Depending on how old you are Picture Day at school could mean something different to you than it does to me. I’m of the age when Picture Day meant something. First of all, you were actually getting a professional picture take of you. Maybe that’s obvious, but that just didn’t happen outside of school unless you were like an executive of a company. Second, my family had a camera (a polaroid, one of those odd Kodak cameras, etc.) and all that, but no one was a professional photographer. Everyday pictures never came out well because you couldn’t see it until a week later when you got it developed. They filled the photo albums up though. Yes, actual books like the binders you keep your cards in.
These days taking pictures in general means something so different because we have phones on our cameras that give us feedback about what we just took. We have phones and computers and clouds that can store gobs of them even if they are all slightly the same. And we have apps like Instagram which let us share them, but also put really cool effects on them and allow us to edit them.
When Picture Day came up you dressed nice and it was your parent’s chance to get a great photo of you. I knew a lady that kept small wallet photos of her kid on her desk and lined all the pictures up. Not just a few.. ALL of them from kindergarten to senior year. To contrast that, I think I’ve maybe purchased a handful of Picture Day photos of my kids because there are only a few years of them before the iPhone existed. Now we forgo getting those because we like what we take. I coached my daughter’s softball team a few years ago and we started skipping Picture Day because as parents we knew that we could take something even better, when we wanted to take it and in the setting we wanted it in.
So what does Picture Day mean for professional baseball? That’s a little different too. For a lot of players they are getting pictures taken of themselves when they play so I’m sure they don’t even notice anymore. Back in the day when we didn’t have action shots, there was a day when you posed. Even then, there were like five poses for hitters (standing, kneeling, pretend hitting, etc.) and five poses for pitchers (pretend pitching, holding a glove, etc.). And that’s beyond just standing there.
Then Stadium Club comes along. We started seeing not just portraits, but maybe even art. We got backgrounds, we got casual looking portraits, we got players not even looking at the camera. The earlier 90’s, with the emergence of some high end product, definitely were a bit of a breakthrough in the quality of the picture. Yes, the card quality, but the pictures too. There was some imagination. That brought some odd things as well, but I would say just like the start of the action shots in the early 70’s, I think these portraits were a game changer. Maybe not to the level of what the action shot meant, but still important.
Picture Day
What I find great about these is that some photographer got these macho guys to make some poses for these cards. Maybe they thought it was cool that their cards wouldn’t look like others. Maybe it didn’t take convincing. These aren’t crazy by any means, but they are definitely more than the standard, “stand there with the bat on your shoulder” type of photo.
I find the Brent Maybe card interesting. Is that really bad weather? Is it at night? If it’s at night why aren’t the lights on? Is he reciting lines from Hamlet and subbing the skull out for a baseball? So many questions. Offerman is obviously leaning on the bat. It looks like Andre is leaning on something, but what. It doesn’t appear to be the ivy. That’s quite an interesting way to hold your bat, or maybe cradle your bat baby.
So these are not like school pictures but more like a magazine photo session. In a way, it’s a mix of both. I’m sure it’s the art of a photo session with the assembly line of the school picture day.
Wow…, Just Wow…
I didn’t know what to say to this card at first. All I could think of is why? Why would you want this out there forever. Then I started thinking, who the heck is Oscar Azocar and why does he love his bat so much? There’s no way I could not remember him playing if he loved his bat this much. I mean you probably wouldn’t hug it like that if it didn’t have a bunch of hits in it.
First of all, Oscar is no longer with us. He dies in June of 2014 at the young age of 45. He was born in Venezuela and died there. During his career he was a Yankee and a Padre over three years in the majors. He was a pitcher in the minors and then switched to playing the outfield in the late 80’s. Oscar LOVED to swing the bat. He didn’t walk for the first time until he had 100 at-bats. He would swing at just about anything and his batting average showed as he hit .226 with 5 home runs and 36 RBI in 202 games. But he only struck out 36 times in 439 at-bats. So a lot like Vlad Guerrero, he could hit a pitch anywhere, but obviously Vlad could avoid getting out a bit better.
And after a little bit of reading I see why Oscar feels the way he does on this card. In the same year that Oscar died of a heart attach, 2010, he was inducted in the Caribbean Baseball Hall of Fame for his contributions to the Caribbean Series. He gave back to baseball, he changed positions to keep playing baseball… Oscar loved baseball. Oscar loved baseball and he wasn’t afraid to show it.
…And Your Photographer For Today Is…
You can’t have a photo shoot without a photographer right? There are so many cards in this era of players using some high end equipment like this. They definitely have the means to get it. I wonder what some of their stuff came out like.
1993 Stadium Club was fun to open for a lot of reasons. Opening an old product like allows me to take time to look at more cards that I missed and like with Oscar Azocar, players I missed. In more way than one, players that are missed now and not just because I didn’t see their baseball card the first time around.