My Father's Day was nice and all too brief.
Staying home was imperative. Anywhere I would want to go on this day would require a drive and we definitely are not doing that on Father's Day. So, the day consisted mostly of watching baseball -- A's/Royals, Cardinals/Brewers, then Giants/Dodgers. Yay, a victory! Beat back those BusterPoseys!
I also talked on the phone with my daughter (a big deal for any Gen Zer), which was the obvious day highlight. I ate pizza and chicken wings, my requested dinner, which thrilled my wife who didn't have to cook. And I opened some baseball cards. The 2025 Heritage blaster and the gift card were Father's Day presents. I haven't decided how to handle the gift card yet. (It will not be used on any Series 2, the amount dupes I've seen pulled from a single retail box is offensive even before getting to the price hike).
The Heritage box went pretty well considering I'm getting down to the "Handful of Base Cards Plus Eight-Five More Short-Prints To Go" stage of the chase. Anything "good" out of this box was a card I didn't have yet obviously, Heritage isn't about hits. But I did luck out on the last pack.
It seems silly to still be excited about a border color parallel of a player from my favorite team. I'll never land all of them -- especially now that Fanatics is flooding every product with 57 different parallels. But I can't help it, it still did feel like a win.
Oh, and also I extended some card research from a previous Father's Day post from a couple years ago.
In that post I addressed (again) my continued obsession with players who show up in a set, disappear from that set the following year, then return the year after that. Fascinating. This mostly concerns Topps sets from my youth and we're still on the most fascinating disappearing acts of all -- guys who showed up in 1974 and 1976 Topps but entirely missed my most favorite set of all-time -- 1975 Topps! Imagine, not getting the chance to appear on a '75 mini!
In the previous post, I found four instances of that happening. But there are actually 10 instances total. I don't know why I didn't uncover all 10 earlier. I probably wanted to do as little work as possible on Father's Day but this project deserves to be finished!
So here are the four players I found the first time:
Randy Hundley
Mike Kekich
Mike Sadek
Jim Willoughby
Now on to the six other players who were good enough for '74 and '76 Topps but not for 1975. A few of these guys are more notable than what I found the first time, don't know why I didn't see them before.
KURT BEVACQUA
Here's one of those notable '70s/'80s guys now, who is part of fan lore thanks to an often-played sound byte as well as one epic '70s video. Bevacqua is the only one of these missing '75 Topps guys who gets two cards in both the '74 and '76 sets yet none in '75. Quite a feat for a guy who couldn't hit water if he fell out of a boat.
Interesting how his position changes from DH-OF to second base.
In 1974 he appeared in the main Topps set and also the Traded set. Bevacqua never received a true trading card in a Pirates uniform. He played in 18 games for Pittsburgh in 1974 and then was traded in July back to the Royals (Topps didn't even have to bother with his Traded card!). Then in March of 1975, he was purchased by the Brewers.
Here are his two Brewers cards in the 1976 Topps set, including the famed Bubble Gum Blowing Champion card. I'm waiting to see if 2025 Heritage comes up with some sort of similar card to recall the original, perhaps in the Update set (the '76 card is No. 564). But given that Fanatics has abandoned the detailed Heritage tributes and even if it did something like this, it would probably be some card available only every 25 cases, I should stop waiting.
I don't know why Bevacqua didn't get a 1975 Topps card. Between his two teams, he played 57 games in 1974, which seems sufficient enough. Maybe the midseason trade threw off the card-maker.
JIM CRAWFORD
The 1974 Jim Crawford is his rookie card, which makes sense that he would disappear for a year as rookies are still trying establish themselves, especially back in the day when teams didn't make nearly as many transactions.
Crawford spent all of 1974 with Triple A Denver, which is why he didn't get a 1975 card. But, like Bevacqua, he received two 1976 cards.
Crawford was traded to the Tigers in December in a big deal between the Astros and Tigers. The Traded card is much more familiar to me than his base card because I pulled the Traded card but never saw the base card in '76.
Crawford did show up as a Tiger in the 1977 Topps set, and then Topps ignored him again in 1978 despite his 37 games pitched in 1977.
ADRIAN GARRETT
Adrian Garrett received just two Topps cards of his own and they book-end a missing 1975 Topps card (he's also on a three-player Cubs rookie card in 1971).
Garrett appeared in just 10 games for the Cubs in 1974, playing the majority of the season for Triple A Wichita, so no 1975 Topps card. He got into 16 games for the Cubs in 1976 then was purchased by the Angels on July 31, 1975 and proceeded to play in 37 games for California. Pretty good job by Topps getting Garrett as an Angel, considering most photos were taken during spring training then. At least I think it's an actual Angels uniform, if not, darn good airbrushing job.
DERON JOHNSON
Quite the contrasting cards here of Deron Johnson (but still not the most drastic change in this post).
Johnson could pass for a young, hip, Oakland A on his '74 card, with the action shot and the height of "modern uniforms" in the '70s - at least at this point. Meanwhile I thought Deron Johnson looked so old on his 1976 Topps card that when I pulled it that year I confused him with Boston manager Darrell Johnson, thinking he appeared on both this card and the team card.
I know why he didn't get a 1975 card, his '74 season was very active. He played 50 games with Oakland, was traded to the Brewers at the end of June, played 49 games for Milwaukee (sorry, no Topps card of his Brewers days), then purchased by the Red Sox in early September for the pennant run. That's not an actual Red Sox outfit he's wearing.
Johnson played in 148 games for the White Sox in 1976 but didn't get a card the next year. Perhaps because he returned to the Red Sox for the final 3 games of the season and Topps threw up its hands.
SKIP JUTZE
Scolding myself for not bringing this player up the first time, I've got Jutze's cards memorized.
He doesn't look like the same player at all here. So much is different, even while he stayed with the same team. The Astros radically changed their uniforms in 1975 and Jutze, in a switch from the pattern of many '70s ballplayers, removed his facial hair instead of growing some. Add that one photo is outside and one is inside and in one he's posing as a fielder and one as a hitter and this is quite the spot-the-difference pair of cards.
Jutze played just eight major league games in 1974 with most of his time with minor league Denver. He was back up to 50-plus big league games in 1975. Jutze skips another Topps set in 1977 before reappearing once again with the Mariners in 1978.
WALT WILLIAMS
Another legendary, often-cited player from the '70s, "No-Neck" Williams misses out on the '75 set, which seems a terrible missed opportunity. (P.S.: That '74 Williams is way miscut and this post will help me upgrade a couple '74s).
Williams played in 43 games for his new team, the Yankees, in 1974, but batted an abysmal .113 and I guess Topps figured that was enough to leave him out of the set. He got in 82 games in his final season in 1975 so that's why he's in the '76 set. And, look, he seems to have grown a little more of a neck during the Topps hiatus.
And those are the 10 players who didn't appear in 1975 Topps after showing up in 1974 and 1976. There are several players who appeared before 1975 and also in 1976 Topps but there was a bigger gap in which they didn't make other Topps sets, too -- players like Mickey Scott, Jerry DaVanon, Rick Austin, Ed Crosby and Terry Humphrey, but I'm not counting them.
It's possible I may do this for other sets aside from my beloved 1975, but I will really have to love that set, too, because I've been writing this blog long enough to know that variations on the same thing draw much less interest.
Hope Father's Day was enjoyable for the dads out there.
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