Fact of the day:
According to a Wall Street Journal article, New York State wildlife expert Richard Thomas found that a woodchuck could chuck around 35 cubic feet of dirt in the course of digging a burrow. Thomas reasoned that if a woodchuck could chuck wood, he would chuck an amount equal to 700 pounds.
Of course, the talk around baseball right now is Miguel Cabrera actually having a legitimate shot at the triple crown with only about a week left in the season. So I figured what a better time to look back at the last time a triple crown was captured on cardboard!
These three cards were all a part of the pile that my Uncle gave me wayyyyyyy back when. I remember when I first got these cards that I looked at them and was awe-struck that I had cards with Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Robinson, Al Kaline and Harmon KIllebrew on them! I was 13 then, so I wasn't that well rehearsed in my baseball history to be thinking about the last triple crown year. It wasn't until about 5 years later that I looked at the three of these cards again and thought to myself "Huh, that's kindda cool. The same guy led in AVG, HR and RBI that year. Neat." It was shortly after that that I finally realized that the '68 Topps AL LL cards would be displaying Yaz's triple crown season from '67! I never claimed to be the quickest guy out there.
I briefly wondered how it would work if Cabrera tied with someone else for the lead in one of the triple crown categories. I didn't have to wonder for long, due in large part to the fact that I was watching MLB Network at the time and they answered my question pretty quickly. But it turns out that while Yaz ran away with the Batting Title, batting 15 points better than Robinson, he tied Killebrew with 44 HR. Pretty sneaky sis...
The final card features Killebrew and Robinson again. Yaz was the only one with any shot at the triple crown that year as Killebrew finished .269/44/113 and Robinson finished .311/30/94. I think my personal favorite thing about these three cards are the fact that Topps used different pictures of each player for each card. Three cards featuring Yaz, three different pictures. I like it so much that it's inspired me to rearrange them a bit differently...
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| Yaz in process of ripping a fart. Robinson and Kaline are suspicious of the noise they hear. |
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| Robinson, now aware of the situation, proceeds to get the fuck out of the proximity. |
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| Robinson is now completely gone. Killebrew is turing away, trying not to give Yaz the pleasure. Howard, unaware of the situation is taken completely off guard. Yaz begins to lose it. |
That got pretty low brow fairly quickly. Never said this was award winning entertainment here people. Never even said this was entertainment...
(...Joe)
Thanks for the post.
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