Who is the man: Tom Seaver was about "The Man" as you can get in 1971. No, his 1970 season wasn't as good as his 1969 season, but it was still pretty darn great. He set an NL record for right-handers with 283 strikeouts.
Can ya dig it: Just a very weird look on Seaver's face.
Right on: This is the first time on a Topps baseball card that we actually see that Seaver has an arm. His 1967, 68, 69 and 70 cards are all head shots. Even his 1970 Super card is a head shot. And the pix of Seaver on the 1970 and 1971 leaders cards are cropped so you can't see his arm. Thank goodness for Kelloggs in 1970 and 1971. Both of them have Seaver in throwing poses much like this one.
You see this cat Seaver is a bad mother: All right, I was going to wait until the back of the card to write this, but if striking out 19 batters in a game, including 10 consecutive batters to end the game, isn't bad-ass, then we need to come up with a new definition of the term.
Shut your mouth: Longtime New York Daily News writer Dick Young's June 1977 column claimed that Seaver and Seaver's wife Nancy, who were friends with Nolan Ryan and his wife Ruth, were jealous of Nolan Ryan's salary. That caused Seaver to demand a trade from the Mets, which led to a deal with the Reds. Until then the two sides had been bickering but Seaver had not demanded a trade until the column, which he called "the straw that broke the camel's back."
No one understands him but his woman: Nancy Seaver told People magazine after the trade: "I talk to Ruth Ryan about babies, not baseball."
(A word about the back): This is not one of Seaver's most photogenic cards, front or back.
I think this is one of the few '71 cards that I had as a kid. I don't have that many ingrained memories of the few I had as I didn't look at them as much as the ones I bought myself (I got a bag of old cards from my older cousin in the mid-70s), but this one strikes a chord with me.
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