As a basketball collector in the early 90s, I was a big fan of the All-NBA 1st/2nd/3rd Team inserts in Fleer Ultra. Not necessarily for the designs (some were pretty atrocious) but the logic behind their creation. The All-NBA Teams were a great way to encapsulate who were THE best players for the year. It was more exclusive than the all-star rosters and less influenced by reputation and previous accolades. Needless to say, when MLB started up the practice of naming an All-MLB 1st and 2nd Team in 2019, I was on board.

With my 2020 Spirit project, the All-MLB Team cards were relegated to a subset within the base set. That meant the design didn’t veer too far from the base design. This year, I’ve moved them over to the Clubhouse brand and made them a standalone insert set. I’m sure the first thing that comes to a lot of minds when seeing these is “reject Bowman design,” which is actually kinda what I was going for. The red and blue streaks bleeding into the corners is a twist on the 2021 Clubhouse base design. Then all the tabs, notches, bevels, etc. are my version of what Topps does with a lot of their designs these days, but on a little bit more basic level. I think it’s fairly easy to see that there’s still a good, solid composition here if you were to strip away all the effects and everything extra. This is my way of bridging the old, simplified era of card design to the modern, kitchen sink era. Some superfluous stuff still persists, but the dial is turned way back down.