here is a 1974 jerry morales card. i ask the question, is it topps or o-pee-chee?
this is the third time i've posted this question (here's the first and second) and it's still somewhat of a shameless plug for my side project. anyway, the answer is, both. the topps and o-pee-chee versions of this card are the same - jerry morales in a padres uniform with the cubs affiliation. the reason can be found on the card back. here's the topps back:
jerry was 'traded to chicago cubs, 11-12-73'. this actually was not too strange for topps, although they did it a lot more in the 60's, with and without cropping to minimize the amount of the players' old uniform showing. of course, airbrushing was far more prevalent in the 70's, but for whatever reason, they left jerry morales alone in his brown and yellow padres garb.
it would be nice to know how topps decided whether to airbrush or do the jerry morales treatment, or just go the text route like the 1988 dickie noles card linked above or the 1985 davey lopes, or worse yet do nothing at all. 6 years later, topps would choose that route for ralph garr, even though he actually played for his new club at the end of the 1979 season. go figure.
1 comment:
The Morales card was very unusual for that era. It was the first card I can remember where that was done. The player the Cubs sent to San Diego, Glenn Beckert, had his card done the same way, showing Beckert in a Cubs uniform. In fact, the first Beckert card was the Washington variation. When Topps corrected the card to San Diego, they kept the same picture of him in his Cubbie blues.
One other oddity about the Morales card: The border around the picture on all of the Cubs cards was blue. But when they switched Morales' card from the Padres to the Cubs, they didn't change the color of the border. It is still yellow, the color used on the Padres cards. I don't believe that error was ever corrected, either.
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