Sorry, Ump, this might hurt a little

So the other day I was happily ripping some 2017 Series Two. Why was I ripping packs of 1.5 year old baseball cards? Too much time away from home, sigh.

It was a very enjoyable rip; it is fairly rare that I feel like I have sufficient financial liquidity to splurge on an actual Hobby Box of baseball cards, but I did that summer. Then I probably promptly disappeared back into living and working in a county without any stoplights. I like those, although they don't usually have baseball cards. Maybe this year I will luck into being in and around such country but still be within striking distance of a Walgreens, we'll see...

I did set aside some fun cards to share with you. But I also found a card that ties in with a subject I have written about a few times on this blog, including just recently: what is going on with the Umpires on the baseball cards?

This is a fun card all the way around. I hear it saying "Everybody Watch Now" before a music bed kicks off where other people hear "Everybody Dance Now." I vaguely remembered it from 2017 Opening Day, but when Opening Day is appearing in my grocery bags, I am generally working all 8 days a week, till dark:30, usually.

I first considered Umpires on cards after receiving a great 1992 Topps card sadly demoted to packing material.

That post in turn helpfully lead to an even more revealing post on Night Owl's blog, a full decade ago. I definitely recommend checking out that one. 

Now you have probably noticed the feature I noticed on this nice Hanley Ramirez card. I have been looking forward to scanning it - Topps can't hide much from a high resolution digital scanner. First, I wanted to see the Catcher:

Though I thought a scanner could figure it out, that is either Russell Martin, or Josh Thole, I can't conclude a positive ID here. But I can confirm it is a regular human being baseball player.

Here is the Umpire standing next to him:

Have you always thought certain Umpires were so terrible as to be not quite human? Maybe here is your proof, complete with a poorly done paste of the original image now with a bonus not-matching halo, though that is difficult to discern, in-hand. Until you see it, and then you can't un-see it.

This card does definitively answer something I was trying to figure out on a 2018 Update card just recently - was the Umpire deliberately blurred when Topps created the card? Ironically, on the card in that post, I couldn't decide for sure - but I could still figure out which actual Umpire it was, even before I just asked Getty Images to spill the beans for me.

Doing that for this card quickly leads to this image:

BOSTON, MA - OCTOBER 2: Hanley Ramirez #13 of the Boston Red Sox watches his solo home run during the seventh inning against the Toronto Blue Jays at Fenway Park on October 2, 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Rich Gagnon/Getty Images)

I'm not going to get into cutting out a blow-up of the Umpire's face from the Gagnon photograph; I don't have a license to do anything at all with photographs and the Internet.

But clearly, finally, to me, Topps doesn't have one for displaying the Umpires on the cards, either.

And that is too bad, really. I am not sure how much the Umpire Union wants to extort from Topps in case one of their faces appears on a baseball card, but the whole question just seems so, so - pointless? Petty?

Now I know Topps and Michael Eisner and Rob Manfred and Tony Clark and the head of the Ump Union, whoever that is, routinely hang on my every word here, every day, so I hope they will take my simple suggestion to heart - how about if Topps makes a small donation every year to the Retired Umpire fund, or the Minor League Umpire Emergency Tragedy Fund?

And then we could have a few more epic baseball cards in every set, when the photographer just happened to also catch an Umpire's face - and without Topps having to go to this extra effort to make sure they don't accidentally let us identify one of the ever mysterious Umpires that are so critical for us to enjoy a baseball game now and again.

Because otherwise, I have to wonder how often Topps just passes on photos that require this extra compositional effort, or simply isolate a player's torso from an otherwise interesting action shot, rather than do this silly looking Umpire erasing trick?

I did find another amusing Umpire card in 2017 Series Two, that required no extra effort from Topps, which just luckily obscures the Ump's face.

It also includes what looks to be a mysterious lurker visitor from the Boston Red Sox, perhaps, in the Oakland A's dug-out, who is blowing a bubble. But you just might have to blow this one up on a scanner, yourself...

and then I found an Umpire on a 2018 Baseball Card

You don't see cards like this very often, any more. Oh, sure, we all love a Play @ The Plate card. And with each passing year, it seems like we get a few more, and they get better and better. I mean, could Stadium Club even be printed these days, without several such cards? Not that there is anything wrong with that!

