# 26 Bob Priddy and the STRANGE '67 Topps San Francisco Giants Card Design

 For some reason, the San Francisco Giants card design made no sense to me growing up. As simple and classic as the card design is for this set. The Giants cards are still strange. I mean, why green lettering for a team with black and orange colors? It's not that the other team colors correspond with the Topps choice of letting colors but these cards looked odd to me. Especially when I first saw these cards in 1987. The reason of this is probably because the 1987 Topps set did the opposite of the '67 set and that's the first modern set I ever saw.

The Will Clark card above is from the '87 Set. The player lettering may have alternated between black and white lettering but the borders correspond with the team's dominate color.

The card which made the color distinction for the 1967 Topps Giants card is most evident to me with this Bob Priddy card. That and Priddy has a mildly distressed
Gene Hackman face.

Bob Priddy was a journeyman of a Major League pitcher. He played for 6 different major league teams in 9 years. The Giants was his second team and while he is featured as a Giant on this '67 card he was already off to the American League pitching for the hard luck Washington Senators. I'll go into more detail about the state of the replacement Washington club (the original became the Twins earlier in the decade) later.

Priddy did a little of everything before 1969. He started a handful of games and did a fiar amount of relieving during that period as well. He seemed to be an emergency starter who stepped into the breach for the White Sox in 1968 and admittedly received little success. His era in '68 was a then very high 3 and half. That's the same year Bob Gibson and Denny McLain had ERA's under 2. Gibson was down near just 1.  It didn't help Priddy that he was on the White Sox which had a lousy offense.

Priddy's effectiveness in the Majors diminished starting in '69 with the Angels. He finished his career with the Braves in 1971. He didn't make much of a dent mostly because he didn't play a major role on the few winning teams he played for. He started out as a major prospect and that's what landed him on more than a few Topps cards. He got a '64,'65, '66,'67,'68,'69,'70 and '71 Topps card. Topps banked on him big time as being a mainstay.