Fred Norman, Bachelor

I think one of the things that's most excited me about my return to collecting, as I sorta mentioned in my introductory post last week, is the notion of collecting baseball cards in any way, shape or form that I want. The concept of "Frankensets" has been exceptionally intriguing. To think that I don't "need" to be chasing the high-dollar, low-run cards to have a blast at this, and can arrange and order cards in any manner that fits my concept of logical - well, that's why I've doubled down the past year. I suppose I never really conceived of that as an option before.

I do have to give full credit to the Dime Boxes ("The Low-End Baseball Card Collector's Journey") blog for giving me the shove I needed for my first real frankenset. Nick, the fella that runs it, shares my sense of the absurd - or rather, I share his sense. He started a "Dime Box Frankenset" series in which he pits one goofus card against another, and lets you, the astute reader, vote on which one is more horrid. Some of these have been absolute whoppers. I mean, just look at the Bob Zupcic, Dick Green and Ryon Healy cards in this post alone. Someone at these respective card companies decided that these were the best representation of these players that they were going to get this year, and called it a day. More likely, they share the same warped sense of humor that Nick does, and knew that someone was going to totally love these. Like me.

I started buying some of the best of these online, just to build up my own best-of-Nick's frankenset, and am now starting to "season" it with some that haven't quite made his elections yet. To think, all those years that I wasn't collecting, I thought Oscar Gamble's 1976 Topps Traded card was the height of hilarity. What did I know, right?

This brings us to today's subject, Fred Norman's 1973 Topps base card. This card brings me much joy for a couple of reasons. First, Norman and his Padres are playing at Candlestick Park in San Francisco against my Giants. As is evident, no one's at the game; or, as I often recall from my trips to Candlestick that decade, there are probably somewhere between 1,000-3,000 people clustered around home plate in the lower deck, then about 25 hippies smoking dope scattered across the upper deck. Around the 7th inning, seagulls will start circulating, beers will kick in, and fights will start. What an image. What a card.

Second, Norman was a 211-inning workhorse for those '72 Padres - a really bad team - and managed to pull off a 3.44 ERA and a 9-11 W/L. I remember him as being an innings-eater on the mid-1970s Big Red Machine Cincinnati teams, and a 2-time World Series champion.

But most importantly, in the spring of 1973, Topps thought the most important thing to mention in their de rigeur cartoon was that "Fred is a bachelor", complete with a mini-skirted kissing bandit chasing him around the field. A bachelor! That's not a term you hear much any longer. It was a term of art in Hollywood for closeted stars like Rock Hudson and Errol Flynn, but more often it just meant you hadn't married yet, and of course you were just playing the field and looking for the right one.

Anyway, this card really has it all, doesn't it?