definitely my new favorite metaphor

Rico, very interesting stuff, thank you too.

An excellent game of ball was played here yesterday between the Cedarville and Port Norris clubs, the latter winning the game. The playing was good on both sides, some of the plays being equal to professional. The battery for Cedarville was Stathem and Ewan, while the Port Norris had McConnell and Bailey, whose excellent work was much admired. The game was played with two umpires. Asher Robbins being the principal and Harry Pierson being umpire in the field, and both gave satisfaction. The score by innings was:
Cedarville………1 0 0 3 1 0 0 0 0 - 5
Port Norris………2 1 0 0 3 2 2 0 x – 10

Guys, importantly, Milbourne was born in 1951 in Port Norris NJ,coming out of its two towns Bivalve and Shell Pile. In the Port Norris area are the towns of Bivalve and Shell Pile. They were both centers of the oystering industry, described in this 1939 excerpt of a WPA Guidebook to New Jersey:
"Shell Pile is named for the great heaps of oyster shells stacked outside the packing sheds. This is a community of about 1,000 Negroes living in wooden barracks erected on stilts over the salt marshes. Negroes here live their own lives in their own way, and present a united and rather hostile front from the rest of the world. Strange whites are not welcomed in Shell Pile."

Hence the badass look on the 75 card.

The oystering industry reached its peak in 1955, declining by 1957 due to a disease called MSX which killed 90 percent of the oysters. Bivalve and Shell Pile are now mostly ghost towns, with a combined population of less than 50.

So Larry was 6 when his family's way of life disintegrated, the irritating grain of sand that may have grown into the pearl of his baseball career.

There to this day, at the very outer limits of the New Jersey sub-continent, stands the mother of all shell piles. A gleaming white mountain, at least four stories in height, covering several acres. The mounds are quite breathtaking and a full robust stench of rancid clams is pervasive (even in the dead of winter).

Two other LM notes:

1. In 1979 he led the AL with 12 pinch hits (in 30 at-bats) in his only successful season in that role.

2. Born on Valentine's Day and nicknamed "The Devil" for his smooth ways

3. He excelled in the 1981 postseason for the Yankees, playing every game in place of the injured Bucky Dent at shortstop. Milbourne hit .316 with four runs scored in the five-game divisional playoff against Milwaukee. In the LCS against the A's, he scored the first run of the series in Game One and tied Game Two with a fourth-inning RBI single, batting .462 with four runs as New York swept in three. He dropped off to .250 in the World Series as the Yankees lost to Los Angeles, but he drove in the first run of New York's Game Two victory with the only extra-base hit of the game, a fifth-inning double.

4. A bivalve is an aquatic mollusk of the class Pelecypoda ( "hatchet-foot" ), with a laterally compressed body and a shell consisting of two valves, or movable pieces, hinged by an elastic "yommy John" ligament.

5. Most of the oysters eaten by Americans start their journey to the gullet in the Gulf of Mexico. But with the Gulf now awash in oil, the supply is down, prices are up, restaurants are going oyster-less, and there appears to be no quick fix to the crisis.

I had heard of Larry Milbourne from the time I was 9 because of this very card. I pulled it out of a pack on a hot summer day in July while on vacation in a small town in southwestern New York. I remember thinking: "what a strange-looking man."

No matter what Larry Milbourne did after that, whether with Seattle or the Yankees, he was always that strange-looking man with the rookie cup on that 1975 card.

And, yes, the '75 set rules fully and completely, as anyone who would start a blog about the set would say.

Unfortunately, I never liked the '75 set. The colors were loud and seemed to be thrown on the card at random. It would have helped had all the Astros, for instance, had the same colors, something to match their uniform colors. A logo would have been nice. This set was just too psychedelic for my taste. But that's just my opinion.