Category: baseball cards

Parenting is difficult. I had no doubts of that really, but I never really prepared myself for the amount of time that I would spend arguing about seemingly meaningless things. Brushing your teeth, combing your hair, and getting dressed hardly seem like negotiables. Nor, really, do finishing chores, reading, or playing quietly before you earn screens. However, that is the world that I am living in.

I’ve wanted desperately to make more art since I became a single parent and yet, it is more difficult to find time to make. The time is there though. I have more time to myself. That is why I’ve felt really frustrated that I haven’t been making as much as I would. It’s only been recently that I’ve discovered how much pressure I put on myself to perform as a parent, so much so that I don’t perform particularly well as a parent. And so, when I arrive at this mysterious increase in time, I am exhausted. I am doubly exhausted after the mental battles that I must play constantly.

Of late I’ve been letting the art seep in though. It is still difficult, but isn’t it better if something is difficult and there rather than difficult and mourned for? Yes, I wish that I had the time and space to make that I did before, but I do not. I will not until my children are a bit older or a bit self reliant. In order for them to become more self reliant I must start to let the artwork and the reading and the “me” elements seep in more. They need to spread and grow. I wish to be like this burro’s tail plant; growing in and around wherever I need to be.

What is it about what could have been that makes life so much more interesting? Over the past two weeks I found myself reading The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World by Joshua Prager. The book, of course, tells the story of the 1951 Giants Pennant, but pays special heed to the way in which the Giants cheated.

It makes you wonder. How well would that team have performed if they had not cheated? This year Elly De La Cruz and the Reds young core has served to light a fire under the Reds, propelling them into first place. Everyone talks about Elly De La Cruz’s “it factor.” But let’s take into account for a second the young core of the 1951 Giants. At it’s center were young pitchers, Maglie and Jansen, and perhaps even more importantly a young Monte Irvin and Willie Mays. Would Willie Mays have ignited the 1952 Giants in the same manner that Elly De La Cruz has done for the 2023 Reds? We can never be fully certain because it is fact that the Durocher’s Giants cheated.

It’s the not knowing that I find interesting though. While we can never really know if Walter Johnson would have pitched as well as Randy Johnson in the nineties, or know if Ty Cobb could have hit .400 in the seventies, or if the Fifties Yankees were better than the Nineties Yankees, the biggest question to me will always be how the Negro Leaguers would have faired in MLB.

This week I started working on a series of drawings of the Detroit Stars and of Detroit Tigers wearing throwback Detroit Stars uniforms in the style of 1933 Goudey Chewing Gum cards. I can’t help but feel curious about the what could have beens, but I also just feel so attached to the what was.

I’ve just started Buck O’Neil’s Right on Time. He talks of being so proud to have played baseball with and against some of the most talented ballplayers of the thirties and forties. A man who could have been so bitter, just wasn’t. I think there is a lesson in that for all of us. While Capitalism has built an entire monopoly off of FOMO, what is it to recognize the beauty in the what is and what was.

I think that is why I am focused on this little Detroit Stars project. These men were great, maybe not recognized for being so, but no doubt great. I feel like in my art that is all that I want, to be great, whether anyone thinks I am or not. And really, what is being recognized as great, when you know that you are more of Bobby Thomson shirking the spotlight than you ever will be a Satchel Paige embodying the spotlight.

Over the course of the past three years I have progressively sold more sports portraiture and sports card art. While I feel a bit reluctant to refer to myself as a card artist, I suppose that that is what I have been doing of late. It has certainly proved a little more lucrative than some of my work in the past.

It does feel a bit odd though, as the idea that I found myself working with my first year of graduate school has sort of rolled back around. How odd. The trading cards that I was attempting to make at that time did not go well. I felt too confused as to what I was even doing. I eventually abandoned them only to saw pieces of wood over and over again into tiny little blocks. I still have a lot of them. There were nearly a thousand painted and illustrated blocks by the time I was done.

But now it’s card art I guess. I had tried painting newer players, junk wax from the eighties. My daily pieces have even been of junk wax cards, but while I feel very much into the daily process with those cards, I do not feel quite so into doing more detailed and finished pieces of them.

However, I found this past weekend that something that I really enjoy is vintage card designs. I was commissioned to create a reproduction of a 1952 Bowman and Topps Roy Campanella, respectively. Additionally, I was tasked with creating a Larry Doby Newark Eagles card.

These two projects proved much more fruitful for my creative juices. I felt much more into the process. There is something about historical reference that always gets me geared up. I think that I’m just going to lean into it a bit more going forward.

That said, I’m starting to get some ideas for a series of Jazz cards based off of these slick 1950s Bowman cards. There is something so delightfully simple about the color in the originals that really has me excited. I did a drawing of Thelonious Monk in my sketchbook that I think will be first. I’ll see if I can’t get that together and posted later this week.

Until then, or some other time that the impulse hits me, cheers.