Archive for May 2011
A few quick notes on this post and the post immediately below it: Brian McCann hit a walkoff home run in the 11th inning tonight so he gets the Just Fair treatment. Ian Kennedy and Wandy Rodriguez are both players from teams that amazingly didn’t make the first 75 cards of the set. The Carlos Pena picture is amazing, maybe one of the best in the set. John Danks is a funky picture that caught my eye as an interesting one so he made the set. Adrian Beltre makes the set and is proving me wrong, I predicted he would be one of the worst free agent signings of all-time but he is producing. I will re-visit this in September and see where the situation stands.
It seems like a very appropriate day to pay tribute to Paul Splittorff. News of his current health is not good. He was a great pitcher for many years with the Royals and continued to be active in the Royals organization. I always really enjoyed Splitt as a commentator, he was very insightful but it looks like his broadcasting days are officially behind him now.
This is the first “Royals Greats” tribute card I have posted. This is actually my very favorite from the whole set too. It is an original design that I wanted to be very flat and simple. I wanted to come up with something that had a 1970’s-1980’s feel to it. I did 36 cards of the 36 greatest Royals in my opinion. I will start posting them occasionally.
I like Raul Ibanez, I always have. He used to be a Kansas City Royal. That seems like an eternity ago but he was. If I recall correctly he really wanted to stay in Kansas City when we sent him toward Seattle. He was a guy that didn’t have much value when he was a Royal but had a couple good seasons and built up his stock as a Major League Baseball player.
He has been a Phillie for a couple years now. He had done well for them overall, he is currently struggling batting just around .230 but I’m sure he will heat up and end up around .270 like he has the last couple years.
I chose 1985 Donruss pretty much randomly. I had a vector Phillies logo so I chose a Phillie to put on the card. I was making summary pages for “History of Joakim Soria” “Just Fair 2011” and “Custom Card of the Day” when I realized I hadn’t done a custom card of the day for a while. This is why I chose to do this.
I experimented quite a bit with the picture for this 1953 Topps card. The cards from the 1950’s had a noticeably painted look. I’m not sure if this was because of the inability for higher quality photography or if they actually painted all of the master pictures. Either way, they have a very distinct look. I tried to replicated this look with an autotrace feature in Illustrator and limited the amount of colors I used. I think I used something like 8 colors for the picture of Soria seen here.
The actual card is very basic but I tried to devote some time to getting an interesting look for the picture. I definitely don’t think I nailed this one but either way I was happy with the result and deemed it good enough to be my next chapter in the History of Joakim Soria.
Chad Billingsley threw a one-hitter against the Diamondbacks last night. The only problem was that he still lost. He gave up a double to Stephen Drew and tried to pick him off and made an error. Drew scored and the Dodgers didn’t, that would have to be a horribly frustrating experience.
Victor Martinez is killing the Royals. Who is really killing the Royals is the Tigers pitching. Verlander and Penny absolutely shut the Royals down the last two games. The Royals reward? Facing 6-0 Max Scherzer, but wait, here come the clouds, here comes the rain and it is a Sunday without baseball. The Royals officially went 0-2 in Detroit and will go home.
The Royals took 2 of 3 in New York so the road trip was a successful 2-3 record. The bad part? 3 losses and just 2 runs scored in those three games. The good part? In those 3 losses, Royals pitching gave up only 9 runs. Infact they gave up 3 runs in each of their 3 losses. A major league team should be happy with that and they should win a very good amount of games like that. Bottom line is that the bats went cold and the Royals lost. Cleveland on Monday.
Pepsi Max Can featuring Royals legend Frank White also known as "A Can Of Frank"
This may take a bit to explain…
First of all I will explain the reason for my post. I have a WordPress feature that shows me traffic on my website. I often look at this to see what articles people are reading and what links are getting clicked. This feature also show incoming links, outgoing links and search terms used to find my site. The search terms are what is really interesting, you would be surprised how often a surfer searches for “Zack Greinke hair” and ends up on my site.
Today someone searched for “pepsi max commercial royals player” This really got my attention because I would like to know who that Royal is as well. During Royals games and I’m sure many other ballgames and programs there is a Pepsi Max commercial with a “Field of Dreams” theme. If you haven’t seen it allow me to explain. CC Sabathia is walking through a cornfield and comes across a clearing full of legendary baseball players. These players include but aren’t limited to: Babe Ruth, Jim Thome, Ozzie Smith, Dennis Eckersly, Ricky Henderson and Randy Johnson. A second commercial has since come out featuring Rollie Fingers and Evan Longoria.
In the commercial you get a glimpse of a Kansas City Royal in the background during one frame. It is never really clear who this Royal is. I know what you are thinking, “George Brett” but NO, you are wrong, the Royal is a black player. So lets go down the list; Willie Wilson, Frank White, Bo Jackson, John Mayberry, Danny Tartabull, Willie Aikens, Hal McRae, Jermaine Dye…ok this is getting out of hand, I’ll stop.
In my mind there are only two real options in that list; Frank White and Bo Jackson. Bo is a real possibility because of his incredible fanfare in his brief career. We all know about Frank White’s eight gold gloves too.
This commercial just happens to co-inside with a Pepsi Max promotion that you see pictured here. As Ryan Lefebvre so eloquently puts it: “A can of Frank.” This is a soda can available in the Kansas City area right now. This can is the reason I believe that the Royal in the Pepsi Max commercial is indeed Frank White.
Wow, I’m outta breath after all that. I would love to know everyone’s opinions on this and especially if someone has some solid answers.
So one of the very first cards for my “Just Fair” set was a Royals card, naturally, and I have decided to change something. For each team the color bar that is the background for the player’s name, team and position is a little bit different. For the Royals I chose a light blue and a dark blue. I have decided to go away from this color scheme. It just doesn’t quite do it for me. I changed it a little and instead of just hoping nobody would notice I am re-posting the three Royals cards from the set so far with the new color scheme.(Francoeur, Hochevar, Hosmer)
Oh, and while I am at it; let’s change the Eric Hosmer picture as well. Eric Hosmer is a major league player now and he deserves a major league picture. The spring training picture just doesn’t cut it for me. I posted it right after I heard he had been summoned to KC and that pic was all I had. I think this picture is more appropriate. Let’s just call that first Hosmer a short print for the set.
This one is interesting. I have mentioned before how much I like using unorthodox pictures, this definitely fits the bill. 1988 Topps was a basic set, no many frills but not to the point that it was boring. The team name is over the picture which is different than most Topps years. This had to be taken into consideration when chosing the photo. To a lesser extent, it was important to make sure the diagonal name in the bottom left hand corner didn’t cover up anything important.
I think the reason I like this card is the fact that it has tension. Soria’s full body is on the card but he is about to explode into a pitch and it looks like the space on the card won’t be able to contain him. This picture is taken right at the top of the windup where he is about to explode toward the target. The picture was obviously taken while Soria warmed in the bullpen before entering the game. The picture is also reminiscent of Zack Greinke’s Sports Illustrated cover from his Cy Young season.
A few quick notes on this post and the post immediately below it: Brian McCann hit a walkoff home run in the 11th inning tonight so he gets the Just Fair treatment. Ian Kennedy and Wandy Rodriguez are both players from teams that amazingly didn’t make the first 75 cards of the set. The Carlos Pena picture is amazing, maybe one of the best in the set. John Danks is a funky picture that caught my eye as an interesting one so he made the set. Adrian Beltre makes the set and is proving me wrong, I predicted he would be one of the worst free agent signings of all-time but he is producing. I will re-visit this in September and see where the situation stands.
A Hair Off Square 