2024 Spirit All-Rookie Team

Let’s keep rolling with some inserts now while I have some momentum. Time for the Spirit All-Rookie Team set. This is a 15-card set with the top rookies at each position and 5 best rookie starting pitchers for the 2023 season. Here’s the checklist:

  1. Yainer Díaz - C

  2. Triston Casas - 1B

  3. Matt McLain - 2B

  4. Josh Jung - 3B

  5. Gunnar Henderson - SS

  6. Corbin Carroll - OF

  7. Nolan Jones - OF

  8. James Outman - OF

  9. Spencer Steer - DH

  10. Andrew Abbott - SP

  11. Tanner Bibee - SP

  12. Bobby Miller - SP

  13. Eury Pérez - SP

  14. Kodai Senga - SP

  15. Yennier Cano - RP

Design-wise, there’s a big diagonal bar running behind the player cutouts with the “2023 All-Rookie Team” text running over it. The “All-Rookie” portion overlaps the photo but with a little bit of transparency, the image shows through. The rest of the text is behind the cutout to show some depth. At the bottom of the card is another bar for the name and position running over the whole photo. The bottom right corner has a team color overlay and space for the team logo. The different planes and overlapping is meant to add depth and make things a bit more dynamic.

Here’s a look at the autograph parallels. Everything is the same but with a white autograph strip for the player signature. The original design really lended itself to an easy auto solution.

2024 Spirit Team MVP

Rolling through the customary inserts I do each year, it’s time for the Spirit flagship’s entry, Team MVPs — a 30-card set sporting each team’s best player.

Each year, I try to figure out a way to incorporate a jersey swatch into the letters for MVP. I think this is the first time I’ve had the swatch run behind the letters rather than fill them. I think it helps for readability not having to drop the hole for the middle of the P.

The other design features include a team-color background with some grain added for contrast to the full-color player image. The “TEAM MVP” text is a team-color-ish shiny foil spot for some extra pizzazz. The team primary logo rest next to TEAM. Simple name and team text at the bottom finish things out.

2024 Spirit Base

With Spring Training up and running, it’s time to share my 2024 Spirit base design.

I believe this is the first time I’ve shied away from using some element of the team logo on a Spirit base design. The team names are big and stretched across the bottom of the card, overlapping a spectrum of the team colors. Tucked inside an opaque strip are the player names and positions. That leaves plenty of room for the photograph to be the main focus of the card. While simple, I find the design to be rather bold with the vibrant colors and the large team names.

The backs are vertical as well with plenty room for full-career stats like Machado here. Team logos make an appearance on the back so they’re not completely absent from this year’s set. All in all, this is a pretty clean design for me as I’ve been using a lot of textures and effects in stuff the past few years. Not sure if this is an outlier or not but it was nice to do something a little different. Stay tuned to see what’s next.

2023 Spirit Base

Sneaking this in before the ball drops on the year, here’s a look at my 2023 Spirit base design for every team.

As it’s tradition by now, the design features a full-bleed photo the visual elements color-coded by team. The look on this year is sort of a triangular scroll with the player name position in the middle with the team logo on the left wedge and the Spirit logo on the right wedge. I added a bigger triangle to the bottom right corner to help balance the composition and also add even more team-identifying elements.

Like last year, I had a few different designs I tried out before arriving at this one. Here are the ones that didn’t make the cut.

The last two here were riffs off the same basic hook with the last one winning out. Ultimately, though, it couldn’t top the design I chose in the end.

I’ll try to do some more design dumps before the new year to show I haven’t been completely slacking. Hopefully 2024 will allow me more time to get back on the horse here.

Baseball Is Back!

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!

That's the Spirit

With the owners finally getting serious about making progress to stop the lockout, there’s a bit of a hopeful vibe going in regards to the 2022 MLB season. Even though I’d be perfectly happy to lose games if it means the players getting a fairer deal, it seems like the wheels are moving and things may actually get resolved somewhat soon. All of this is to say that I’ve been working towards my 2022 Spirit set design.

