heading down the lurker rabbit hole

here's joe oliver's 1993 topps stadium club card

night owl posted the card in his best set of 93 post. i had not seen it before, but i immediately took a liking to it, and was particularly intrigued by the presumed baserunner partially obscured by the presumed reds' pitcher. because of the dodger stadium anniversary patch and the bit of red jersey number showing, i knew that was a dodger to oliver's left, and it looked to me to be brett butler. butler, coincidentally, has a cameo on john kruk's card in the same set.

i knew i needed to add this card to my lurker collection regardless, but i still spent half an hour on baseball reference and getty images researching things to determine that it was, in fact, butler and that the photo came from a game on april 13, 1992.

it turns our that i could've just done a few google searches to find this post on a card blog i was not familiar with. i did just that after i had figured out the game that the photo came from - looking for some confirmation. turns out i could have saved myself half an hour. to make things worse, i started looking through posts on that site and came across this 1999 ud choice ellis burks card

that features another lurking dodger - this time it's charles johnson.  the post told me that it came from a september 19, 1998 game.

i wound up picking up both the oliver and the burks cards for my collection in a sportlots order. when they arrived and i went to put them away, i discovered that i already had the burks, and that i had even posted about charles johnson being there on the card.

i guess buying a card i already had for 18 cents on sportlots is a small price to pay for discovering that blog - there are some really interesting posts about images shown on cards - some that i had seen before and some that i had not. i invite you to check it out - you might find a rabbit hole of your own.