That old-school pose

 

There are a lot of baseball card poses that were common on cards when I was collecting as a youngster that have mostly disappeared from cardboard.

 

One of them is the pitcher’s “hands-over-head” wind-up pose. This pose used to appear on dozens of cards every year but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it in a current set. Maybe a one-off here and there.

 

Pitchers mostly have scrapped the long, drawn-out wind-up and did so beginning with the 1970s, or so I’m told. But I just reviewed a small sampling of game footage from the 1970s and here are the pitchers that were using that wind-up in the videos I watched:

 

Bruce Kison, Jerry Garvin, Steve Baker, Vida Blue, Jerry Koosman, Rudy May, Andy Hassler, Bob Knepper, Don Sutton, Dickie Noles, Jim Bibby, Eddie Solomon, Jim Rooker, Mike Cuellar, Don Robinson.

 

Here are the ones who weren’t:

 

J.R. Richard, Jim Merritt, Steve Rogers.

 

So it was still prevalent in the 1970s.

 

Today it’s still used by a handful of pitchers — Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer are two notables. But the over-the-head wind-up has mostly vanished just as it has on baseball cards. I started to wonder when it last appeared on a baseball card. That quickly became tedious, so instead I decided to find which sets had the most hands-over-head poses (some would say this is more tedious, but, ah, they are not me).

 

I started counting. Just the Topps sets. I started with 1952 and I continued all the way through 1996, when it started to become a futile endeavor — or more accurately, a waste of my time. Maybe someday I’ll continue into the present.

 

Here are the top five sets in reverse order for over-the-head wind-up poses. There’s a tie at No. 5:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1960 has a built-in advantage because it has two photos on each card and I counted an OTHWU whether it was in color or black-in-white.

 

 

 

Another set with a built-in advantage.

 

 

 

 

1970 is the king of this pose. But in general, the 1960s was the golden age for over-the-heads — also for debates over whether the ball was really in the glove or not (hint: it mostly was not).

 

After the ’60s, it was a little hit-and-miss through the 1970s. For example, there are just five over-the-heads in 1974 Topps, perhaps due to more emphasis on action that year. 1978 also has relatively few (9), but then it jumps up to 24 in 1979.

 

In the ’80s, there’s just one set with double-figure over-the-head poses — 1983, another set that offers two photos on the front, though the inset photo is almost exclusively head shots. By the 1990s I started coming across sets with zero over-the-head shots, which I hadn’t seen since the 1950s — 1955 also has none.

 

But here is the rundown with minimal words:

 

1952 – 4

1953 – 1 (Johnny Podres)

1954 – 4

1955 – 0

1956 – 1 (Don Newcombe)

1957 – 30

1958 – 14

1959 – 30

 

1960 – 35

1961 – 8

1962 – 17

1963 – 36

1964 – 30

1965 – 38

1966 – 31

1967 – 33

1968 – 31

1969 – 29

 

1970 – 43

1971 – 33

1972 – 29

1973 – 19

1974 – 5

1975 – 10

1976 – 26

1977 – 14

1978 – 9

1979 – 24

 

1980 – 9

1981 – 7

1982 – 2

1983 – 13

1984 – 10

1985 – 8

1986 – 3

1987 – 1 (Bill Mooneyham)

1988 – 4

1989 – 1 (Todd Burns)

 

1990 – 1 (Nolan Ryan, old photo of him on the Mets at card No. 2)

1991 – 5

1992 – 0

1993 – 2

1994 – 3

1995 – 2

1996 – 0

 

Although I would be surprised to see an over-the-head shot in the late 1990s (at the time any posed shot was much more stylized than that), I would not be surprised to see a very modest return in the 2000s — immediately I’m thinking of Hideo Nomo.

 

 

 

There are lots of other common poses on cards from when I was a kid that have all-but disappeared from cardboard. This could be a continuing series — though I’ll see how this one fares first.

 

I may enjoy counting exercises and research. But there also only 24 hours in a day.