NOT REALLY MISSING IN ACTION- 1973 ELIAS SOSA

Time to add a 1973 ”not so missing” for former reliever Elias Sosa to the wthballs stable, marking his Big League debut in 1972 with eight appearances:

Sosa was 22-years-of-age when he got his first taste of the Majors in ‘72, going 0-1 with a nice 2.30 earned run average over 15.2 innings for the San Francisco Giants.
In 1973 he would have an excellent year, going 10-4 over 71 appearances, posting an ERA of 3.28 with 18 saves as an official rookie, pitching 107 innings and making one start.
He would go on to have a very nice, under-the-radar Major League career that spanned 12 seasons, between 1972 and 1983, going 59-51 with 83 saves and a 3.32 ERA in 601 appearances.
His finest season would arguably be 1979 while with the Expos when he went 8-7 with a brilliant 1.96 ERA over 62 appearances and 96.2 innings pitched, along with 18 saves while closing out 41 games.
He would play for eight different teams, including the Los Angeles Dodgers for whom he’d get the only World Series experience of his career in 1977, and the Montreal Expos where he’d see the only other Post Season action in 1981.
Seems the 1970’s had a bunch of these “forgotten” relievers who put in solid seasons year after year, without the gaudy numbers but effective nevertheless.

RANDOM QUICKIE: THOSE AIRBRUSHED 1975 ST. LOUIS CARDINALS

I know there were a ton of airbrushing jobs on Topps part in the 1970's, and many of them left a lot to be desired as far as "quality" went.

But one little item that always popped out to me were those badly airbrushed St. Louis Cardinals cards from the 1975 set.

It seemed like there were an inordinate amount of bad ones for that team in that year, and they are absolute CLASSICS!

Let's take a look:

Man. Some of those St. Louis logos on the caps are horrendous!

I'll pick the Osteen logo as the worst. However the Sadecki and Rudolph caps sport some terrible messy black stroking around the white lettering on the caps.

What a classic set of cards right here!

I guess looking at it now the Cardinals had the same bad amount of airbrushing as the Yankees or any other team in this set.

But for some reason these Cardinal cards were the ones that always stuck with me through the years.

The Osteen photo also bothers me since he looks so confused, like he's looking at the camera as some magic box and can't figure out what's happening at that moment.

Still, even with all the airbrush "disasters" in the set, the 1975 Topps offering is still one of my all-time favorites! Just can't get enough of all the colors.