Airbrushed Fridays: 2013 Topps Opening Day #174

In honor of Julio Franco's birthday, here's today's airbrushed atrocity.

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Kendrys Morales is a slugging first baseman/DH type that spent the first 7 years of his professional baseball career having his name misspelled and mispronunced. It seems like a really odd thing to just grin and accept, but I'm a person whose name is so frequently misspelled that I tend to just start spelling it out for people when I get that certain confused look on someone's face. Short an 'S', Morales came up in the Angels system and is perhaps best known for suffering a severe knee injury while celebrating a walkoff grand slam, something that kept him out of action for nearly two years.

Why is this a thing? Offensively starved Seattle came a-calling for Morales's services after he had proved his relative health in 2012. The pitching rich Mariners sent over Jason Vargas in return, and seem to have succeeded in becoming mediocre at both pitching and hitting instead of being polar opposites at each as they were in the past. As is the case with many Topps Opening Day cards in recent years, we get someone's Photoshop handywork on a photo that is not very flattering to begin with.

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 torn ACL, but you never know!