A week or two ago I decided to figure out exactly when baseball cards started calling Hall of Fame relief pitcher Rich Gossage by his nickname "Goose". As a kid collecting cards during the late '70s, Gossage was always "Rich" on his baseball cards even if the broadcasters would often call him by his nickname. Finding the first "Goose" on his cards wasn't difficult. The first time his nickname was mentioned came on the back of one of his cards, 1975 Topps: It's there in the cartoon, complete with a goose toeing the rubber. The first time Gossage's nickname showed up on the front of one of his cards came quite a bit later, and, as I suspected, it wasn't Topps to first display his nickname. It first showed up on 1983 Fleer, which was also Goose's final year with the Yankees. But even after Fleer broke the ice and some of the other card companies, like Score and Upper Deck followed (it wasn't consistent through ...
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