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Since the baseball world's collective eyes are focused on the Royals and Giants, it seemed like a good time to dust off my old baseball cards of Padres manager Bud Black from when he played with each team. This half of the ensuing blog-post doubleheader will take a look at the two cards I have of him from his Kansas City days (my favorite card I have of him with the Giants can be seen here).
The star of both of these cards is of course Black's mustache, captured in its 80-grade prime. Between it, the powder blue jerseys, and the hat-balanced-on-a-helmet-of-hair look, these cards are quintessentially mid-'80s. Despite being released three years apart (1984 and '87), the pictures on the cards are basically interchangeable. Out of curiosity, I did an image search to see if Fleer's cards of Black in 1985 and '86 also featured posed shots of him in a road jersey, leaning on a fence in front of some stands. It turns out they don't, but it's close; they both have posed shots of him in a road jersey, standing in the middle of a field with a sea of empty seats in the background. This sort of year-to-year monotony was pretty much the norm back then, before Upper Deck showed up in 1989 and made all the other card companies step up their photography game.