Sunday, May 17, 2020

Vintage backgrounds: Not Sun City?

A while back I showed a 1970 Seattle Pilots card taken in Tempe with Double Butte Mountain dominating the background. In that post Gregory asked if it was the same mountain in the background of Jerry Bell's 1974 card.
We're up to the 1974 set now in the Vintage Backgrounds series. In 1973 the Brewers found themselves in a new spring training site - Sun City Stadium. They stayed there through 1985, and ten years later it was razed for a seniors apartment complex. Theoretically then this picture should have been in Sun City. However that ballpark was in the middle of town and most photos taken in the ballpark (pretty much all the Sun City Stadium photos online can be found on this Smugmug site) do not have mountains in the background. So my guess is that this is a photo from a prior spring, and it is probably Double Butte or another Tempe mountain in the background.

There is one photo from the Sun City era that does have some mountains clearly in the background. It is probably from 1985, the Brewers' last season in Sun City, and it is too good not to be shared. Such a stark difference between baseball of the 1970s/1980s with that of the 2000s/2010s. (The 2020s? Who knows?)

1 comment:

  1. Jerry Bell obviously said "I...I...I ain't gonna play Sun City"!

    (OK, that will go over the head of anyone who wasn't watching MTV in 1985.)

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