A Hair Off Square   custom cards

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.

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.

If you noticed all the pink bats this week you probably knew I was working toward something. This is a short print variant of the players regular base cards. These players have base cards with pink bats that are their regular cards. These 10 players also have a pink border variant that you see above. It is the ultimate Mother’s Day tribute. I purposely tried to get random players, as I am trying with this whole set so it isn’t all the huge names that have this short print variant. I ran with this idea and got it done, I don’t know how much I like the pink border but it isn’t like I made a whole set like this or anything, it is just something to break the monotony.

I’m not going to do a lot of these. I have dubbed this “subset” simply “Heroes.” I am working on variations for my set now to try to keep it fresh for me and the readers. I don’t have a ton of heroes but Cal Ripken is probably at the top of the list no matter how long it is.

The “Heroes” subset is will be numbered along with the original set but as I said, there won’t be many of them. I’m thinking maybe 3-5 cards will be it. This means I likely won’t have a Micky Mantle or anything like that in this set. This is something Topps is doing now, inserting several retired players into their sets. This is a great idea but is a little overused.

He has always been my favorite player. I have literally hundreds of cards of him and countless magazines, figures and other collectibles like that. I got his autograph during his last season and it is one of the highlights of my life. It just hit me all at once, “I have my own card set, Cal Ripken has to be in it.”