Like Bobby Murcer, Rudy May had two tours of duty with the Yankees that lucklessly came just before and just after the team’s 1977 and 1978 World Series triumphs. This perplexing card signals Rudy May’s initial arrival in New York, though it actually came out after he’d already played half a season for the Yankees. The fact that he’d already appeared in games with the Yankees, wearing a real Yankee uniform and a real Yankee cap, makes it difficult to understand why Topps had to resort to what may be the poorest bit of card doctoring I’ve ever seen. The uniform shirt looks like a piece of college-ruled notebook paper that sat out in the Topps parking lot all through a snowy winter and sun-drenched spring, and the interlocking NY on the cap appears to have been rendered by a distracted gorilla brandishing a tube of Crest toothpaste. The N in particular seems to have a sordid, malodorous life all its own, the part of the letter on our left like the staggering in-buckling leg of a drunkard, the letter-ending flourish on the right like the drunkard’s wilted flowers, offered in an ill-fated attempt to gain reentry to the apartment of his beleaguered erstwhile mate who hurled him out onto the street after ten or twelve too many booze-related fuckups.
Archive for the ‘Rudy May’ Category
Rudy May
February 14, 2007“Puh-pleaz . . . sweedard,” the drunken N begs, wheezing, his drooping crocuses clutched to his chest. “I. I loveyou and. And I can change. I swear. I . . . I broughtcha these . . . Honey?”
Slam.
(Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody!)
Cardboard Gods 