In the past few months I have come to really appreciate how bizarre and awful (but in kind of an interesting way) the photography on Calbee cards from the 80s are. I was flipping through my 1987 nearing-complete set the other day and noticed this card of Komatsu, who played for the Dragons. This card must hold the record for the closest close-up photo of a player on a baseball card.
I mean, this takes it to ridiculous levels - they even cropped his entire chin out of the photo! Most of his ears and hat are gone too.
I wonder why they chose this photo. My guess is it was the only even remotely usable photo they had of him, but there may have been something they needed to crop out of the photo (maybe some 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken type shenanigans, if I dare speculate?). But for some reason in cropping it they found the only way to get the offending material completely out was to also take almost all of him out of the photo with it.
It actually looks kind a modern day selfie taken with a cell phone camera. And there are good reasons why we don`t use selfies on baseball cards, as I`m sure we all know.
No comments:
Post a Comment