If you've been following my blog (and if you are, thanks!) you may have noticed that I've been posting some old Phillies cards recently. That's because I've been scanning a lot of those old cards. I'll post some more as I get further into this project.So what is so interesting about these two cards?
Lonborg and Sanders were both involved in a big trade between the Phillies and the Brewers in October 1972. The Brewers sent Lonborg, Sanders and Ken Brett (George's brother) to the Phillies for Don Money, John Vukovich, and Bill Champion.
If you look at these cards you should direct your attention to caps and the shirt collars.
First the hats. Do they look a little unnatural to you. It was (and still is) a common practice to doctor player photos to show them in a different uniform. When Topps was putting this set together, there were no pictures of either player as a Phillie. So they got out the air brush and painted their caps red and faked up a Phillies logo. They left the shirt collars alone however.
Lonborg went on to play for the Phillies for 7 years. Sanders? Don't remember him as a Phillie? Sanders was a Phillie for 30 days. On November 30, 1972, the Phillies traded him to the Twins with Joe Lis and Ken Reynolds for Cesar Tovar.
Lonborg - Phillie
Sanders - Not!
3 comments:
I love those cards in which a player was pictured for a team he never played for.
Lonborg was airbrushed into a cap for a second straight year. In '72 he's airbrushed into a Brewers cap (it's a really poor job of it, too). So who knows when this "Phillies" photo of him was taken.
Also, Lonborg appears to have been standing in front of Tempe Butte when his photo was snapped- suggesting it was taken during spring training of 1972. That was the last year the Brewers trained in Tempe before moving to Sun City.
I was wondering about the background of the Lonborg photo. I was guessing it was spring training but being an East Coast person I always think of spring training as in Florida and it didn't look like Florida.
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