Good day everyone!
On
the blog today, revisiting a blog post from March of 2015, taking a
closer look at a great airbrushing job by Topps on the 1978 Elliott
Maddox card.
Here's the original write-up for that post way back when:
"Recently, when I posted an article on the great airbrushing job by
Topps on the 1977 Doyle Alexander card, we started a small conversation
on some OTHER great airbrushing done on cards of the period.
Some one mentioned the 1976 Nelson Briles, which was indeed a great
job (I'll cover that in the future), and someone else mentioned a card I
was already planning on writing about: the 1978 Elliott Maddox card.
Now, first things first: I never realized this was an airbrushing
job until about a month ago! All these years it just looked genuine to
me at a passing glance.
Then I was looking at Maddox's career and saw he never played for the Mets in 1977, but the Orioles.
That's when I took a closer look and realized Topps took a shot of
Maddox when he was with the Yankees, and cleverly airbrushed the TINIEST
end of the "Mets" logo on his jersey, while keeping the Yankees
pinstriping, messing with the hue just a bit to
resemble the Met's pinstriping.
Brilliant!
With the most minimal of airbrushing: in this case that little bit
of the "Mets" script peeking out from behind his arm, this really made
for an authentic looking shot.
I love stuff like this!
As for Maddox the player, he played a solid 11 years in the Major
Leagues, coming up in 1970 with the Tigers before moving on to the
Senators/Rangers, Yankees, Orioles and Mets, for whom he played for the
last three years of his career until 1980.
He finished with a .261 average with 742 hits over 2843 at-bats,
and even finished 8th in MVP voting in 1974, his first season with the
Yankees, after hitting .303 in perhaps his finest year in the Majors.