Airbrushed Fridays: 1971 Topps #286

The Cardinals wore their navy blue road caps last night for the first time this season. After 21 consecutive years of having the navy blue road caps (which themselves were a return to the '60s look), the team announced that they were going to go with the familiar red cap on the road again. Then, they backed off of that statement and claimed they would keep the navys around and wear them in road games against teams that wore red caps. If that wasn't confusing enough, just a few days before the season started the team conducted a fan poll, which suspiciously skewed towards an "all red" look despite all sorts of evidence that votes were leaning against that. So here it is, nearly three weeks into the season, with no official announcement from the team... well, who knows what's going on?

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? I have to feel that Jerry McNertney was tormented a bit as a kid. Why? His name just screams Nerdy McNerderson. He also looks like a cartoon character. To which I'm sure Jerry would say, "I played Major League Baseball and you did nothing of the sort." McNertney was a journeyman multi-positional player who spent nine seasons with five clubs and is one of the few who has donned a Seattle Pilots jersey.

Why is this a thing? McNertney was traded by the fledgling Pilots-turned-Brewers franchise in the offseason following the Brewers inaugural year. He is wearing a logoless blue batting helmet (Brewers? Pilots?), which is nothing resembling what the Cardinals employed back in 1971.

Airbrushed Fridays is a 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 some dried up old Sharpies, but you never know!