31 March 2010

who's who?

it's not that rare, i don't think, for the wrong person to be featured on a baseball card.  think of the 1969 aurelio rodriguez (a bat boy posed), 1985 topps gary pettis (his younger brother), 1990 donruss john smoltz (tom glavine), 1995 topps traded juan lebron (carlos beltran), etc.  i think it is rarer that the card gets corrected.

case in point.  here's brian holton's 1989 upper deck card, complete with dodger stadium goodness.
here's the original version.
good lord, that's shawn hillegas! in an road uni!  in a generic stadium setting!

how about 1991 topps, which included this (correct) version of jose gonzalez
but don't forget about the error version, which featured bill bean
at least upper deck had two right-handed pitchers whose last names began with 'h'.  gonzalez and bean had completely different uniform numbers and hit from the opposite sides of the plate!  the interesting thing here is that bean didn't appear in the majors for the dodgers in 1990 (he had 71 at bats with them in 1989) so topps was presumably digging in the photo archives for a jose gonzalez shot, even though he appeared in over 100 games for the dodgers in 1990.  curious.

there was another case of mistaken identity in 1991 topps - here's wes chamberlain
and here's louie meadows, the guy topps tried to pass off as wes chamberlain
or is it the other way around?

1 comment:

Jim said...

It's the other way around - Meadows on top, Chamberlain on bottom.

I thought I had struck error card/variation gold when I pulled these cards from packs back in 1991. So naive.