Peace

This may be my favorite baseball card.

When I was a kid, by which I mean, what, 7?, cards from before one's birth/one's collecting age beginning were imbued with a certain mysteriousness...here a couple of things: all the '71 Topps are printed with that strange Technicolor-seeming glow. Wait - I think they all were up til '72...'73 is the first, on thinking, where the players just look like they were, y'know, photgraphed. ANYway...

Also, when I was a kid and got this card in trade, I didn't think that, with the casual smile, he was posing as a guy who had just thrown a fastball so much as flashing a peace sign! Now, typing this, this makes me wonder if that's where the surely godawful jam band Vida Blue (whom I have not heard, I'm not a monster) got their name. "Dudes, he's saying peace..." [wiggles off to huff freon]

[and, oh god, here's who they are: Page McConnell of Phish and included Oteil Burbridge of The Allman Brothers Band and Russell Batiste of The Meters.]

See, my card collecting started at six (1975) and ended ca 1980...maybe '81. So to see something so seemingly iconic as a black guy named "Vida Blue" flashing (to my mind, at least) a peace sign on a baseball card blew my mind. This was straight after 'nam, remember, and Patty Hearst and Hot l Baltimore [?], so there was a lot of "free thinking" around.

And, fwiw, here is the first card that was on the top of my first pack of cards: