Airbrushed Fridays: 1985 Topps #577

Baseball is a funny sport. The "boys of summer" play out nearly half their season in the spring and play its most crucial games in the fall. Spring training mostly happens in the winter. We're only two weeks away from Winter Training games... can you believe it?

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Chris Speier had a long, successful run as a major leaguer, completing 19 seasons where he primarily played SS. He was a high draft choice, selected second overall in something called the secondary January draft. (I don't know what that means, either.) He's also the father of former reliever Justin Speier.

Why is this a thing? Speier was actually a Cardinal for much of the 1984 season, though I have no memory or photographic evidence of this (time to Google away!). The Redbirds traded him late in the season to the Twins in exchange for a Player To Be Named Later, which turned out to be Jay Pettibone. Pettibone never played for the Cardinals or anyone else after that trade. Apparently just a few dozen plate appearances were not enough to capture Speier in a Twin Cities cap, so the rush to airbrush was on.

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 some empty yellowing top loaders from the early '90s, but you never know!

Up For Grabs: Bench and Fingers

The next two players up for grabs in my attempt to downsize didn't occupy more than a page apiece, so I thought I'd put them both on offer in the same post. As always, the list of cards available follows at the end of the post.

Johnny Bench was little more than a TV star by the time I was aware of him. He was the star of The Baseball Bunch when I was a kid, which would probably be amazing to watch today. I should hit up YouTube on my next free rainy afternoon.

(You can have this weird 1981 Donruss card that it looks like someone wrote on! Awesome...?)

Rollie Fingers was in my binder because... well... let's face it. It's the 'stache. It was always the 'stache.

Even Goose Gossage went sans facial hair on this League Leaders card because he knew that anything he put on his face would be shamed in comparison to Rollie.

The list:

Johnny Bench
1981 Donruss #62 [2 available]
1981 Fleer #196
1987 K-Mart #12
1990 Topps (Turn Back the Clock) #664 [2 available]
2010 Topps (Reds Franchise Leaders w/ Tony Perez) #415

Rollie Fingers
1979 Topps (Leading Fireman w/ Rich Gossage) #8 [2 available]
1981 Donruss #2
1982 Fleer #141
1982 Fleer (Most Saves 1981 A.L.) #644
1985 Topps #750
1986 Donruss #229

ATBATT Trade

Last month, I splurged and bought a couple of cheap Topps Archives blasters. Stealing Home from All Trade Bait All The Time was one of the first to respond with a request for some of the inserts, and I was happy to oblige and receive some cards in return.

I snagged a few more Matt Holliday cards, which should come as no surprise to anyone following the blog. He's on both Erin and my hit lists, so he's occasionally needed in triplicate around here. Someday I'm probably going to need a separate room for these stupid cards that I have.

One thing that I really miss about the Topps Gold parallels is the little "XX YEARS OF COLLECTING" stamp on each card. They dropped it last year when they dumped all of the goldies into Topps Update, and it apparently continues to be absent in this year's set. Combine it with the shoddy serial numbering that they use now, and these cards just don't feel as special as they did in 2008.

Oh, hi, Braden Looper! Milwaukee misses you.

A New Want List + Hits to Trade

I've added another set to the unfortunately growing list of things I'm chasing. I've been squirreling away a few 2006 Bowman Heritage cards over the past couple of years and finally found an opportunity to buy a bunch of packs at an affordable price. This inspired me to put together a want list, which should be live before I go to sleep tonight. In 11 hobby packs (at $1 each!), I managed to snag three hits, and they were all pretty nice.

Before I get into that, however, I wanted to address today's big Cardinals news - that Chris Carpenter is probably done as a major league pitcher. That's not shocking or anything, but I think most fans like we were hopeful that he might be back for one last hurrah after the man went and got a rib removed (!) last year just so he could pitch again. Wow. Unfortunately, it looks like the nerve issues that were causing all the problems are still lingering, and the team announced that they don't expect him to pitch this season. Ouch. Carp went from being a relatively obscure comeback story to pitching dominance to the kind of player that every fan of every team he doesn't play for completely hates. But that's okay with me, and there's no way the Cardinals win either of their recent World Series rings without him. He may never be a Hall of Famer, but he's a Cardinal Hall of Famer - a Willie McGee, if you will.

