One Ugly Cardinal

Baseball Every Night is holding a little contest with ugly baseball cards.  Seemed like a great topic for a blog post, so regardless of contests I sat down and tried to come up with an ugliest card that I could possibly think of in my collection.  My initial thought was to search my boxes of Bowman Draft, which used to be sort of my bad/terrible photos go-to back when I used to do end of the year posts about the best and worst card products.

Little kids could do a better job airbrushing the photos in Bowman Draft than Topps.

While there are many bad cards in those sets, I decided to look for something that was a little older, and possibly connected to either the Cardinals or Durham Bulls.  There were not very many good choices, err bad looking cards, for bad Durham Bulls cards, but I started shuffling through my 1980s Cardinals cards and ran across a card that wishes it was airbrushed as well as a card in a Bowman Draft set.

My ugliest Cardinals card.  I think.

I kept looking for Greg Minton in a Cardinals uniform, this is as close as I got.

This is from the 1984 Topps Traded set. Ken Dayley is a Brave in the regular 1984 set.  I am not sure where the Braves did Spring Training during the 1980s, but this background with the pinkish seats seems to pop up in a lot on their cards from this era.  So, clearly a Braves picture with some beyond terrible photo editing.

It looks like they even airbrushed his face for some reason.  He's pretty tanish/orangish.  

To their credit, Topps was probably using the Paint app on an old Macintosh to change over Dayley's picture on this card.....

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