NOT REALLY MISSING IN ACTION- 1977 BILLY CHAMPION

Up on the blog today we have a “not so missing” 1977 career-capper for former pitcher Billy Champion, who pitched the last of his Big League games during the 1976 season with the Milwaukee Brewers:

Champion appeared in 10 games for Milwaukee in 1976, going 0-1 with an ERA of 7.03 over 24.1 innings of work, three of those games starts.
He would spend all of 1977 in the Philadelphia Phillies Minor league system, but would retire by season’s end, putting in eight years in the Majors, split evenly between Philadelphia (1969-1972) and Milwaukee (1973-1976).
His finest season would easily be 1974 when he posted a record of 11-4 for Milwaukee, with a 3.62 ERA over 31 appearances and 23 starts.
All told he ended up with a record of 34-50, with a 4.69 earned run average over 202 appearances, 102 of which were starts, including three shutouts and a couple of saves.

1973 BILLY CHAMPION AIRBRUSHED IMAGE SPOTLIGHT

Here’s an interesting find, the original negative for the image that would end up being Billy Champion’s 1973 Topps card.
First up the card as-issued by Topps:

 

Now the negative as it was treated for final production:

I love finding these to see just how Topps had the original photos “touched up” to show the correct team for a player in the following set.
Here we see that Champion was originally photographed with the Philadelphia Phillies, for whom he played the first four years of his eight-year Major League career.
To get him into his new team’s uni, in this case the Milwaukee Brewers, Topps just went and partially touched up the image, enough to get the part of the photo that would be used on the card.
I would have thought it was a given to re-paint the whole image, but certainly makes sense to JUST do what is needed.
As for Champion, he played for eight seasons in the Majors evenly split between the Phillies and Brewers, compiling a 34-50 record with a 4.69 earned run average over 202 appearances, 102 of which were starts.