red sox of giza

i was seven when i started opening packs of 1978 topps baseball cards. each and every card was an opportunity to learn something new about the game and its players. most of those cards are burned in to my brain, even though many did not feature very memorable images. dwight evans' card is not one of those, however.

when i first saw a 1978 topps dwight evans card

i first noticed the patch. i remember asking my dad about these things, like the patch on wayne garrett's card that he identified as having to do with the 1976 olympics, and i wondered why the dodgers didn't have some sort of patch on their jerseys, too.  thanks to my young eyes (and maybe my grandma's magnifying glass) i saw that the patch celebrated massachusetts' bicentennial. i didn't think twice, although there were no states 200 years prior to 1978. i guess massachusetts jumped on the nation's bicentennial celebration and decided that their existence began in 1775, as they started wearing the patch in 1975. more info is here via this link. 

like i said, i didn't think twice about the patch, however, i did do a double take with the background of the photo and thought that perhaps the red sox had played a game in egypt. the two sets of palm trees in the plus the sandstone colored structure at the right side of the card had me thinking that evans was standing somewhere near a pyramid. to this day, i still don't know what that is. the red sox were training in florida during evans' career and i didn't think there was anything that high above ground level in the state back then.

i guess i am still not sure that he wasn't in giza.