And this is a really good card, which proves to be from Taylor Davis' actual first MLB start behind the plate on Sept. 14, 2017. A First Start Rookie Card. That's Jose Reyes coming in to score on a Double by Brandom Nimmo as Asdrubal Cabrera, the on-deck batter, gives some sort of heads-up sign about what's going on with the defense, probably a throw coming in to the Catcher, imminently. Which, unfortunately for the ultimate charm of this Rookie Card, Davis proceeds to drop, as Reyes remains Safe and Nimmo advances to 3rd.

In the 4th inning, veteran Alex Avila trotted out to replace Davis, an easy call for Maddon to make in a September game with 3 Catchers on his roster and the divisional standings to consider. As I write, there is very little chatter on the MLB blogs about Davis' future; he had only 5 At Bats in 2018, all in September as this card was being printed, and the entire business of Baseball doesn't much care for MLB debuts at 28 years old. His road to The Show started with being signed while playing in the independent Cape Cod League - you don't see players like that very often, any more.

His tiny footnote in Baseball history will also include a minor 'viral' video made in the minor leagues while with the Cubs AAA affiliate in Iowa, which is not that super exciting but probably didn't hurt the process of making the Topps RC checklist, either, when he had only 8 games and 13 AB (his 2017 totals) in MLB at the time final 2018 Update checklist cuts were made this year. Unless he once again gets The Call to Chicago as a 30 year old back-up Catcher with very little MLB experience, in the 2019 season, there is a very good chance this card will be a One-and-Done. At least for the S1+S2+Update Topps Set, as he was also on a 3-player Rookie Card in Heritage this year, and 21st Century 1&Done cards might need a fair bit of special rules to delineate.

And though all of that was basically interesting for me to figure out starting with just a baseball card of a player I have never heard of, and might also never hear of, ever again, none of that is why I am posting this card, as you already know from the title up there.

This post is because of this guy on the card:

Who I am quite sure is (in) famous Umpire Joe West, who has been an MLB Umpire for almost as long as I have loved baseball cards, and that's a pretty long time. He is 2nd All-Time in games "Umped", through 40 still Active seasons. I barely ever see MLB on the TV and I still know his face.

I wouldn't be totally surprised if Joe West has appeared on a baseball card before this one, though I mean that in the 'Cameo' sense, as here. He does have his own card in a couple oddball sets, and also in 2004 Bowman Heritage, the return of the TV Set, which included Umpires in the original 1955 edition. I don't own any of those cards, and have no plans to pick one up; you will have to click on over to see them somewhere on your own time. I like Umpires strictly as occasional cameos on my live action baseball cards, and have no wish to collect trading cards for them.

Finding any such cameos of any specific Ump would be a bit of random luck, and would be exceptionally unlikely in the 21st century and especially again in the 2010s, when Umpires have all but virtually disappeared from baseball cards.

Now a question is - Why?

It is speculated at times that Topps blurs out parts of the cards now, on purpose. Maybe they are afraid of making an individual fan completely recognizable, maybe they don't have a special side contract with the Managers, maybe they don't have a special side contract with the Umpires. Hold those theories, while we re-visit this Taylor Davis 2018 Topps Update #US229 RC

But I am not so sure those ideas are correct. I don't know what year the source photos that Topps uses switched from 20th century 'analog' to 21st century 'digital', but I think as time has passed both the photographer and also possibly the Topps baseball card constructor have a great deal of control over which parts of an image are in the most focus.

On this card, the Umpire's face is quite blurry, and he is not all that far from the well focused portion of the image, Taylor Davis's face inside his Catcher's mask. But Asdrubal Cabrera just beyond Home Plate is also fairly blurry, too. Did you know that was 12 year MLB veteran A. Cabrera in that picture, after his probably semi-regular semi-annual appearances in all your stacks of baseball cards? I didn't. I had to use the wonderful cheat sheet tools available on Baseball Reference to sort it out, using his Uniform #.

Topps can print images of Asdrubal Cabrera whenever and however it wants, on any card. The unfocused portion of this card does not totally seem deliberate to me, yet.

Nevertheless, that could still be true for Cowboy Joe's face there.

I have been leaning away from that theory, of Topps deliberately adding blurriness to get around extra contract hassles. There is also a chance that all those confusing blurs on cards these days is simply a side effect of how the source photo is made. Even if I had the free time to do it, I know I will never learn the intricacies of creating high quality photographs; I am strictly a pointer&shooter. My first digital camera, purchased well before my 'phone' included one, had a robust instruction manual that was a just about guaranteed sleep aid whenever I tried to absorb it.

