2024 Pennant Dream Team

Time for another Pennant insert.

Keeping with the look of the 2024 Pennant base design, these feature black & white, high-contrast player cutouts over a gradient background. For these, I added a dreamy sky and baseball field overlay, so it’s not just a solid color block. Pairs well with the concept of the insert. I kept the text simple with “Dream Team” across the top and the last night along the bottom. No need to clutter with other info since these are the guys at each position. Here’s a look at the checklist I put together.

1B Bryce Harper
2B José Altuve
3B José Ramírez
SS Francisco Lindor
OF Mike Trout
OF Aaron Judge
OF Ronald Acuña, Jr.
C Adley Rutschman
DH Shohei Ohtani
UT Mookie Betts
SP Gerrit Cole
SP Corbin Burnes
SP Zack Wheeler
SP Justin Verlander
SP Spencer Strider
RP Edwin Díaz
RP Emmanuel Clase

The starting pitcher rotation was honestly a bit of task, especially considering we’re in such an age of pitching. Verlander is there on account of this being timed to the beginning of the season before he was on the IL. Same with Strider. There just aren’t the lights-out names these days like there always seemed to be in years past.

2024 Pennant Throwbacks

First insert for the Pennant set his year once again is the Throwbacks set, featuring players wearing, you guessed it, throwback uniforms. I had a hard time tracking down a lot of instances of teams wearing old-time uniforms in 2023. I blame the whole City Connect thing for that. The only ones I could track down were the Diamondbacks, Marlins and Rays. Expansion-palooza, minus the Rockies who have yet to really change their look since their conception.

The design has the same black-and-white cutout over gradient motif as the base set, though I tweaked the colors to match the team colors of the respective uniforms. The large ‘THROW BACKS’ type looks kinda like an old boxing flyer or something like that from the past.

There’s also a relic version with a swatch from the actual uniforms depicted in the photo. This one has a teal pinstripe, which looks pretty cool. The autograph version has the gradient and photo fading out to white at the bottom to leave room for a legible signature. I don’t think I had seen Arozarena’s sig before but it’s pretty cute, lol.

2024 Pennant

After accidentally deleting all the linked PSDs a month or two again, I just finished up redoing my 2024 Pennant set yesterday. Time to share.

These are retro without calling back to a specific time period or design. Nuts and bolts of the design are basically a black-and-white high-contrast player photo on top of a color gradient and then a solid color block at the bottom for their name and team/position text. Rather than going with exact team colors, I decided to do what Topps did back in the day and assign each team its own combo of colors from a general color palette. It’s kinda of a hard task since there are so many red/blue teams in the league. To help that, I picked a couple different blues and a few different reds to mix things up a bit.

This was a fun set to do other than having to do the images two separate time. It did give me a chance to swap out Luis Arraez for the Marlins since he got traded to the Padres after my first go round. Hopefully nobody else featured here changes teams before I click “publish” on this bad boy.

2023 Pennant

Finishing up my 2023 designs is Pennant, the “retro” set in the Spirit family. I went with a 70s-ish look for this year’s design and for the first time kept the color palette limited to around 8 colors rather than doing team-specific colors like I usually do. While there is some overlap from team-to-team (I mean, there are so many red and blue MLB teams), I was able to keep teams in the same division from having a duplicate palette.

The photos also have undergone a treatment making them look less modern. It helps put the design in the right era and really drives home the “retro” feel in relation to the rest of the Spirit releases.

2022 Pennant

There is no baseball until Friday. We have only 4-7 games of 2022 baseball left. Seems like a perfect time to get around to posting the rest of my 2022 Spirit stuff (though I’m sure I’ll be doing that well after the World Series, too). I’ve done the Spirit base set, the Clubhouse set, and a smattering of inserts for both. Next up is the Pennant design.

If you’ll recall, Pennant is the “retro” set. I use that as a vague direction to basically go for whatever non-modern vibe I feel like rather than trying to focus in on a specific era or set from the past. Anything that’s not objectively modern or contemporary will usually work for the brand.

There’s a look at the design spread across all 30 teams. White(ish) borders with team color cameo-style photo frames. I tried a few different looks for the frame details before sticking with this here. Some were too plain, some too gaudy. I think this hits the mark. I also did a “retro” treatment on the photos to make them look a bit old, though didn’t go the full Gypsy Queen route. I wanted to make sure the card were still bright and colorful.

Not sure if I’ll get around to doing inserts for this set, but I think the base design here is probably one of the most solid I’ve done. I have a couple of recurring insert themes I could easily revisit if the mood strikes. Stay tuned I guess.

2021 Pennant Throwdown

It’s been a bit since I posted the 2021 Pennant base design so I figured it was time to do a Pennant insert. Traditionally, I’ve tackled the Throwbacks insert first since it’s pretty fun and easy but I ran into a slight problem. Due to the COVID-shortened season, there weren’t any “throwback” games in 2020. And while I very well could’ve used some of the early 2021 throwback games, that seemed like a cheat to me. So instead of throwing back, we’re gonna throw down.

I believe this is the 3rd edition of the Throwdown insert, which always features a pair of players who are either on rival teams or have a noteworthy connection between them. The Dodgers and Astros aren’t technically rivals but after the whole 2017 World Series thing, I suppose they hate each other like a rivalry. The Harper/Scherzer card can qualify for both since they used to be teammates and they’re division rivals, too. (Yes, I know Max is with the Dodgers as of this post but if these were real cards on a real release schedule, they’d have been made long before the 2021 trade deadline.)

This is the first time I’ve done a vertical design for these. They’ve been horizontal to allow themselves for an easier autograph parallel but I had a different idea this year. In staying in line with the 2021 Pennant base design, I used the same photo treatment on the players as well as the same fonts and general look. Doubling up on players per card makes the photo tweaking effort twice as tedious. So instead of doing four duos, I decided to keep these same pairs and make the autograph versions a little different.

The color boxes get the axe so the autographs can be nice and legible (as far as these particular ones can go). The THROWDOWN title gets split and screened back to add a bit of visual texture and fill in for the solid colors’ absence. Theres some color coordination to help keep the sigs and players sorted together. All in all, I’m pretty happy with both iterations. The autograph versions are a bit similar to the 2017 version but hopefully there’s enough difference to keep them distinguishable in the long run.

2021 Pennant

Now that I’ve finished wading through Topps’ designs from the Aughts, it’s time to reveal some new original designs. After posting the Spirit flagship design and cards for each of the 30 teams, I’m scaling back a bit going forward, offering just a few cards per release. So, say hi to the 2021 Pennant design.

The Pennant release has been the “retro” Spirit set, calling back to design styles of the past without ripping them off wholesale. I’ve bounced around decades and eras so as to not be too repetitive. Honestly, I can’t pinpoint the era I’m going for here, just more of a general “old” feel. The key is simplicity as I’ve kept the “design” to a minimum with plain but bold text at the bottom for the name and team. In the corners at the top are corresponding pennants with the Pennant logo and the player position. The most notable feature of the design is the photo treatment. What I’ve done is ramp up the contrast, remove the actual colors from the photos and replaced it with painted simple, solid color shapes. There is still some noise and black values to fill in the details, keeping it from looking quite so illustrated. Of the three here, the Brandon Lowe card is the best in my eyes, mostly thanks to the solid green background.

Here’s the back of the Lowe card. They’re black-and-white with the design mimicking the front. With just 3 seasons under his belt, I was able to fit Lowe’s full career (simplified) stats on here, though that probably wouldn’t be the case for a more seasoned veteran. This is also an opportunity to include the new MLBPA logo for the first time for me.