Mets Card of the Week: Jim Fregosi Boyhood Photo

1972 JIM FREGOSI BOYHOOD PHOTO

Is bigger really better?

As if anticipating the excesses of the decade to come, the 1970 Topps set tipped the scales at 720 cards, besting the previous high of 664 cards from the 1969 set.

The black-beauty set of 1971 swelled to 752 cards, reaching into the far corners of each teams’ roster.

And then came 1972, and its 787-card offering.

The ’72 set was gaudy, garish, and from where I sit, great. The basic player cards were straight out of Pepperland, with colorful team names leaping off the front, framed by pop-art stars.

But in order to stretch the set to 787 cards, Topps added all sorts of filler and extenders.

Sure, you had your by-then standard league-leaders, team cards, playoff/World Series summaries, checklists, and multi-player rookies.

But Topps added to this mix a run of seven high-series traded cards, a riot of in-action subset cards (taking in players ranging in status from Reggie Jackson down to Doug Griffin), and the much-derided-in-my-neighborhood award cards.

These award cards simply pictured a specific trophy on the front of the card (say, the Cy Young Award, or most thrillingly, the Minor League Player of the Year Award), and the backs just contained a list of the previous winners of those awards. I tell you, pulling one of those suckers would have me pining for a Doug Griffin In Action card…

The set also included 16 boyhood-photo cards, including this charming shot of Jim Fregosi rocking a mean squeeze box.

The 1973 set saw Topps retrench to 660 cards, where they remained until the expansion of 1977 pushed them to the 726-card level that they held through the dawn of the ’80s.

The ’80s? Well, that’s a tale of excess for another time…