So perhaps the original photographer (who turns out to be Jon Durr, with Getty Images) made his lenses spin just so, until he could see the whites of Taylor's eyes just exactly perfectly, and Click!

Or perhaps not.

In this closer-to-the-original digital image, Joe West is much easier to identify. Though I still doubt anyone not really, really well acquainted with 2017 New York Mets uniform #s and/or likely batting orders could have correctly ID'd Asdrubal Cabrera back there near the wall.

However -- Topps chose to crop this card down some, giving it their best shot to make it possible for us to recognize brand new Cubs back-up Catcher Taylor Davis, while also giving us a dramatic action Play @ The Plate baseball card.

Yet I am left with a continuing wonder if perhaps that cropping process inside Topps HQ, done to the digital image well after it was first recorded on an ultra high-end sports photographer's camera, might inevitably reduce the resolution on the other parts of the image that Topps doesn't really need, anyway. When after all what they do need is the visage of an MLB player for their own individual baseball card, not other players, fans, or an Umpire.

Here is another wrench in the zoom crops - reconsider the Rajai Davis card I posted yesterday -

-which is from a day game.

The Taylor Davis card, also from 2018 Update, is from a night game. I have noticed over the last couple years that the night cards arrive with a little more blur to everything beyond the player. Perhaps it is easier for the camera to keep good resolution of the objects farther and farther from the center of the focus point, in bright sunshine. On the other hand, Rajai's card is probably shot from much closer to Rajai than the distance to Taylor on that card. But in general, to me, the night cards have a little less resolution beyond the central player image. I think.

And I wonder how the printing process itself interacts with the possible sharpness around the edges of the card, as Jose Reyes's compression sleeve goes from a distinct Mets Orange in the original Getty Image, to a far less vivid kinda-reddish, sorta, color on the resulting baseball card.

However the digi-stuff is all working in practice, I still know Joe West is on my baseball card; and that is yet another reason for me to think there is no particular contractual proscription on that.

Although I still can't answer this basic Baseball Card Theory question definitively either way as Topps never seems to ask me to just come hang out at Topps HQ with my jaw agape while I ask trivial questions all day, I do hope to see more cards like this. The Umpire is a pretty key part of the game after all. And I also know there will be only one way for me to continue trying to answer it. I'll just have to keep collecting baseball cards.

There are Umpires at the baseball game?

Because I just don't see them on my baseball cards much any more.

I received this card recently; not in trade, but as a bit of packaging protection in a shipment from an eBay seller. The fate of early 1990s baseball cards...

A nice, basic, horizontal baseball card. A Turning Two card, most likely selected out into many collections of such cards.

But what immediately jumped to my attention is the Umpire there. You just don't see many cards like these. We still receive brand new Turning Two cards from Topps, but the Ump is so often edited completely out of the picture.

Now I'm not suggesting Umpires should be on baseball cards. They shouldn't, generally. Baseball picture cards are supposed to feature the players, and oh how well they do now. I just prefer baseball cards that depict the game of baseball, rather than make fetish objects out of the players. Baseball card collectors are always saddened by the size of "The Hobby" today, and wonder why more people aren't interested in it. I'm beginning to think the steady banishment of baseball pictures in favor of the ego-gratifying celebrity-worshipping products that baseball cards generally are today, is one, albeit small, part of the reason.

When I started pondering this toppic the other day I knew I should compare my old-fart complaints about those kids today to cards of years past. But I don't really have the collection for that, with my wonderful 70s/80s cards in a secure remote undisclosed location for the time being, and only large portions of 1991 and 2001 Topps sets to check out. 2001 proved to have a whole lot of live action photos, but no Umps; the images were all sensibly cropped down to a single baseball player, as they should be. You do usually get to see their feet however, which allows in more glimpses of that game context I crave. And again, the cards should be about the players, not the Umpires.

I knew 1991 likely held few of the action shots I seek. That led me to the set that brought me back into everyday collecting, the 2011 set. I fondly recall some Umpires on a 2011 insert set, the Kimball Champion minis:

I like those little cards, where it looks like the Major Leaguers are playing on some small town ball diamond with a forest in the background, but am only saving 2 binder pages of 15 each, rather than collecting all 150 of them. I am down to 8 entries on my want list and have about 50 left over, which I would like to find a good home for. They're not worth sending to COMC.

