Friday, August 31, 2012

Airbrushed Fridays: 1974 Topps Traded #616T


This is the time of year where my college football fandom begins to interfere with my baseball thing. It's easy to switch over to the handegg when your team is playing out the string and experimenting with young players to see what sticks. The Cardinals are teetering on the verge of collapse, especially with the news that Rafael Furcal may need Tommy John surgery, but what else is new? This team seems like a sinking ship at this point, but last season's sinking ship had to rid itself of nearly all of its passengers before they patched up the leaks and made it to its final destination at the last possible moment.

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Larry Gura was a lefty hurler, a prominent piece of the Kansas City Royals rotation from the mid '70s to the mid '80s. He was an All-Star in 1980. For some reason, I was completely oblivious to his existence until now and I even followed the American League a lot in the '80s.


Why does this card exist? Before Gura found his footing as a Royal, he came up as a Chicago Cub. The Cubbies dealt him to to Texas for Duke Sims. The Rangers actually stashed Gura in the Pacific Coast League for his only 7 appearances for their franchise, making this a bona fide member of the Zero Year Club.

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 broken CD jewel cases, but you never know!

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