Cards from Suldog part one

A few days ago I blogged about receiving a package from the legendary
Suldog. I say he's legendary because of his wonderful blog. I actually did go through the entire blog reading about the exploits of him and HIS WIFE.

He's a big fan of baseball and softball and has a variety of posts depicting his days as a manager/catcher for his softball teams. He's also a bass player. He seems to have had a much more exciting life than most of the people I know. Maybe it's in part to his writing that makes the journey through his stories so enjoyable. I don't know what it is. I know that it's a quality that I don't have, but it doesn't hurt to try.

He contacted me a few weeks ago about having some 1973 cards to help me out with my set. I found some stuff for him. Mainly Red Sox, Patriots and some other stuff. He's a big fan of the 1965 set. If you have a chance go read his Green Sox post. I won't ruin the story, but I feel like our trade was pretty much the same thing. A really nice gift.


Pretty nice stack of cards isn't it?

Since it was such a large stack I'm dividing the post up into a few parts.

1973 set is one of the first Topps sets to offer up action shots in the regular set along with the posed action shots. (1971 was technically the first, but action shots on a baseball card was a pretty new concept in 1973) I do a lot of action photography so I really like seeing action shots depicted on cards.

A mainstay of these cards is AL, NL and World Series highlight cards. Of course these are all going to be action shots.


This is a nice one depicting Johnny Bench scoring a run to ties up the World Series in game six. The Oakland A's would win game 7 to win the World Series, but that doesn't matter to me. It is one of the cards in the set to feature Oklahoma's own Johnny Bench even if he is a little obscured by his teammates.


He also has a regular issue base card showing him in action. Pretty nice. Catchers have the best cards.

His opponent in the 72 world series was Bert Campaneris shown in this Game 7 World Series card. Another nice action shot.



"Campy" would also have a regular issue base card. A nice posed batting shot. Normally I don't like the posed shots, but I'm warming up to them. After seeing this card I came up with a theory that older guys had better posed shots than the rookies. I need to do more research on this.

Both guys would have cameos in other players cards.


Campy running to first in this Bob Oliver card. With cards like this you have to look twice to see who it's supposed to represent. I'd like to think it's another Campaneris card.


To show you how a real nerd stores his cards this is a binder sheet with 9 cards. These are arranged numerically. You'll notice the Bob Oliver (Bert Campaneris) card shares a page with Bert's "real" card. That fact will only seem cool and interesting to me, but I thought I would share anyway.


Here is a nice Willie McCovey card. A good player in his own right. The catcher making a cameo is of course, Johnny Bench. This happens a lot in cards, but it's a little nice when it's a player that you collect. Up until the trade with Suldog I only had a couple of Johnny Bench cards from his playing days.

In keeping with the action shot theme for this post I'd like to show off a couple of these stars.



Reggie Jackson. (Wow, that's a lot of A's players in this post. In fact this is probably the most A's or Reds for that matter in one single post from me.)

Reggie's mustacheless in this shot. A little blurry, but a nice action shot.


Since I'm on a Reds/A's kick today, I'll follow up with a nice action shot of "Charlie Hustle". He got that name from Whitey Ford as a sarcastic nickname. Rose liked it enough to keep it.




Here's another cool action shot with a cameo. It's got a Hall of Famer, the ball and .... Terry Crowley. I hope I don't offend anyone, but I don't know who the heck Terry Crowley is. I know Thurman Munson. For the non-baseball fans, he's the guy front and center (#15). Pretty nice!

I wish the composition was a little better. If the camera was panned a little more to the right their wouldn't be so much dead space on the left of the card. Also, we could probably see the ball a little better. It's going to always be a Thurman Munson card to me though.

I guess that's about it for this post. When I first started collecting this set. I was pretty sure that some of the cards would be pretty hard to find. Having someone take the time to send them over in a trade is really generous. Soon, I will show off some more nice cards from this trade.

Thanks for reading.