Favorite Cards: Seattle Pilots

1970 Topps #158 - Jerry McNertney

Sure, my favorite team is and always will be the White Sox. I can't foresee anything changing that. However, that doesn't mean that I'm not a fan of other teams or baseball in general. I can pick something out for every team that I like. It might be a player or a card or a feat. Well, you get the idea.

I'm a sucker for the oddities of baseball. Perhaps the oddest team in recent memory would be the Seattle Pilots, which are now the Milwaukee Brewers.

When I was absorbing information like a sponge as a kid, I was drawn to the Pilots, after receiving a 1970 card of a player in some baseball repack set that I chose from some rewards program. It was a huge catalog of items that I had access to by working for the Penny Saver newspaper.

I wondered if the Mariners were known as a different name. That quickly was discovered to be false. I learned that after one season, the Pilots were relocated to Milwaukee. I always wondered how that was possible in the twentieth century. I understood why teams started up, folded and moved in the nineteenth century, but I couldn't fathom why one would do that less than a decade before I was born.

I have a handful of Pilots cards, but I do not own this one. It is my favorite Pilots card, not because the player is an ex-White Sox player, but because of the composition of the photograph. It almost looks like someone caught Jerry in a compromising position. It seems to be a unique perspective, behind a batting cage and what looks to be a manager or a coach.

I do remember seeing this as a kid, possibly in the card shop called Family Coins, where they had binders of each set. It may have been priced a little higher because of the White Sox connection, which would explain why I did not get it. The oldest card I could afford was a 1974 Topps Luis Aparicio from that shop.

I can still remember being captured by the image on this card. It's still with me after all these years and it's what immediately comes to mind when I think of the Seattle Pilots.