This is year number 11 for me in doing this fake card company. And as you can expect, having just a singular person in charge of all the design decisions can lead to a bit of burnout. Maybe not burnout so much as the well getting a little bit shallow. While I’m not tied to 70 years of history and nostalgia like Topps, there are a few consistent guidelines I’ve imposed on myself through the years to help rein in the brainstorming a bit. For the Spirit flagship set, it’s been stuff like full-bleed photos, design elements that use actual team colors, and a solid composition that’s interesting enough without having to lean on “effects”. On that last bit, I do add some textures/effects to the design but only afterwards to help the cards look contemporary to the era instead of flat like the “golden era” of cards.

All told, I ended up with 4 different designs to weigh and ultimately choose. They all have their merit but none of them were jumping out at me, screaming “THIS IS THE ONE.” So, I made a Twitter poll in an attempt to narrow down the good and the bad. Let’s go through them one by one.

The first crack at it was this one I dubbed “metal tabs” in said Twitter poll. There were a few Spirit designs that are somewhat similar to the basic bones here. It’s a bar across the bottom of a full-bleed photo with team colors added to the shapes, team logo and the player name plainly but tastefully included. The rounded edges to the color blocks give this a little bit of a late 90s/early 00s feel, especially the screened accolades tab on the bottom right for applicable players. Compositionally, I’m really happy with how I’ve resolved the task of included all of these informational elements. The only flourishes are the metal textures and the beveling around them I added to make everything a little more contemporary. It’s a solid design but there must’ve been something missing because I kept on plugging away with others after putting a bow on these.

My next stab (“target practice”) was the simplest of the bunch. I took a page out of the 92 Stadium Club playbook and had just the smallest little imposition of design rising up from the bottom corners. Keeping with the Spirit standards, the tab became the team primary color. I added a little circle tab for the logo and connected both elements to make it look like a little spinner thingy. For the names, I had to find a typeface that was somewhat condensed to begin with since the tab wasn’t super wide. I went with one that had a variety of weights and widths (Dharma Gothic) because, as you can seem from the Vladito card, there are some really long names that would show up across the whole set. It definitely looks better on TUCKER and INDIA, but it passes on GUERRERO, JR. With the tab already crowded, I had to use the circle for the player position and didn’t find a good spot for the accolades. This was the winner on the Twitter poll, which totally took me by surprise. Mostly because this is the least designed of the group.

The third bunch here (“take off”) was what I figured would win the Twitter poll. It ended up getting the fewest votes… So it may be time to pack it up, Ross. I guess I might have been unduly influenced by the knowledge that this one took me the most time to design. Not the final product, but the journey from idea to finished design. There’s still a lot I favor here. It does the best job balancing the colors. The names are more readable here than the previous two designs. I dunno, it just scratches that itch for me of being nice and compact without being boring. The accolades treatment really works for me, too. Maybe people didn’t like it because it looks like something else I can’t place? Who knows. The only thing that jumps out at me is the fact the design elements reach the two bottom corners, which is something I’ve done more than once before.

Finally, we have “bubble waves,” which is the outlier of vibes in the group. It’s unabashedly more playful than the other entries, with the big colorful waves rolling off the left and right edges. The big blocky text for the names is different, too, as the other cards featured more condensed typefaces. So while this is definitely not a Spirit flagship design, it did prove to be popular enough that I’ve already decided it fits perfectly with the Clubhouse feel. You’ll be seeing it on this blog in the future, with some modifications to fit that line even more appropriately.

With all of that to chew on, there’s still some work to do before I “officially” unveil the 2022 Spirit flagship design. I’m not sure if I should do with the masses and tweak the “target practice” design or go with one of the others by executive order. Regardless of which path I take, there’s still another 26 teams to make cards for along with a card back or two. And while progress has been made by the MLB and MLBPA, I’m guessing there will be plenty of time before I make that official post. See ya then!

Goodbye, 2021

Happy New Year, all. As many do when the calendar turns over at the end of December, I’m looking to let go of the past and look forward to the future. So here’s a look at some of the 2021 Spirit cards I made that didn’t quite get polished enough for a proper post.

First up is the Spirit Deluxe Duos dual autograph cards. Not a lot to these other than adjusting the elements of the Deluxe base design to accommodate two players and their sigs. The primary/secondary team color marble spaces add a little bit more interest here.

