Mets Card of the Week: 1977-79 Sportscaster

1977-79 SPORTSCASTER RUNDOWN

Sometimes you just have to go down the rabbit hole…

This particular quest started innocently enough. I was searching for oddball Mets cards and I came across a late ’70s Sportscaster card titled “Rundown.”

Now, if you were a sentient being during the days of Jimmy Carter and disco, you will be at least passingly familiar with Sportscaster cards, a huge mail-order set of multi-sport cards offered by subscription and advertised in publications such as Baseball Digest, as well as via wide-collared TV commercials:

I never took the bait on these cards back in the day– the whole filing aspect made the prospect of starting a collection sound like a damn grown-up job. And who needed that.

Over the years, I had seen these at conventions and online, and was familiar with the Tom Seaver, Willie Mays, and 1969 Mets cards. But I was unaware of Rundown until last week.

And my first impulse was to learn more about the exact play pictured on the card front. The text on the reverse offered no help, starting off with a narrative about Bert Campaneris getting caught in a rundown between third and home, before devolving into a pedantic lecture about rundowns in general.

Oh, and there’s a figure caption too, apparently written by the cast of Hee-Haw: “This Houston runner has got himself into a pickle.”

Indeed.

So with the card providing little explicit detail regarding the actual rundown, I began to look for clues.

First of all, the Sportscaster cards were offered between 1977 and 1979, so the image likely came from a game within that timeframe, or a couple of years prior at most. In addition, I discovered that the Astros started wearing their rainbow-connection uniforms in 1975, so that helped establish the low end.

Next, I considered that number 11 staring me in the face, and it took me a few ticks to remember that it was worn by Lenny Randle during his tenure with the Mets, which ran from a strong 1977 through a weak 1978. I was getting closer.

The next set of clues, though, threw me for a bit of a loop. Based on the scoreboard advertisement for a twin bill with the Astros the following day, I went looking on baseball-reference.com for a 1977/1978 game against Houston that preceded a doubleheader, and contained a line score where the Mets allowed two runs in the first inning and a minimum of two runs in the second inning. But I could find no such animal.

After several minutes circling around the annual results, I noticed an anomaly in the 1978 schedule. On July 19 and July 20 of that season, the Mets and Astros played consecutive doubleheaders at Shea, with the Mets taking three of four games. And then it hit me– there must have been a rainout earlier in the season that caused this midsummer pileup.

And sure enough, there was the evidence: the teams had played a game on Saturday, May 13, but not on Sunday, May 14. So now I knew that the picture in question had likely been snapped during that May 13 contest, and that rain had wiped out the subsequent Mother’s Day doubleheader.

The box score for May 13 supported this theory: the Mets lost the game 7-4, with Mike Bruhert getting rocked for seven runs in the first three innings.

As it turns out, the second-inning pickle pictured on this Sportscaster card transpired when Enos Cabell hit a double to right, driving in pitcher Joe Niekro and Terry Puhl to make the score 6-0. Mets right fielder Elliott Maddox (pictured in the background. Editor’s note: actually, that appears to be Lee Mazzilli) relayed the ball to shortstop Doug Flynn, and after a couple of throws back and forth between Flynn and Randle, a frisky Cabell was nabbed in a rundown for the second out of the inning…