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<\/a><\/p>\nSee that tiny little tattoo peeking out from under Burnett\u2019s yanked-up sleeve? That was enough to earn him the moniker of \u201cmarked man\u201d just 2 decades ago. In retrospect, this seems crazy \u2014 so many athletes, including baseball players, have tattoo sleeves, neck tattoos, and so on that the thought of ink being taboo so recently feels absurd. I began to wonder: when was the first time a tattoo was visible on a baseball card?<\/p>\n
My first guess was that there were likely tattoos that the first tattoos were from players returning from the Navy in the 40s or 50s, became largely visible on cards in the 1990s, and were commonplace sometime in the early to mid 2000s. But then I was reminded of another Marlins pitcher, the late Justin Miller, who was an MLB reliever from 2002 to 2010. In the mid-2000s, his tattoo sleeves caused MLB to institute the \u201cJustin Miller rule,\u201d which required pitchers to wear long sleeves so as to not distract hitters. If Miller wasn\u2019t allowed to show off his tattoos in game, how could a photo of him reflect those tattoos?<\/p>\n
I figured Miller would be a good jumping off point, so I looked at photos of all of his cards. I discovered that on most of his cards, his trademark long sleeves were present. However, on an early-career card from 2003 Topps Total, he has some ink peeking out of his sleeve, much like the AJ Burnett newspaper photo.<\/p>\n
This gave me a good date of 2003 to start from. But suddenly I realized that there would be no easy way to examine all of the cards before 2003. I\u2019d need to crowdsource the answer. So, I turned to Net54, a site I\u2019ve noted many times as having the most knowledgeable collectors on the web. It turns out, my question was already answered a few years ago by the late industry titan Bob Lemke, former editor and publisher of Sports Collectors Digest. In a blog post from 2011<\/a>, Lemke determined that the 1952 Bowman card of Sam Mele had a visible tattoo.<\/p>\n Well, that was a little disappointing \u2014 someone had already answered my question! Fortunately, Lemke\u2019s blog post raised a new question for me. He ended by noting \u201cIn the mid-1990s\u00a0at least one of the card companys [sic] was airbrushing tats off player photos.\u201d If anyone knew this to be true, it would be Lemke, who literally wrote the book about every baseball card release ever. If that was the case, I began to wonder: what was the SECOND baseball card featuring a visible tattoo? Could it be the Justin Miller card from 2003?<\/p>\n I started looking at hundreds of card images, Googling players who were known for their tattoos and rifling through photos of their releases. I was getting nowhere fast. Then I thought, why not go back to the hive mind that led me int he right direction to start with? I went back to Net54 with my follow-up question. I got several suggestions (including a few that were later than the \u201803 Miller I found) but the most viable solution seems to be this 1991 Upper Deck issue of Kirby Puckett.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n