies even-up for some guy named Steve Carlton.

1941 Goudey Lefty Grove

During its short life on earth, the Boston-based Goudey Gum Co., made some of the most beloved and influential baseball-card sets of all time.

The 1941 set is not one of them.

The '41 set, Goudey's dying last gasp of a set, displays none of the hallmarks that made its cards so popular during the 1930s. Blank backs. Black and white photos. (And why are the logos airbrushed out? What is this, the King-B beef jerky set?) A cheesy "Big LEAGUE Gum" logo in the corner. A stark yellow background. Or red. Or blue. Or green. Each of the 33 players came with four different backgrounds. It's as if Goudey didn't have enough players and this was its way of padding out the checklist. Does this mean Goudey invented parallel cards?

Ah, the player selection. It sucks. Mel Ott and Carl Hubbell and the biggest names. This would be like a modern set whose only good players are Felix Hernandez and Giancarlo Stanton, and the rest of the player roster is filled out with the Jeremy Guthries of the world.

The lone Red Sox player in the '41 set is a pitcher named Emerson Dickman, who compiled a 22-15 record despite a 5.33 ERA (good run support, you say?). His main claim to fame is coaching Princeton to its only College World Series appearance, in 1951, which is pretty neat.

Here are my '41 Goudey creations of a Sox pitcher of slightly greater stature: Lefty Grove, who won his 300th and final game that year before retiring. The card is numbered 36. And where are Nos. 34 and 35? They'll pop up on this blog eventually. ...

1973 Topps Danny Cater

Danny Cater. I heard a rumor once that the Sox dealt a pretty fair pitcher for him.

All wisecracks aside, at least then-Red Sox GM Dick O'Connell admitted it was the worst trade he ever made (If one of my dog-eared, taped-up, pages-falling out Baseball Hall of Shame books from my childhood servers me correctly). Lou Gorman, on the other hand, continued to defend the Jeff Bagwell trade until his dying day, sadly.

Topps gave Cater a card in '73 worthy of his tenure in Boston: capless photo, Yankee pinstripes in obvious view, hair flying everywhere as if he were yanked out of the clubhouse for a photo before he could put a comb to it ... this card is truly worthy of someone who compiled a 2.0 WAR over three seasons while Sparky Lyle was 8.4 over that same span, and he probably sat in twice as many birthday cakes.

That said, we're going to give Cater a decent-looking '73 card anyway. Cater looks like one of those guys who was caught off-guard by baseball's switch to double-knits in the early 70s, kinda like hair bands who were swept away by grunge in the early '90s -- which didn't stop the crue-heads in my high school from sporting leather jackets and spiky hair during the Nirvana era. Cater here just looks as if he'd be more comfortable in baggy flannel. Nineteen-seventies skin-tight knits were never meant for doughy players; trust me, I know what I'm talking about.

The original Cater is on the left; the new version is on the right.

1975 Topps Red Sox Throwbacks (part 3)

Here is the third and final installment of our 1975-style Topps cards of current Red Sox in '75 uniforms, inspired by their two throwback games earlier this season. Since these games happened in May and June:

1) Mike Napoli was traded to Texas;
2) Jackie Bradley Jr., turned into Baseball Jesus;
3) Wade Miley chopped off his long locks;
4) Koji Uehara suffered a freak injury and was lost for the season. Woof.
5) The Red Sox became fun and entertaining again.

1975 Topps Red Sox Throwbacks (part 2)

As promised, the second batch of 1975 Topps Red Sox retro cards, inspired by the Sox' pair of games in '75 uniforms to honor the AL champs from that year. While Topps didn't give managers their own cards in '75 (they were lumped in with the team cards), I decided to give John Farrell his own card here.

The original Pedroia photo has a copyright line that I wiped out:

1975 Topps Red Sox Throwbacks (part 1)

 

    

Earlier this season, the Red Sox honored their 1975 AL championship team by playing a pair of games in spot-on '75 throwback uniforms, complete with pullover jerseys, elastic waistbands, red hats and striped socks. Even the lettering, ever-so-slightly different from the current uniforms, is reproduced with 100 percent accuracy. Which is good, because bitching about inaccurate throwbacks might be the Internet's favorite pastime.

Presented here is the first batch of '75 Topps-style cards of the Sox in their throwbacks. Parts 2 and 3 will appear over the next week or so.

And yes, I know the real '75s show pictures of the '74 Sox in their blue hats (the red hats didn't debut until the '75 season, after the cards were printed), but I opted to use the kick-arse '75 design anyway. I also slightly faded and pixelated the photos to give them more of a '70s Topps feel. Unlike the real 75s, these lack facsimile autographs. Just like the real '75s, there are centering issues.

Two other things:

1) Brock Holt has to be the only player with an "IF-OF" all-star designation on a baseball card;

2) Am I the only one who thinks Ryan Hanigan looks like that guy in Zack and Miri Make a Porno?

1967 Topps Sparky Lyle

When "Sparky Lyle" and "Red Sox" are brought up in the same sentence, the infamous Danny Cater trade with the Yankees in 1972 is usually always the first thing that comes to mind. But Lyle had a fine rookie year for the '67 Sox in limited duty (2.28 ERA, 156 ERA+ in 43 1/3 innings). Alas, is was limited enough that Topps declined to put Lyle on a card until 1969. Here's his what-might-have-been from '67, taken at his future home in the Bronx Zoo. We'll look at that Cater guy in a future post.

1975 Hostess Marichal, Cooper

Nineteen seventy-five was a watershed year for a few reasons:

1) I was born;
2) The Red Sox went to the World Series;
3) Hostess began its five-year run of baseball cards.

Any baseball fan who grew up in the 1970s likely has fond memories of chowing through a combination of flour, artificial chocolate flavoring and high-fructose corn syrup while cutting a Pete Rose or Mike Schmidt off a box of Hostess dessert-like product. Of course, any youngster with a Hostess card was likely to "adorn" it with jagged edges and cupcake stains. It may have ruined the monetary value, but likely sent the nostalgia value through the roof. 

Here are a couple of '75 Hostess cards that didn't make the cut: past-his-prime Hall of Famer Juan Marichal, who pitched for the Sox in '74, and first baseman Cecil Cooper, who went on to greater success with the Brewers from 1977-87 while the Sox plowed through a half-dozen or so first basemen. 

Marichal-with-the-Sox is a popular fantasy card subject, but I'm pretty certain this is his first Hostess creation. Have some Ho-Hos and celebrate!

1955 Topps Sammy White

Since we're having so much fun with Red Sox catchers lately, let's do another one. Sammy White was sort of the poor man's Jason Varitek -- his offensive numbers were far from Tek's level, but by all accounts he was a master at handling a pitching staff, a la Tek. You can read more about Mr. White here.

White was a Bowman exclusive in '54 and '55, which gives me a chance to create a Topps card for him. The head shot is same one used in the '56 Topps set, while the "action" shot is from one those glorious TCMA old-timers sets from the 1970s-80s. God, I loved those cards. Good, cheap quasi-unlicenesed cards of good-to-great players ... Excuse me, I have to go buy some now.