AIRBRUSHING SPOTLIGHT- 1976 TRADED MIKE LUM

Found another gem of an airbrushing job from the 1970’s, so that always makes for a blog post, this one the photo used for the 1976 Mike Lum Traded:

The Hawaii native was traded over to the eventual repeating World Champion Cincinnati Reds for Darrel Chaney, where he’d put in a couple of seasons before coming right back in 1979.
He’d play for another few years in Atlanta before a appearing in 41 games with the Chicago Cubs in 1981 to close out his 15-year career.
His best season in the Big Leagues was easily his 1973 season, when the Braves seemed to have a few guys have career-years.
For Lum, he set career-highs with a .294 batting average,  74 runs scored, 16 home runs and 82 runs batted in on a team that featured three 40-home run guys (Aaron, Evans and Davey Johnson) and four 90+ RBI men.
Amazing that the team could only muster a record of 83-78 with lumber like that!
Nevertheless, Lum finished his career after the 1981 season, collecting a career .247 average with 877 hits and 431 RBIs over 1517 games, with Post Season appearances in the 1969 and 1976 League Championship Series.
Until writing this post I never realized he had that long a Major League career, coming up with the Braves back in 1967 as a 21-year old.

GUEST WRITER "RAJ" WITH SOME GREAT EXAMPLES OF TOPPS & AIRBRUSHING IN 1979

I received a GREAT email recently from blog-reader "RAJ" with some excellent examples of Topps and their airbrushing choices which really left me wondering how many other examples like these exist throughout the 1970's.
I liked the email so much I thought it'd make a perfect post.
Some good stuff here! Thanks Robert!

"Here is a great example of how Topps would remove certain elements in the background of photos for their cards using airbrushing when it really didn’t seem to be all that necessary.  On the left we see Mike Lum batting against the Pirates in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium during the 1978 season.  On the right is a photo take during that same game, with no Topps airbrushing applied to it.  I’m not sure what was gained by painstakingly removing the photographers and their tri-pods.  

I guess Topps was wanting a clean background for this card as well as the cards for Johnny Bench and Dave Concepcion (below):

However, they chose to leave photographers and their equipment in the cards for Ray Knight, Ken Griffey, and Joe Morgan although they certainly removed portions of a photographer who was wearing blue jeans and a red shirt because you can see remnants of him in the Griffey and Morgan cards: 

In the cards we also see some strange happenings in the crowd as it appears that there are flesh-colored arms (or limbs of some sort) next to and below the big fella in blue in the Lum card.  What could they have done THAT for?

Hope this was of interest to you.  It always fascinated me the airbrushing “hack jobs” that Topps pawned off on us with some of those horrific baseball hats as well as the terrible football helmets in the 70s.  Classic..."