Nashville Part I: Astros
As I mentioned previously on the blog, we took a trip to Nashville about a month ago to see my brother and his girlfriend. It’s a city that I love for many reasons, and last year when we went to visit I found one more bonus: there’s still a great card shop left in town. You’ll have to do a little hunting, but eventually you can find Cards-R-Fun a little to the south of the city, and it’s boxes on boxes of cards and oddballs and assorted memorabilia.
1976 Topps made up a pretty significant portion of the box as well, so I set about filling the holes I had remaining in my team set. Here are two prominent Astros of the day.
And here they are a year later. Cabell had evidently been shifted across the diamond to make room for Bob Watson. Check out those jerseys with the giant circle on the back. I love these tequila sunrise uniforms.
Another pair of team favorites from the time. I managed to nearly complete the 1976 and 1977 sets, while snagging some duplicates to send off for autographs.
Let’s finish off with a bit of a laugh, eh? Bo here looks like Daniel Stern’s doppelganger – perhaps McLaughlin went on to become a bumbling cat burglar who was outwitted by an 8-year-old. Meanwhile, this horrifically airbrushed 1988 Topps Traded sees Buddy Bell absolutely drowning in a super-saturated blue ocean of a uniform. Our jerseys were never that bright.
All in all, I had another great extended dig that ended far too soon. I managed to check off quite a few more Astros, but I’ll spare you the gory details of the stack of nearly 100 cards that I pulled.
What I will do, however, is come back tomorrow with a post about some of the great non-Astros I pulled from the stacks.
– Bru
