Clemente's back hurt before the 1957 season began, and it went on hurting. He missed the first two games, played 111 in all, and finished at .253, the lowest full-season average of his career. The back trouble followed him into the winter. It was the year people in Pittsburgh began to wonder whether he would hold up, and the year the cardboard started calling him by a name he did not use.
The card is a straightforward photograph, which in 1957 was the news. This was the first Topps set printed entirely from color photographs, with no painting on any front, and the first at 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches, the size every Topps card has kept since. There are 407 of them. Clemente's is a close portrait under the Pirates cap, a dark ballpark behind him, with a narrow white border all the way around.
At the bottom the name is printed in two colors: BOB, and then Clemente. Turn the card over and the reverse gives him as ROBERTO W. CLEMENTE. The front followed the sportswriters, who had decided that Bob and Bobby would sound more familiar to their readers; the back followed the paperwork. He corrected reporters about it for years. Topps kept printing Bob on the front through 1969.
The front says BOB. The back says ROBERTO W. CLEMENTE. The back was right.
Number 76 sits in the first of the set's five series, numbers 1 through 88, the part of the checklist that was printed first and in the largest quantity. The scarce stretch of 1957 is the fourth series, well away from him. What makes a sharp copy hard is the design itself: a dark photograph and a thin white margin, so centering drift shows immediately and any corner touch reads as a white flaw against the picture.
It is an honest card of an uncertain year. He would not hit .300 again until 1960, and he would not be called by his name on a Topps front until 1970.