On to the hits! This is an on-card Alex Gordon autograph. While Keith Olbermann was buying up all of the so-called mistakenly printed Gordon cards in the Topps base set, the Bowman arm cranked out a much nicer card that any Gordon fan would love to own. I almost don't want to get rid of it and I couldn't care less about the Royals.

It's Ryan Howard! And a pinstripe! Usually when I pull jersey cards out of a 7 year old pack, it ends up being Morgan Ensberg.

Gary Sheffield and a chunk of his bat? This is numbered 04/49. Maybe it was the batboy's bat. Maybe the bat came from Sports Authority. Who knows?

There were other Cardinals (not for trade!) in the packs that I opened, and one of them was a mini Juan Encarnacion.

Adam Ottavino had a cup of coffee with the Cardinals but never panned out as a prospect. He resurfaced last year as a league-average reliever with the Rockies.

Brad Furnish didn't fare so well.

Pictures of Men (That I Need)

I need men, apparently. If you've ever tried to do a Google search for Pictures of Men, the Blue Jays-centric blog with the hilarious name, you've no doubt encountered an array of photos of well-groomed men. And I don't know what my point is, really, except that I find it amusing. In any case, I got my very own stack of manpics from up north (and back east) and I thought I'd share a few with you.

Dennis hit up a few of my Topps Heritage needs. 2011's Then and Now look might be favorite version of this annual insert set.

This Eric Hurley short print from the 2008 High Numbers set is reminding me how long ago it was when I started collecting this set. The 1959 is probably my favorite design, but it's amazing that I am still so far away from completing this set. I am still missing plain old base cards from this set, people!

My blog has its own Google search ambiguity issues, but it is a place where Cardinals are celebrated and Dennis provided some more great Cardinal stuff. This Stan the Man is a mini version of an already short printed card.

Mike Tyson is going to make an appearance on the next new episode Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which has outraged advocates for victims everywhere. (Seeing as how the show is ostensibly about a sex crimes police unit and Tyson has quite a sordid past that delves into that area, well....) Oh, wait, wrong Mike Tyson!

Finally, here's a couple of goldies, which I always enjoy. Jake Westbrook had a fantastic 2012 season, but many remain skeptical that he'll be able to repeat his success in 2013. There are plenty of talented young arms that seem to be ready for big time duty, but I think St. Louis will still need some steady veteran innings with Kyle Lohse gone and other members of the rotation dealing with various ailments.

Finally, it's our old bald friend, Matt Holliday. I'm not sure if he'd make the cut in a photo array, but he's a hell of a baseball player.

This One Time, Upper Deck Got It Exactly Right

I picked up a few 1997 Upper Deck cards for free on Listia (for the Edmonds, of course) and was struck by something. Sure, the design is fairly uninteresting, but they did something amazing with every card that I wish every set could manage.

Can you guess what it is? They captioned every photo! How difficult would that be? Especially in this day and age, where it seems that Topps uses plenty of popular AP and Getty Images photos, you would think it would be super easy to tell us when a photo was taken. Upper Deck took it a step further by giving us a little  brief factoid about each.

This one is less descriptive, but it's better than what we usually get. Of course, it could have been taken at any time, and there's obviously room for fabrication to happen here.

I love what this set was doing, though. It's probably not enough for me to ever want to collect the set, but if a card company wants to do something truly innovative... well, it's already been done. But please, feel free to do it again!

Airbrushed Fridays: 2012 Topps #413

Since this is officially 2013 Topps Week, it would have been appropriate for me to post one of the cards from the new set here. I guess you'll have to wait on that. Has anyone seen any ridiculously Photoshopped cards yet? Let me know in the comments.

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Frank Francisco is a Dominican-born right-handed reliever who has spent most of his career as a setup guy and part-time closer. He's never been particularly amazing, but he's had his moment and won't usually make a team worse. According to Fangraphs, he's amassed 5.7 WAR in his career. That's not great, but it's serviceable.

Why is this a thing? Francisco spent most of his career with Texas, but after a one year stint with Toronto, the Mets gave him his first big payday to the tune of a 2 year/12 million dollar deal. Topps seems to produce Series 2 cards at the same time as Series 1, just holding them back for purely financial reasons, so Francisco probably hadn't taken the field with his new team while this card was developed.

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 bunch of expired 2012 Topps Golden Giveaway codes, but you never know!