As I’m sure you’ve heard, the MLB owners ended their lockout yesterday after reaching agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement with the MLBPA. Even though the league and owners are still set to make a disproportionately large fortune compared to the players (you know, the guys that are actually responsible for what compels people to spend their money and attention on), it’s still nice to have the 2022 season no longer in a coma. After working myself into a teeth-gnashing fury multiple times on Twitter reading the immature, narrow-minded, or greed-worshipping “fans” railing against the players for not taking a shitty deal, I’m ready to turn towards sunnier thoughts.
Before I move on to the “official” 2022 season designs, I decided to put a cap on the 2021 season with my very first printed set. I searched all around online to find a vendor that makes trading cards but kept running into the same limitation: they’ll print you a bunch cheap, but only a bunch of copies of the same card. In other words, you can get like 100 cards cheap, but only 100 of the same card, not a 100-card set. Major bummer. The only place I found an option of printing multiple images on an order was with Moo, but they don’t do the standard 2.5” x 3.5” trading card. I decided to compromise and come up with a 50-card set to print on their square business cards. They’re 2.56” square, so almost the same size as regular cards. Close enough in my book.
So, 50 cards. That sounds like a good number for a “best of” set. Say hi to the 2021 Spirit Stars of Baseball.
Like the all-star squads, every team is represented here. Unfortunately, that means some of the guys who had top-50 performance last year didn’t make the cut. I don’t think there are any glaring omissions other than maybe Acuña and Luis Robert, but their injuries had to be taken into consideration. Because I sure as heck wasn’t going to do 100 of these. The design was labor-intensive with every card requiring me to cut the player out, color-correct the photos, create a halftone background image and then color-theming them each. It’s a colorful set while some teams’ palettes didn’t lend themselves to a really great overprint effect (Padres, Pirates, Rays).
Here are a few photos of the finished product. The paper stock is about the thickness of Heritage and the finish is a smooth matte on both sides. I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out. Unfortunately, the 12-pocket pages I got are just a little too tight to page these up, but they fit into standard penny sleeves and toploaders. I’d try my hand at making more of these if there’s a market for such a thing. There’s still some cost involved that would prohibit me from just printing a bunch and try to push them. But if enough interest was shown, I might ponder another set in this format.
Anyway, welcome back, baseball. Loving you isn’t always easy but I can’t help myself. Play ball!