A Love Letter To A Season
It’s Valentine’s Day, and so what better time to share my labor of love from the past year. I’m talking about my entry into the ring of “what if we made our own Documentary / ToppsNOW sets” – a crazy project that a few of us actual saw through to completion. There are several posts over at the SABR Baseball Cards blog, written by our wonderful companion Nick Vossbrink, and I’m sure that before long a (condensed) version of this post will make its way there as well.
So let’s talk about this stupefyingly large project which I finally finished last week. I’ve shared a few glimpses (well, several if you follow me on Twitter) and teased it in a recent post after completing the page layouts. So without further ado, I present it to you:
2018 Starchives
The Name
Documentary felt stiff, and my cards weren’t made immediately so the NOW nomenclature was definitely out. I wanted something that denoted the temporal nature of the set, but there’s already a Chronicles (Panini), and Daily felt weird (plus there’s already a lovely Astros Daily website), and while there were a couple other contenders in the running but I eventually settled on the portmanteau.
The Design
The Backs
I have to give a massive amount of credit to Nick here. I was stuck, and thought this might be the downfall of my set. I briefly thought about recreating the SP backs, then decided they weren’t all that great. I researched other card backs from the 1998 sets, and nearly went in on an extra panel of stats and complex bios like Score* before coming to my senses and realizing that I was adding an immense amount of work to what had been an already significant project.
So, I reached out to Nick and asked for a copy of his highlight backs. I made some design tweaks, changed colors and fonts, and gave it my own twist, but they are by and large his creation. I kept his vertical format, something which I think looks really neat when you flip through the pages in a binder.
For the roster backs, I began by adapting the highlight design. I moved the boxscore down and transmogrified it into a statline. Because it was a set specifically designed to chronicle a season, I went with single-season + career lines, leaving me room for a quick few sentences to summarize each player’s year.
I had to decide what exactly I wanted to showcase – I like to add a little bit of advanced stat** flair on my customs. I had briefly thought about making these backs vertical as well before deciding I wouldn’t be able to cram all the numbers I wanted into those narrow columns. For the player cards, I also added a “Stat Blast” below the statline, something that highlighted a more unusual statistic that was often pulled from Statcast or the Splits page in Baseball-Reference.
* They were still doing this in 1998! Go check one, there is a panel of fielding stats and splits!
** I used BRef’s WAR stat.
The Roster Cards
As a team collector – and someone with an audacious autograph project for said team – one thing I often lament is the lack of cards for the non-stars and bit players in a season. “Give me middle relievers! Give me third and fourth string catchers!” I cry. So, every single player that made an appearance with the Astros in 2018 – all 41 of them – has a card in this set. This proved a bit hard when sourcing photos, and I had to pilfer a couple 2017 photos* to finish these off, but I managed to get it done.
What’s more, I didn’t stop with the players, either. Yes, there’s a manager card – and I could have left it at that, but I made individual cards of the entire coaching staff, so that was another 9 cards. You want a challenge? Try finding a photo of the bullpen coach for your team in action. I had to settle for a photo day shot of Doug White.
* A.J. Reed (1 game) and Reymin Guduan (3 games). I did manage to find a shot of James Hoyt in his lone appearance, though.
The Highlights
The Filler
If you’ve been keeping track, that’s 41 roster cards, 9 manager/coach cards, 162 game cards, and 8 playoff cards. But that number is only 220, and that’s not divisible by 9 – I was in a quandry. 162 is divisible by 9, however, so I wanted to make sure the highlights started on a fresh page. So, this required a little bit of filler. I rounded out the player + coach section of the beginning of the set with a card of the stadium and the mascots. The broadcasters were also an option, but the card of Lil’ Bit – Orbit’s occasionally seen inflatable buddy – was just screaming to be made, with the photo featuring a pair of windbags (I’m looking at you, Country Joe).
The Inserts
With Houston having another excellent season, there were several All-Star cards to be made, which brought another 7 cards to the set: Altuve, Springer, Bregman, Morton, Verlander, Cole, and Hinch. I probably wouldn’t have shoehorned these in, but I got excited just prior to the game and decided to tackle another design for these. In the end, I reworked the great Future Watch rookie subset from SP into its own All-Star design. At first I thought I was crazy to try it, but once I figured out the layout I became really proud of these.
That still left me with 3 spots to fill to bring the set to another full page, so I made a few achievement cards as well. Again, I went back to the source for inspiration, and lifted the design from the Chirography autograph inserts in 1998 SP. Those feature a square photo with the autograph below, so I just extended the photo frame, making the picture larger. Altuve’s Silver Slugger award finished off the playoff page, while Bregman’s All-Star MVP and Home Run Derby appearance finished my All-Stars page.
The Checklist
- Card 1: Minute Maid Park, with team leaders listed on the back.
- Cards 2-42: Players, in order of appearance. We opened on the road, so I put the Opening Day lineup in order of their position designations.
- Cards 43-45: Orbit, Lil’ Bit, Bobby Dynamite (the train engineer)
- Cards 46-54: A.J. Hinch and the coaching staff.
- Cards 55-216: The full season, games 1-162
- Cards 217-224: Playoffs
- Card 225: Altuve Silver Slugger
- Cards 226-232: All-Stars
- Cards 233 & 234: Bregman All-Star highlights.
Awesome set! Love the way you cropped the Altuve Silver Slugger card and the Bregman Home Run Derby card. They're gorgeous! This would be a fun project… especially since it'd keep me on top of my beloved Athletics. But I'm not ready for another commitment right now.
Very impressive.. I’ve been following on Twitter. The cards came out great. Way to much work for me to ever attempt something like this. I commend your perseverance
Awesome. Congrats on finishing. I've been mailing my cards out to spring training this week.
I'm very envious of this project. I would love to be able to undertake one similar to it, but I think I'm too intimidated!
You should do the Cubs this year! Just roster cards. Nick and I can supply a template, and you'd just drop photos in. Or you could even just select photos and one of us could make the cards.
I need to get to sending a few out.
Thanks Mark! It'll definitely be scaled back in future efforts, but I can see this being something that I'll do for a long time.
Thanks Fuji! This was a really fun project indeed. You could totally handle an A's roster set. Join in this year! "One of us! One of us!"
Even though I've seen the progress of the set on Twitter, I still can't believe someone was able to create it all by themselves! Congratulations on the achievement.