The 1973 cards featured here within this 1975 card are both familiar and excitingly foreign to me. I don’t own any cards from that year but they are closer both in time and in style to the cards I do have, especially the 1974 and 1976 cards, than any of the other older cards featured in this celebratory subgroup of Topps’ 1975 set. Also, this glimpse into the 1973 style features two supremely iconic players who continued to be a huge presence throughout my childhood, allowing me to make a personal connection with the cards that I wouldn’t be able to make when considering, for example, the card from this series featuring the 1963 versions of Sandy Koufax and Elston Howard.
The immediately accessible, classically simple design features a couple of unfamiliar flourishes that I love, including the way the names are presented at the bottom left of the card, the last name larger than the first, and, more significantly, the silhouette fielder at the bottom right, which may be my favorite feature in any Topps design. The 1976 cards also had fielder icons, but in being more detailed than the 1973 icons they actually lose a little something in comparison, lacking the gravity of the 1973 silhouettes.
The action photos in these 1973 offerings seem somehow different from the photos featured in later years, adding an additional note of strangeness to these cards. The Watergate hearings occurred the year these Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose cards came out, and there seems, coincidentally, to be an echo in the cards of the anomie that must have been seeping from sea to shining sea as the evidence of corruption from the top down began to mount. Instead of capturing the superstars in heroic poses, the Watergate-era edition shows Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose in moments that seem oddly inconsequential at best, and perhaps even tinged with failure. Read the rest of this entry ?
Cardboard Gods 
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