After a bit of a "soft open" period, I'm going to go ahead and announce that Cards on Cards, for whatever it's worth, is now on the Twitter. You can follow me at @cardsoncards. The account is mostly just autoposting links to my posts here on the blog, which may be useful to some of you, but I will probably find occasion to use it for other things as well. I've finally succumbed and decided to embrace the more useful aspects of the Twitter machine (real-time information, thoughts and musings from my favorite musicians) while rejecting the things I choose to reject (hashtags, being a dick to people for no reason.) I promise to respond to inquiries and trade requests in that platform as much (or more?) than I do to emails, so if you're more comfortable with that sort of thing, go for it.
Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Mike Torrez is an MLB lifer, and also the kind of guy who can spend 18 seasons in the bigs with 7 teams while having nearly zero name recognition whatsoever. That's a special kind of talent. He was a right-handed starting pitcher who won slightly more games than he lost, notching nearly 500 appearances and wearing at least 6 different uniform numbers. His peak season was 1975, when he won 20 games with Baltimore while managing to lead the league in bases on balls.
Why is this a thing? Torrez was involved in transactions with the likes of Ken Singleton, Don Baylor, Reggie Jackson and Dock Ellis, but his move to Boston was by way of a free agent signing. This card is, admittedly, one of the best airbrush jobs from the '70s that I've ever seen. I applaud Mike, and the "artist" involved, for bringing this card to the world.
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 eleven Twitter followers, but you never know!
Believe me, I know who he is.
ReplyDelete