here's to a classic

tomorrow is the annual midsummer classic, which used to be such a highlight of the baseball season for me. these days, i am more likely to miss the event or maybe watch the first couple of innings than i am to pay close attention.

one thing i have been paying attention to for the past two years is my saved ebay search for "2005 palmer box scores". you might recall that around the 2024 all-star game i posted about this card and mentioned that i was on the hunt for the card that celebrated the 1977 game. well, about a month ago, there was finally a legitimate hit on that saved search, and now i can rest easy!

2005 upper deck all-star classics jim palmer box scores (1977 all-star game)

i wanted this card, not because i remember the game like i do the 1979 contest that was the subject of the post linked above, but rather because it features the players whose 1978 cards i studied thanks to the presence of the all-star shield. the card does not differentiate the starters from the subs, but you can pick them out by position pretty easily.

for the national league, there was joe morgan, steve garvey, dave parker, george foster, greg luzinski, ron cey, johnny bench, and don sutton. in the american league, it was rod carew, willie randolph (who played the whole game), george brett, carl yastrzemski, richie zisk, reggie jackson, carlton fisk, rick burleson, and jim palmer. of those players, only zisk was denied the all-star shield, presumably because he changed teams in the offseason and topps forgot that they didn't care about that in the 1975 set with bobby murcer.

had the american league won the game, zisk had a good shot at mvp, too. it took me a while as a young fan to figure out who the missing all-star was from my 1978 topps set, as there were no resources like there are today. i think i found out from one of the annual baseball handbooks that i used to read cover-to-cover, but i might have heard it from an older fan instead. another item of note is that pete rose wasn't licensed for use on cards, so he is listed as "reds no. 14". 

the back of the card shows the line score, along with a writeup

seeing that, it would have made more sense for don sutton to be featured on the card. sure, palmer was the american league starter (1 of 3 such starts he made as the back tells us), but if the card were about the actual game, sutton (who was voted the game's mvp) should have been featured.

unfortunately, it's not sutton shown, and even though steve garvey is named on the card (and hit one of the three home runs off of palmer), this card goes in my "meaningful and just because" mini-collection instead of the dodger or garvey collection. i am glad to finally have this card that shows how those all-star shields were earned, even if topps didn't distribute all 18 of them.