Today on the blog, a fun look at the 1961 Topps Bill Kunkel card, which was brought up recently by my buddy Thomas (Milwaukee Mauler) because of its crazy colorization:
I absolutely love all the old Topps black and white photo colorizations in the 1950s and 1960s sets, and this is one of them!
The
poor guy, as his first Topps card turns out to be some cartoon-like
image, obviously a black-and-white photo that Topps colored in. Not
airbrushing by any means, but most likely hand-painted to the result you
see here.
A much more successful card that utilized this
technique would be Carl Yastrzemski's rookie card, as well as his 1961
card which was the same image.
On this Kunkel however, it is
funny that while the "artist" went into some detail with the signage in
the background, he kind of took a massive shortcut when it came time to
work on the uniform, leaving it white except for the number "12" just
above the waist.
You gotta love this stuff!!!
As for
Kunkel, he put three years in the Majors, going 3-4 in his 1961 rookie
season with a 5.18 earned run average for the Kansas City Athletics,
followed by a no decision year in 1962 when he appeared in only nine
games for K.C., capped off by a 1963 season that saw him suit up for the
New York Yankees, going 3-2 over 22 games, all in relief, sporting a
very nice 2.72 ERA.
After his playing days were over, he turned in quie a successful career as an official both in the Majors and the NBA/ABA.
While
he only officiated in basketball for three years, he went on to umpire
in the Majors for 17 years, between 1968 and 1984, umpiring a total of
2227 regular season games, including the game in which Harmon Killebrew
hit his 500th home run in 1971, Nolan Ryan's third MLB no-hitter in 1974
and the Oakland A's combined no-hitter on September 28th of 1975, when
four A's hurlers turned in the gem against the California Angels.
Not too shabby a baseball life!
