I just found out yesterday that the 7-11 store that is partly responsible for me getting back into collecting suddenly shuttered. Very strange. (Also strange is a single 7-11 store having its own Twitter account and Facebook page, but whatever.)
Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Mark Mulder was one of the top lefties in baseball once upon a time, a centerpiece of the dream rotation that Oakland had going along side Barry Zito and Tim Hudson. Why does it feel like this story has a sad ending?
Why is this a thing? First of all, this card is a disaster, much like Mulder's post-Oakland career. Though he had a solid first season after a high stakes trade sent him to St. Louis for a budding Dan Haren and others, his shoulder was a rotten mess and he would never be effective again after 2005. You can find him on Baseball Tonight these days during the season. As for the card, somehow the Photoshop work was so bad that they didn't even bother to remove the A's logo from his cap. The weird red shade is probably some strange blend of what happens when you put red on top of green. If you hold up the card to the light at a certain angle, you see his Cardinals cap logo. If you don't, you get the A's logo. It's very, very strange and I doubt the scan does it much justice.
Airbrushed Fridays is a regular, weekly feature as the name seems to imply. If you know of a card with an altered photograph that you'd like to see featured, please contact me. You probably won't win anything other than a hyperlink and a night on the town with Manti Te'o's girlfriend, but you never know!
It could be even worse; I once saw (maybe even on this blog) an airbrushed card of his featuring him in his Oakland #20, which of course has been retired for a little while in St. Louis.
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