Next we have the Spirit Hall Marks insert, featuring guys that are approaching some statistical milestones that are close to shoo-ins for induction. Now, I really doubt Nelson Cruz gets the call, but the fact he’s just 2 average seasons away from 500 is kind of an eye-opener. And of course, Max got his 3,000 Ks this year (though in a different jersey). As for the design, the cool thing here would be the embossed placard portrait that mimics the actual plaques in the hall. They’d look a lot better printed than I could render them here.

Lastly, this WARriors insert didn’t really make it past the first draft stage. There’s not a lot of “there” there, but I figured I’d share rather than memory-hole it. Plus, Gausman’s not a Giant anymore, so I can’t exactly resurrect it for 2022. Assuming there is baseball in 2022…..

Anyway, those are the loose threads of 2021 neatly tied up here in one post. I’m not sure what the whole Spirit project will look like in 2022, but I’m guessing I’ll start getting the itch in a month or so to start working on a new Spirit base design. Beyond that, I’m open to anything.

10 Years of Spirit Trading Cards

I’m not sure how it didn’t dawn on me before now but I’ve been doing these fake cards long enough to have made 10 years worth of Spirit base designs. This fake card company has had its ups and downs along the way. Years where I made dozens of unique base, insert, parallel designs as well as years where I pumped out close to the bare minimum to keep this whole thing afloat. A lot of that has to do with life in general as well as the ebbs and flow of my passion for baseball and the collecting world. Lately I’ve found myself spending more time tweaking other stuff rather than spending time on wholly new designs. Perhaps the inspiration tank is running low. Nevertheless, I still love designing cards and plan on doing it in some capacity so long as I have the time.

That said, I thought it’d be nice to have all 10 of the Spirit base designs in one place to see the journey a little more clearly.

Seeing the progression from the 2012 Belt to the 2020 Margot, I can honestly say that none of them are embarrassing (which was definitely a fear). Is there room for improvement? Oh, most definitely. Are a few of them similar and/or derivative? You betcha. Could you rearrange the order without them looking drastically out of place? Probably. Am I proud of them? Without a doubt.

I’d love to see these ranked like one of those polls/lists/tournaments that pop up from time-to-time discussing Topps and their 70 different base designs. It would definitely be more objective since there aren’t biases like childhood nostalgia or print technology advances to cloud people’s choices. Maybe I’ll take the time put something like that together.

Welcome to 2021

In honor of the first Spring Training games of the (pre)season, I figured today would be a good day to share the Spirit 2021 designs. I’ve decided to scale back from last year and just make a card for each team here instead of making one for every single card on the checklist. This means I’ll have more time to tackle other designs like inserts for this set as well as some of the other releases I’ve done in the past (Clubhouse, Pennant, Deluxe). I also tackled just a couple of the backs — one pitcher, one batter — since those may get a little boring looking at 30 in a row.

As I try to do with the Spirit line, the base design features full-bleed photos with team colors and team logos as well as the player name prominently featured (and easy to read). The home plate shape for the logo took me in the direction of these diagonal elements for the team colors and name plates. The idea is for the design to add some visually interest and give the info room to live without getting in the way or overpowering the photo. Ryan Mountcastle and Dylan Carlson have the standard RC logo I’ve been using on Spirit cards for years, tucked into the top corners to balance the design as a whole and not crowding the bottoms.

The backs are full-color with the same colorful diagonals from the front. I pared down the bio information so it could fit in the secondary bar and leave room for a fuller career stat record. I also reintroduced a feature from previous years where a player’s accomplishment from the previous season can be easily highlighted (Maeda’s All-MLB 2nd Team honor, Solano’s Silver Slugger award). Obviously every player won’t have such a notation but the space will still work if empty.

As 2020 taught us, plans are futile and we’re all living in a nonsensical simulation, but my intention is to have a good number of card design posts in this space throughout the upcoming season. Even as the hobby and world have made some huge shifts in the very recent past, making and sharing these cards is something that brings me joy, so hopefully there’s plenty more to come.