It's been a couple of weeks since I did one of these card breakdowns. Heritage was tough and I don't have any Gypsy Queen cards yet so it's nice to have something fresh to work with. I'm not sure which of the cards in the 2013 Factory Team Set will make the cut for Series 2 but the stadium cards never make it so we'll start there.
Unfortunately, when you search for "Wrigley Field" over at Getty Images, you get all the photos from games that happened at Wrigley Field, not just aerial photos like this one (48,000+ photos). So I had to go deeper. Behind home plate is the "Opening Week" logo so I narrowed my search to April 2012 (down to 1500+). Adding "aerial" didn't help as this shot was likely taken from an upper deck somewhere and not actually from the air.
The Cubs opened the 2012 season on a 7-game home stand against the Washington Nationals and Milwaukee Brewers. Of the two teams, the Brewers were more likely to wear that dark uniform shown on the card and the on deck circle logo more closely resembles the Brewers logo. Including "Brewers" to the search brought it down to a more manageable less than 500 photos to browse.
Sure enough, after playing spot the difference between five similar photos, all submitted by the same photographer, I found the right shot. One interesting difference is that for some reason, the chalk lines were removed on the card. No base coach boxes. No foul lines in the outfield. Infield and batter's box were hard to tell from the photo and probably mostly erased throughout the normal play of the game anyway.
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| Photo taken by Jonathan Daniel (courtesy of Getty Images) |
The photo caption did not provide a lot of detail as to what was going on so it was up to me to find out.
CHICAGO, IL - APRIL 11: A general view of Wrigley Field as the Chicago Cubs take on the Milwaukee Brewers on April 11, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. The Brewers defeated the Cubs 2-1. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)
With the date now in hand, I went over to Baseball Reference to look at the boxscore. Looking at the photo again, here is what I knew. Runner on first with a left handed batter at the plate. Low scoring game so there probably wasn't a lot of opportunities for this matchup. Let's take a look.
First Inning - Leadoff double by David DeJesus, no other runners. Not this inning!
Second Inning - Bryan LaHair walked, Geovany Soto (righty) grounded into a double play. Inning over. Nope.
Third Inning- DeJesus walk, next batter Darwin Barney (righty) flys out to end inning. Nope.
Fourth Inning - Ian Stewart singled, next batter Bryan LaHair (lefty) struck out to end inning. Maybe!
Fifth Inning - Three up, three down. Nope
Sixth Inning - Barney singled, Starlin Castro (righty) fly out, Alfonso Soriano (righty) strikeout. Nope.
Seventh Inning - Ian Stewart singled, next batter LaHair (lefty) also singled. With runners on first and second, no other scenarios matched. Maybe!
Eighth Inning - Catsro walked, Soriano (righty) walked. Nope
Ninth inning - Clevenger doubled, no other base runners. Nope
That leaves me with the 4th inning or the 7th inning. Either way, the runner is Ian Stewart, the batter is Bryan LaHair and the guy on deck is Geovany Soto. The sequence of photos submitted to Getty by the same photographer is inconclusive as well. Maybe someone could tell me by the shadows whether it is the 4th or 7th inning based on a 2:59 PM start time, haha.
Despite the Cubs falling 2-1 to the Brewers, its a pretty decent shot.
The back of the card features a pretty generic writeup about Wrigley Field that should be common knowledge to any baseball fan, not just Cubs fans. In the second line there is a weird spacing between "neighborhood" and "Wrigleyville". Missing the word "called" maybe? Or just a comma?
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