Sunday, October 18, 2009

#3 - '74 Highlights, Bob Gibson

Is there anything better than listening to "Disco Inferno" when posting on the '75 Topps blog? I mean, I know there are better songs, but I'm talking about feelin' tha funk, ya dig?

Card fact: Bob Gibson is the third player featured here who has two cards in the set. I can't say that about the subject of the next post.

What I thought about this card then: Never saw it. Gibson was one of those players who retired immediately before I started paying attention to baseball. I'm sure I didn't know who he was until I was a teenager.

What I think about this card now: Gibson is one of my favorite pitchers of all-time. I wrote about him once before here. He is everything that I want a pitcher to be. As for the photo, it's OK. I do like it when pitchers color coordinate their gloves.

Other stuff: We continue with the mind-blowing achievements. Three thousand strikeouts may not seem a terribly big deal now, but back then Gibson was just the SECOND player to ever reach 3,000 strikeouts. And the first person since Walter Johnson retired almost 50 years prior.

These days, we're debating whether someone with 3,000 strikeouts -- Curt Schilling -- deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Schilling has exactly one less career strikeout than Gibson.

Back facts: For the first time, no errors to be found. Cesar Geronimo was the 3,000th strikeout victim of both Gibson and Nolan Ryan. Take that, Big Red Machine.

Other blog stuff: Nothing new today. I'm kicking around something to do with the cartoons on the back -- maybe a list of my favorites.

2 comments:

Matt Runyon said...

Sometimes I set my iTunes to play songs from 1976 when I'm writing posts for my 1976 blog. I also set it to play whatever year I'm doing when I post in my Giants blog. Fun stuff.

I learned a lot about baseball from those trivia questions on the backs of the '75 cards. Perhaps you can do something about whether or not those questions are still correct (broken records, etc.).

Jim said...

If Bob Gibson stumbles across this blog and reads you don't care for his color coordinated glove, just be prepared for a brushback pitch. Just saying.