I like seeing how players from the 1975 Topps set show up in other years. And that’s what you’ll find in this post.

I need to start with a classic Bill Buckner card. In Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, Mookie Wilson hit a ball that slipped past Buckner’s legs. The Red Sox eventually lost the series and he was blamed (but nobody really knows what the outcome would’ve been had he made the play). The whole thing was over in 40 seconds. But four years later, Upper Deck still poked fun of it in the 1990 set.

Even today the first thing a search for Bill Buckner World Series pops up is a YouTube video of the event. As time passed and the Red Sox won multiple World Series, most everyone including Bill got over it. He even appeared in a 2011 Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that joked about the incident.

So yeah, the card’s an oddball equivalent of a stand-up joke, but it also reminds me of perseverance and that’s why I like it. Winning is great but dealing with adversity really tests a person. How many people could’ve dealt with making a similar public mistake?

Cards and baseball are sometimes about more than just cards and baseball.

Buckner’s oddball vs. the real Buckner in 1975

There are other Upper Deck oddballs. You’ve got your footballs mixed with your baseball. And Frank either doing laundry or emptying a bucket of balls.

15 years is impressive for any line of work, let alone playing in the majors. Some don’t make it past a year.  Players from 1975 with the stamina to play into the 90s (like Buckner) quickly dwindle. In 1988, only 35 were still playing and 3 years later there were less than half – Dave Winfield was one of those still in the game:

I like how these cards contrast

A lot of junk wax era cards are just junk. I didn’t collect back then and missed most of it so Bru’s cards were an eye opener. Many of these Upper Deck cards are examples of when both photography and design are excellent. The results can be spectacular even if the cards were overproduced. They include great action shots:

Fans are much closer to the action

But just because you can take stop-action photos doesn’t mean you should use them. Like bad family photos, we just don’t need to see 1989 Upper Deck Charlie Hough’s weird facial expression. I had to pull 1975 Topps Charlie to make it better…

I haven’t owned a single DonRuss card and wasn’t seeking them out. Bru sent some and I won’t turn away any card with 1975 players. The photos in the 1990 DonRuss set are mostly mediocre. But I really like this Griffey – the photo’s good and the color fits in with his uniform. Even the potentially cheesy paint speckles seem to work. So this is my favorite DonRuss card so far: