Sunday, May 20, 2018

1977 BILL LAXTON FOR US "YEARBOOK" COLLECTORS

Here’s a card I whipped up just because I came across a nice shot of former pitcher Bill Laxton in a Tigers uniform, for whom he pitched in 1976:

Re-do with 1976 team.
1977 card as issued by Topps

The reason I thought it’d make for an interesting card is because he was depicted in the 1977 Topps set as an upcoming Seattle Mariner, with all the bad airbrushing we got with those Mariner and Blue Jay cards, and for us “Yearbook” collectors, that is, people that think a card set should represent the previous year’s events, results, etc, it’d be nice to have a card of him with the team he actually pitched for. (Run-on sentence there. You get the gist).
Laxton appeared in 26 games for Detroit in 1976, going an unflattering 0-5 with an earned run average of 4.09 over 94.2 innings of work.
When the 1977 season started, he did pitch for the Mariners in their inaugural campaign. He’d go 3-2 with a 4.95 ERA over 43 games and 72.2 innings pitched before getting traded to the Cleveland Indians for catcher Ray Fosse in September, getting into two games for the Tribe before season’s end.
Turns out those would be the last games of Laxton’s Major League career, and he’d finish with a career record of 3-10 over 121 games and 243.1 innings with an ERA of 4.73.

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