Now the 2011 set has standard cropping very similar to the 2001 set, but far more horizontal cards, and those are usually dramatic entries in the set. It didn't take long to find one:

A complete slice of baseball action there. I always like cards that capture the press pit there in the background for some reason, though they make me wonder who Topps hires to get such shots, as they obviously aren't over there with the rest of the media.

But let's see what happens when we apply the 2013 zoom style to a similar card I know you all probably remember from Series One this year:

Now the Umpire is just a lurker? No, though even lurking umpires are few and far between on the backs of the Sea Turtles. They can be found on the Ben Zobrist I-just-murdered-the-catcher card, and the spectacular Pedro Alvarez card.

There on the Utley card, the Home Plate Umpire is still present, with just his fingers on Buster Posey's back there, which I found quite touching. Ouch. The Utley card is still a pretty good card, but despite all my bitching about the zooming in to the all torsos, all the cards this year, I have never liked cards that don't show a player's face, no matter how spectacular the game action we receive in exchange. It just seems disrespectful, to me.

But that's about it for Umpire Action in Series 1 & 2. A couple blurry lurkers, and one headless umpire that I was very grateful to have on a card, as I used his uniform # to determine the results of the bunt on the wonderful Erick Aybar card.

Now that Aybar card introduced me to an outstanding baseball card vantage point, seemingly from a point just above and behind the pitcher's shoulders. I'm not sure just how new this is, as I don't have enough baseball cards to ponder. Does anyone ever have enough baseball cards? Topps came through with another fine example of this in Update, on what could become a classic Rookie Card:

Now to me, that is already a great baseball card. Arcia is still a promising young Major Leaguer, but if he hits 30 Home Runs next season collectors these days will be scrambling for all his shiny photo-shopped serial #d relic autograph cards....every card but this one.

I'm not sure how Topps gets these photos. Maybe all that digital / optical zoom technology they overuse now has it's advantages I guess; perhaps these are even stills from the video feed of the standard baseball-on-TV vantage point. I have never fully understood that view; I have always wanted to watch a game from the Umpire's vantage point. I sat 7 rows directly behind Home Plate at Comerica Park once, watching each pitch come right at me, and I've had a bit less desire to go back to a baseball game ever since; unless I could return to that simply awesome vista of baseball, which is how the game should be seen. 

However these photos arrive in my packs of baseball cards, Topps certainly deployed it to good effect on the live-action All-Star cards this year:

There are several of these shots used for the All-Star cards, and I have already featured another great one. Whatever the technology at play, it's only a tad better than the TV cameras at handling Max Scherzer's max out the tint orange shoes there. Is this his hint that he hopes to play in Baltimore in 2015?

Topps does get their photo equipment dialed in to deal with more great orange shoes on an actual Oriole player, Adam Jones:

Though here we are back to an obscured Umpire, I added this tonight because I certainly flubbed not including this one last night ... where else are you going to find two memorial patches for two baseball legends, Stan Musial and Earl Weaver, on the same card but on an All-Star card. (The O's Weaver patch is moved to the left breast to accommodate the All-Star Game shoulder patch). I love the lines on this card created by the MLB logo, the umpire's torso, and the space betweem Molina and Jones. They lead you right to those wonderful shoes. Though lines trending down aren't good for baseball cards, they work out just fine here.

A few more of those cards shot from the same point are used for the All-Star cards in Update, and I am just fine with that, as these make for excellent baseball cards. Overall the Arcia card is probably my favorite Umpire Card this year, at least among the base cards.

But my actual favorite baseball picture cards including an Umpire appeared in an insert set in Opening Day this year:

The game is over, for everyone but the Umpire, lurking there to make sure Willingham steps on the plate after his Walk-Off. I'm not the greatest fan of these cards, or seeing this at a regular season game, though I guess some teams need to celebrate when they can.

Another card in those inserts actually is a home run though, for many reasons. A copy of it will probably make my Airborne binder pages, for one, and even though the card features the vast majority of the Washington Nationals - perhaps these are better than staid team checklist cards - I can't seem to find Bryce Harper anywhere on it, amazingly enough, though I have no plans to look too closely:

Now I had hoped to deploy my own digital technology to figure out which Umpire this is and give him some props here, by zooming in on the scanner results, but that didn't work out. Just not enough pixels available, I think.

Whichever Ump it is, I love this shot of the Umpire, an integral part of every Major League Baseball game, all the way to the end. Whether Topps ever notices them or not.