You know all about Little Joe Morgan, the spark plug who helped pace the Big Red Machine to two World Series titles in 1975 and 1976 with a combination of power, patience, contact ability, speed, and slick defense that you don’t often find outside the walls of Cooperstown.

Little wonder, then, that Morgan copped both National League MVP awards those seasons or that he sailed into the Hall of Fame when his name bubbled up to the ballot for the first time in 1990.

What’s easy to forget, though, is that Morgan was already 33 years old by the time he copped that second set of hardware, getting up there by baseball standards.

The Little General put up a few more All-Star seasons and several above average campaigns before hanging up his spikes in 1984, but he was never really the same as he had been in 1975-76. Neither were the Reds.

But then, who could be, really?

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Morgan’s baseball cards were kind of the same — everybody knows that second 1972 Topps of his, the one with the “TRADED” stamp across the front. It marked the beginning of his tenure on the Riverfront, after all.

And his 1975 and 1976 cards are iconic as his MVP cards, and they’ve been featured in retrospective sets over the years, too (think 1982 Kmart).

His 1977 Topps card was good, too, though not iconic in any real sort of way, other than, you know, picturing Joe Morgan.

His 1977 Topps Cloth Sticker card thing is pretty much just as good, but in a test issue sort of way. And in a fabric sort of way. And an sorta scarce sort of way.

Morgan also appeared (presumably) on the Reds team card (#287) in that 1977 Topps set, and with teammate Johnny Bench on a World Series card (#411).

And, of course, Morgan was a big star, so he appeared in the O-Pee-Chee set in 1977, too, at card #220.

That’s a lot of 1977-Topps-ish cards for one guy, but did you know that Morgan had yet another 1977-Topps-ish card?? Well, he did.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Topps-like cards began appearing in Venezuela, generally matching the base Topps set in design and usually in picture, but falling way short in quality.

(Topps apparently sold their own versions in Central and South America earlier in the 1950s.)

In 1972, the Venezuelan card maker starting throwing in stickers, but only sometimes, from what I can gather. It seems, too, that not all of the runs were really Topps-made or Topps-sanctioned (made by Benco) — some seem to have been outright bootlegs.

Whatever the case, in 1977, as in previous years, Joe Morgan got the Venezuelan treatment, which meant thin paper, frequent miscuts, an orange-yellow banner instead of a green one, brown REDS letters, putrid photo quality, card number typed on the card front, and a blank back.

“Sticker” seemed to be more of a suggestion than a guarantee, too, as most of these babies that actually got stuck to something did so with the help of a bit of glue.

Or lot of glue.

Now, you can drop into the same sort of doldrums looking at just about any Venezuelan Topps-ish card from the entire run, but it seems all the more poignant with the 1977 Joe Morgan.

There he was, the greatest of the great, staring down the imminent decline phase of his career … what could be a more appropriate tableau than this dingy slip of paper?

Heck, Little Joe even looks like he’s closed his eyes in moving from Topps to Topps-ish — maybe he just didn’t want to see what was coming.