Saturday, March 7, 2015

GENIUS MOVES: THE 1978 ELLIOTT MADDOX "FAUX-BRUSH" MASTERPIECE

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.
Check out the 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.

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER...

@wthballs
Everything baseball: cards, events, history and more.