day.
Topps 1976 #300: Johnny Bench
With my baseball cards, as with little else, I knew where I stood. I owed this feeling of solidity in part to Toppsâs practice of numbering their cards in such a way as to signal a four-level hierarchy of gods. If the number of a card ended in anything but a 0 or a 5, the player on that card resided on the bottom level of the hierarchy, a level so broad it included almost everyoneâall the steady, colorless regulars and flawed reserves, all the hasbeens and never-weres, all the green big-eyed hopefuls and graying squint-eyed hangers-on. Owchinko, Terpko, Heaverlo, Rapp, Nicosia, Barlow, Nahorodny, Knapp. One level up included players whose card numbers ended in 5; these players had made an All-Star Game or two, perhaps, or were just a couple decent if unspectacular years removed from a Rookie of the Year award, or had recently vied for, but not won, a batting crown. McRae, Wise, Hendrick, Tanana. Rising still higher, players whose card numbers ended in 0 had been to a few All-Star Games and seemed likely to be going to a few more before they were done. Madlock, Blue, Cey. And at the very top of this steep mountain were the players whose card numbers ended in 00. These were the superstars, among the best to ever play the game. There were only a handful of these players in every set.
The photo on this card, number 300 in the 1976 series, is most likely from the 1975 season, in which Johnny Benchâs team, the Cincinnati Reds, won 108 regular-season games and then bested the Red Sox in a legendary World Series. Though I have since steeped myself down to the last detail of the 1975 World Series (that last detail being Yaz coming to bat with two outs in the bottom of the
ninth of Game Seven with the Red Sox down a run and 30,000 voices screaming, Come on, Yaz! until the man they were screaming for popped out to César Gerónimo in center field), I missed the whole thing as it happened, all the action broadcast on NBC, which we couldnât get in East Randolph. In later years, Iâd listen to games on the radio that I couldnât see on TV, but in 1975 I may not have even known that radio was an option, and if I did I may have not yet been able to follow a game that way. So I had to rely on my imagination and my cards to piece together what had happened to the Red Sox when they faced Johnny Bench and the Reds.
This particular card told me just about all I needed to know. With dust rising all around him, Johnny Bench is the gunslinger who has just downed one challenger and who is now eyeing the next as if to say, âYou really think thatâs a good idea? Really?â
At times I imagined that heâd just gunned down a runner, and at other times I imagined that heâd just gunned down the whole league, including the Red Sox. At the end of the year, after the Reds again won more than 100 games during the regular season, Bench single-handedly demolished the Yankees in the Redsâ four-game sweep of the 1976 World Series. That was also on NBC, so I didnât learn about it until my brotherâs Sports Illustrated showed up in the mail with Johnny Bench on the cover, launching a home run. The caption asked a questionââHow good are the Reds?ââthat even at age eight I understood was not really a question but a throwing up of the hands: Johnny Benchâs Reds are so good, you canât even explain how good they are.
Benchâs 1976 card stood out even more than the other superstar cards from that year. His gunslinger pose revealed him as a hero from an earlier, simpler time, the last of a dying breed. By then the classic Western, along with the clearly defined model of tough, decisive American maleness that fueled the genre, seemed to be limping its final gut-shot paces. John Wayne was old, and in his wake had come a new version of what it meant to be an American man. A boy growing up in the 1950s could follow the path to maleness
Topps 1976 #300: Johnny Bench
With my baseball cards, as with little else, I knew where I stood. I owed this feeling of solidity in part to Toppsâs practice of numbering their cards in such a way as to signal a four-level hierarchy of gods. If the number of a card ended in anything but a 0 or a 5, the player on that card resided on the bottom level of the hierarchy, a level so broad it included almost everyoneâall the steady, colorless regulars and flawed reserves, all the hasbeens and never-weres, all the green big-eyed hopefuls and graying squint-eyed hangers-on. Owchinko, Terpko, Heaverlo, Rapp, Nicosia, Barlow, Nahorodny, Knapp. One level up included players whose card numbers ended in 5; these players had made an All-Star Game or two, perhaps, or were just a couple decent if unspectacular years removed from a Rookie of the Year award, or had recently vied for, but not won, a batting crown. McRae, Wise, Hendrick, Tanana. Rising still higher, players whose card numbers ended in 0 had been to a few All-Star Games and seemed likely to be going to a few more before they were done. Madlock, Blue, Cey. And at the very top of this steep mountain were the players whose card numbers ended in 00. These were the superstars, among the best to ever play the game. There were only a handful of these players in every set.
The photo on this card, number 300 in the 1976 series, is most likely from the 1975 season, in which Johnny Benchâs team, the Cincinnati Reds, won 108 regular-season games and then bested the Red Sox in a legendary World Series. Though I have since steeped myself down to the last detail of the 1975 World Series (that last detail being Yaz coming to bat with two outs in the bottom of the
ninth of Game Seven with the Red Sox down a run and 30,000 voices screaming, Come on, Yaz! until the man they were screaming for popped out to César Gerónimo in center field), I missed the whole thing as it happened, all the action broadcast on NBC, which we couldnât get in East Randolph. In later years, Iâd listen to games on the radio that I couldnât see on TV, but in 1975 I may not have even known that radio was an option, and if I did I may have not yet been able to follow a game that way. So I had to rely on my imagination and my cards to piece together what had happened to the Red Sox when they faced Johnny Bench and the Reds.
This particular card told me just about all I needed to know. With dust rising all around him, Johnny Bench is the gunslinger who has just downed one challenger and who is now eyeing the next as if to say, âYou really think thatâs a good idea? Really?â
At times I imagined that heâd just gunned down a runner, and at other times I imagined that heâd just gunned down the whole league, including the Red Sox. At the end of the year, after the Reds again won more than 100 games during the regular season, Bench single-handedly demolished the Yankees in the Redsâ four-game sweep of the 1976 World Series. That was also on NBC, so I didnât learn about it until my brotherâs Sports Illustrated showed up in the mail with Johnny Bench on the cover, launching a home run. The caption asked a questionââHow good are the Reds?ââthat even at age eight I understood was not really a question but a throwing up of the hands: Johnny Benchâs Reds are so good, you canât even explain how good they are.
Benchâs 1976 card stood out even more than the other superstar cards from that year. His gunslinger pose revealed him as a hero from an earlier, simpler time, the last of a dying breed. By then the classic Western, along with the clearly defined model of tough, decisive American maleness that fueled the genre, seemed to be limping its final gut-shot paces. John Wayne was old, and in his wake had come a new version of what it meant to be an American man. A boy growing up in the 1950s could follow the path to maleness
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