Billy Almon
August 16, 2023
This is one of my favorite baseball cards. It’s an action shot, but what is the action? In some other famous cards with action shots, the action captures an element of the game that’s at the heart of why the game came to mean so much to us, the drama, the excitement, the heroism. I think of the 1974 Cleon Jones card that is in my mind the first baseball card I ever saw, the one that started to lay the whole foundation of my conscious mind. For what is my mind but something built on baseball cards, on early childhood attachment interwoven with a want and need to attach to my older brother and to all things colorful and exciting? Everything before baseball cards was unconscious, and everything after it had within it at least some fragment of baseball cards. I’m living and have been living in the after for a long time. The after changes. I think about another iconic action card, Johnny Bench’s 1976 card, where he stands amid swirling dust like a gunslinger who’s just gunned down another challenger. That’s an after wherein the before seems so close at hand it crackles with life, an after that suggests itself as part of a continuum of drama and action and victory. The action shown in this Billy Almon card tells a different story. Billy Almon is clearly returning to the dugout after failing to reach base. If he were approaching home plate for an at-bat, he wouldn’t be holding the bat this way. He’s holding it in such a way as to enable a handoff to a bat boy. He has not only failed to reach base but has failed to even put the ball in play. He has struck out. This is why he’s still in possession of the bat. His expression is implacable. He is looking at me, or if you’re the one looking at this card, he’s looking at you. You could imagine he’s about to hand you the bat, that it could be your turn. But who would want to enter such a universe as the one that has reduced him to such brown and yellow and gray mediocrity? In truth I didn’t get this card as a kid but received it as part of a dumping of old cards on me last year from a friend of a friend who was getting rid of his collection. So I never had the experience of seeing it as a kid, when my favorite thing in all the world was playing little league baseball, and my favorite moment in little league baseball was being on deck, bat in hand, about to get an at-bat. Now I’m on the other side of most things. I’m not who Billy Almon is looking at. I’m Billy Almon, or standing in Billy Almon’s place, more or less. This is not such a bad thing. I’ve been blessed with a staggering amount of gifts in my life, and still out in front of me are the lives of my two sons, who are as young now as I was when baseball cards were forming my brain. From what I can tell, Billy Almon is accepting his fate with dignity and care. He stands upright. He hasn’t thrown his bat away in a tantrum but holds it carefully. He is going to hand it gently to the boy with his whole life in front of him.
Cardboard Gods 
Remember the year I think it was 81, his Strat card against LH pitching was great, however he couldn’t field worth shit at SS…nice to see you back Mr. Wilker.
Hey….glad you’re back!
To be fair, Almon is so passive and almost zen-like because he did a lot of walking back to the dugout with bat in hand. He must have been a defensive whiz because how the hell else would you get over 3,000 big league AB’s with a career .648 OPS? Yuck.
graymalkin26: via the Strat-O-Matic online game, I still make use of Billy Almon’s ability to hit lefties.
Gary Trujillo: As graymalkin26 points out, he wasn’t a very good fielder at shortstop, at least in Strat-O-Matic’s estimation. He was versatile (not a great fielder anywhere else, either, but he could play third base, first base, and the outfield), and he could consistently hit lefties pretty well, especially for a shortstop, and he could steal bases.
well back in the day, they were not roided and PED up. There were tons of forgotten players that were acceptable back then. He was acceptable.
He 254 in 15 years and led the league in 77 when bunting was still allowed.
in 81 he was 19 MVP voting
He is industrious and thorough… i believe he saw a crack in his bat and is going back to batboy to get a new one, that will allow him to lay down the perfect bunt and laugh at everyone who thinks he or the people that paid him care about it his OPS
do players get to approve the image on their cards?
if so, whether he just struck out or is going back to the dugout to get another bat, why would almon okay this picture of him, in the middle of some kind of bewildering crisis of conscience, perhaps getting ready for the after?
his other cards show him in full swing, tossing around a ball in what might be spring training, leading off first base, connecting with a pitch, waiting in the infield for a ball to be hit, throwing to first after fielding a ball, swinging a bat with a donut in the on-deck circle, smiling for the camera in an empty stadium, and laying down a bunt.
Yeah, true, could have been a cracked bat.
I tend to doubt players had any input on the images used for their cards at that time.
i despised the oversized topps logo wasting space in this set
haha i always wondered if the players had input too.
Just found your blog looking for photos of Bruce Kison in the early 70s and love it! Can’t wait to dig through it. You have excellent prose. Thanks