Pat Zachry brings to mind a question I've always had rolling around in my mind.
When you were a kid, did you like or dislike players based on how they looked on their baseball cards?
Zachry is an interesting example of this. My first year being into cards was 1978. On his '78 Topps, Zachry is pretty clean cut.
As a youngster, even though my formative years were ensconced in the rough-hewn 70s, where beards, etc., were commonplace, I tended to gravitate more towards the clean-cut guys. They were less "scary" to this young kid.
So Zachry is clean-cut in '78, but on his '79 Topps, he's fully bearded, though it's in profile. By his '80 Topps card, which appeared in every pack that season, he's got the whole look down pat.
Still, my young self was like, "What the fork? Why did you do this to yourself, Pat Zachry? You look like shirt!"
It wasn't just hair style or beards either. If a player seemed happy on their baseball card, I tended to like them more. The surly ones not so much.
I became a Paul Molitor fan when I got his autograph prior to his ever playing a game in 1978, but I'm not unconvinced that part of the reason I sustained that fandom is that, apart from his being a very good player, he looks cheerful on his '79 Topps card, his first full card of his own. I was probably like, "Yeah, that's my guy. Look how happy he is to be playing baseball."
Very odd, I know, but I probably carried that feeling with me in my early baseball card days about a lot of players.
