What was Topps thinking?

When Peter, from Baseball Every Night, announced his Ugly Sweater contest, one card immediately came to mind, but it wasn't a baseball card, and not knowing if would be acceptable or not, I held off my entry and set forth to try and find an "ugly" baseball card.

After trying, and failing, to find an appropriate card -- as well as seeing Billy use a non-baseball card for his entry -- I am just going to go ahead and use the card that I originally thought of:

Vintage baseball collectors often bemoan Topps' use of airbrushed caps, a complaint which is warranted to a certain degree, but in the grand scheme of things, it's nowhere near as bad as an airbrushed face!

I had thought for the longest time that my copy of Ticky Burden's 1976-77 Topps card had been arted up by some kid in a previous decade, imagine my surprise when I eventually got a second copy and found that it was identical to my original card.

As you can see, there was nothing wrong with Luther Burden's appearance, so one can only wonder why Topps did what they did to his card -- which by the way, was the only card that was ever produced of him.

Mr. Burden passed away a few years ago, so there's no way to ask him how he felt about it, but I can imagine that he was too keen on it... and to think of all the times that he had to have been asked to sign that monstrosity!

The '76-77 set is full of wonderful images, some of the best from that decade in fact, which makes the atrociousness of Ticky's card even more perplexing.

And for the record, there was one more "what was Topps thinking?" card in this set:

Part of me has always thought that Topps attempted to colorize b/w photos for both Dave and Ticky, why I don't know, especially once you see the final results.While Topps' attempt to turn Dave into a ghoul was bad, he would at least have a few more normal cards produced in the proceeding years, it's too bad that the same couldn't be said for Ticky.


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