How did they do on the day the card photo was taken?

Another recent Dinged Corners post featuring some current Stadium Club cards included a play from a game I was at this year - Joba pitched great as well as fielded great as the Yankees won. It is not often you can tell which game a card is from, but when you can it can really be fun.

Retrosheet.org is a great website which, if you are not familiar with it, gives the boxscore to every game going back decades. It can be a great tool for finding out more about a certain picture and helping to "bring the card to life". For example, here's an easy one.

The Shea Stadium line score can cleary be seen behind Lloyd McClendon in this 1993 Topps card, so it is a simple matter of going through Pirates at Mets game from 1992 and see what line score matches. As you can see, it is tied at six in the top of the tenth. From retrosheet, we learn that this game is from August 12, 1992, and McClendon is scoring what would end up being the winning run in a 7-6 affair, scoring from first on Jay Bell's triple off of John Franco after McClendon hit a two-out single to keep the inning alive.

Sometimes a little more detective work is need. How can you possibly know what game the 1993 Upper Deck Randy Milligan is from? You can't even tell what park it is in.

Nevertheless, there is a clue, though you may need the actual card, rather than my image to see it. (By the way, it looks like I don't have the settings on my scanner that are necessary to prevent the purple dots - which I have learned are called moire, so the pictures on this blog are going to be from photographs of the cards, which I am getting better at).

The clue that gives it away is the trainer's watch. It is one of those digital date-and-time watches, and the date is May 12. Knowing that the year is 1992, we got to retrosheet and find the Orioles game from May 12, 1992. Baltimore was at Texas on this day, and beat them 5-1. Milligan would go one-for-four, singling in the seventh before leaving the next injury with an injury to his right leg. The injury kept him sidelined for a couple of games but was not too serious as he was back in the lineup in Chicago three days later, reaching base twice in four trips.