The first two decades of the Mets’ existence is my favorite era of Topps cards. Sure, it would be nice to make 3-4 trades and get some classic 50s and 1961 sets in there, but few things in life are perfect. The first set I’d trade would be the 1962 one, a set so ugly I didn’t collect it. My second set to ditch would probably be the 1973 set.
I’ve tried to appreciate the ’73 offering. The year before, Topps went with both a psychedelic design and the largest set they produced to date. So, the following year they pulled back, going with plain white borders and a 660-card size, over 120 fewer cards than the year before. But my opinion was formed at an early age and it’s tough to shake that.
At the time, my biggest complaint was that there was no Rusty Staub card. It’s next to impossible to describe today how much I wanted that card then. It wasn’t until later that I realized that Staub did make an appearance on a ’73 card, unbilled as it was. See, he was in the game-action shot for Tommie Agee’s card, one that showed Agee catching a fly ball. Agee, Staub and Ken Boswell appear in the photo, which meant that the airbrush department had to work on three players, as Agee was traded in late November to the Astros.
It’s hard to imagine that Topps planned on Agee to be on a team besides the Mets for 1973 when they picked this photo. It seems like there wasn’t enough time to get a new photo but there was enough to put the art team to work to eliminate the Mets colors from the image. It’s a neat card, one made slightly more interesting knowing that Staub started with the Astros and that Boswell would later play for Houston, too.
With Agee not being on the team, that meant there was only one game-action shot among the 25 Mets cards – including manager and team photo – in the 1973 Topps set. And to make it even worse, it was of Jim Fregosi, the guy who they traded Nolan Ryan for, the one who stunk up the joint in 1972 and one who was no longer even on the team when this penultimate series card was first available. The Mets sold Fregosi to the Rangers in early July.
There were a lot of game-action shots included in the 1973 set, even if they didn’t have “In Action” captioned on them like the previous year. Among many others, there were game shots of Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Roberto Clemente, Reggie Jackson and Frank Robinson. There were cards of non-Hall of Famers that had action shots, too. There’s one of Oscar Gamble sliding into second, where his hat is off and you can see his giant afro.
The Mets had two future Hall of Famers in Tom Seaver and Willie Mays. After the horrible 1972 In Action Seaver, one where he’s bent over on the mound looking like he just gave up a key hit, he was owed a triumphant action shot. Instead, we got a posed offering. And not only wasn’t there an action shot of Mays, the photo they used made him look 70 years old. None of the semi-stars or stiffs on the Mets got an action shot besides Fregosi, either. Yuck.
Of the 23 player cards, there was one game-action shot, 18 posed shots and four head shots of recently-acquired players with their hats flipped so you couldn’t see their previous team’s logo. Those four were Rich Chiles (acquired in the Agee deal,) George Stone & Felix Millan (in the Gary Gentry/Danny Frisella swap) and Phil Hennigan (Brent Strom deal.) Actually, Hennigan’s cap wasn’t flipped up. Instead, it was a complete airbrush job. After going 5-3 with a 2.67 ERA in 1972, perhaps Topps had some hope that Hennigan would be a useful pitcher for the Mets in ’73. Instead, he was 0-4 with a 6.23 ERA in what turned out to be his final season in the majors.
Topps, you owed Mets fans better than one stinking action shot in the ’73 set. And the fact that your action shot was off Fregosi only made it 100X worse. Perhaps if it was a picture of Fregosi drinking from a bottle – Fregosi once said that he had the title of his autobiography ready and it would be, “The Bases Were Loaded and So Was I” – maybe it would have been better. But a shot of him popping up to the catcher was pretty representative of his Mets career, too.