Best of '83 Topps - Pirates

I flipped throught the binder and pointed to a random page to choose the second team. I landed on Pirates. The pirates in this set are kind of boringmost everyone was sort of in the same generic swing or pitch action phot with an Olan Mills headshot for the portrait. There were some good cards, but after a while they all sort of ran together. To break the monotony, I switched things up a bit.

1983 Topps Best Card:

Pittsburgh Pirates

Kent Tekulve Super Vet

I was planning to only do base cards for the "Best Of" but this was too good. Plus it was one of the few Super Vets where the player has been on the same team for his whole career. I pretty much had to choose this card just for the fact that it shows Kent in normal glasses. Which look almost exactly the same as his trademark sunglasses. It's a shame Topps couldn't have lightened up the before photo a bit, that muddy pic s the only thing wrong with the card.

Here's Kent's base card, which is pretty damn good in its own right. Check out that sidearm action! There were some decent players on that '82 Pirates team like Dave Parker, Rick Rhoden and John Candelaria. Hell, Willie stargell was on the team, but Topps inexplicably left him out of the set! Tekulve was a solid reliever for a lot of years so he's worthy of representing the Pirates here. Besides, Night owl thinks this is the best glasses card EVER. He's probably right...

Honorable mention:

Dave Parker
Randy Niemann **P**
John Candelaria