#CardCorner: 1976 Topps Bob Coluccio
“Every once in a while, someone will tell me I’m in the Hall of Fame,” says Bob Coluccio, a Newport Beach, Calif. realtor. “Someday, I’m going to have to see it for myself.”
What he’ll see, on the second floor in one of the Whole New Ballgame display cases, is his 1976 Topps baseball card. He’s there as part of a six-pack of cards of players who had distinctive hairstyles. He’s on the top row along with Bart Johnson (1975 White Sox) and certified Hall of Famer Ted Simmons (1975 Cardinals), and above the row of Oscar Gamble (1976 Yankees), Wayne Garland (1977 Indians) and Al Hrabosky (1977 Cardinals). Nearly as outrageous as Gamble’s Afro is Coluccio’s thick, bushy mustache.
“I’d rather be in Cooperstown for something I did rather than for something I grew,” Coluccio said. “But I have to say, it was a pretty good mustache.”
Actually, Coluccio did do something that put him in the baseball history books and could have been a scene from “The Natural”. A native of Centralia, Wash., he made his major league debut at the age of 21 for the 1973 Milwaukee Brewers. He played in 124 games that year, showing enough pop and speed to inspire announcer Bob Uecker to call him “The Macaroni Pony” – a play on “The Italian Stallion”, a nickname for actor Sylvester Stallone. After games, fans in right field would give the rookie jugs of Italian wine to take home.
His moment in the sun, or rather the moon, came at the start of the 1974 season, April 17 to be exact. Cleveland was in town, and in the second game of the two-game series against the first-place Brewers, Milwaukee had to face a future Hall of Famer, 35-year-old Gaylord Perry. The Indians were leading 2-0 in the bottom of the sixth, and Perry was pitching a no-hitter.
“I was in center field, batting second,” Coluccio recalls. “Gaylord was really dealing when I came up to bat with two outs and a man on first. I singled to right to break up the no-hitter. But the next batter grounded out, and the rally ended.”
With the Indians leading 4-0, the Brewers scored two runs in the bottom of the eighth and tied the game at 4 in the bottom of the ninth when second baseman Pedro García celebrated his 24th birthday with a two-run homer off Perry.
Keep in mind, this was 1974, so pitch counts didn’t matter as much as they do now. Perry went back out in the bottom of the 10th, the bottom of the 11th, the bottom of the 12th… “He could have gone 20 innings that night,” Coluccio said.
Cleveland manager Ken Aspromonte finally took Perry out after 15 innings. Former Brewers reliever Ken Sanders was brought in to face Coluccio, the leadoff hitter in the 16th. By that time – 9:50 p.m., 3 hours and 50 minutes after the game had started – the crowd of 8,733 had thinned out to only yawning die-hards and relatives.
“I was starting to get a little tired myself,” Coluccio said.
Sanders fell behind 3-and-1, and Coluccio drove his next pitch deep to left. Indians left fielder John Lowenstein jumped to try to catch it, but the ball cleared the fence, and The Macaroni Pony took a trot around the bases. Among the players mobbing him that night was the Brewers’ 18-year-old rookie shortstop, Robin Yount.
With one swing of the bat, Coluccio had ruined the outing of one future Hall of Famer and made the night of another. Alas, it was the high point of Coluccio’s short career, but he did get to play with eight Hall of Famers – Yount and Hank Aaron in Milwaukee, Jim Kaat and Rich Gossage with the White Sox, Mike Schmidt and Tony La Russa in the minors and Ted Simmons and Lou Brock in St. Louis.
As for the mustache, that’s long gone. “The morning I shaved it off, I scared my kids.”
The memories are still there, though.
Steve Wulf is a freelance writer living in New York City.
