A Hair Off Square   custom cards

A request! Jim at The Phillies Room, who I have posted about before, asked me if I could do a Pete Orr custom card for him. I was more than happy to do it. A big part of my fuel to do custom cards comes from the other people on the web doing custom cards, namely Goose Joak, CSD and The Phillies Room among others.

The request was Pete Orr. So who the heck is Pete Orr? He is a utility infielder for the Philadelphia Phillies. He is not a young guy, a Canadian who first played with the Braves in 2005 and is in his first season with the Phillies. He is getting more field time thanks to an injury to superstar Chase Utley. This is the exact reason teams love guys like Pete Orr. The most interesting thing about Pete Orr? He has hit exactly .253 in 3 of 5 Major League seasons.

This is also why I really like custom cards. I can spotlight a guy like Pete Orr, normally he wouldn’t even get a card unless it is in a very large set. I don’t know if Topps will even have a Pete Orr card this year. It looks like he had card in 2006, 2007 and 2008 but apparently has missed the honor the last two seasons. We will just have to see about 2011.

Here are a couple overpaid NL guys. Both can be good but it seems they are both often disappointing. Garza signed a huge free agent contract with the Cubs and gives them a solid arm but he got ace money in my opinion even though he is a 2 to 3 starter in a rotation, once again just my opinion. I hear how great Jose Reyes is all the time but all I ever see is him on the DL or making outs in key situations.

This completes my big cluster of 2011 Just Fair cards. I set my goal to do 10 new cards and I have now posted 11 if you count my correction of the Zack Greinke card originally posted yesterday. I would like to do this more often, it is time consuming though. My Just Fair checklist has just expanded to a balmy 60 cards. 60 is far short of where I would like to see it end up but it is an impressive number for this point in the season. I am thinking up parallel cards to start slipping in so keep an eye out for those.

Paul Konerko kills the Royals every year, I get tired of it. Michael Pineda faced the Royals a few games ago in KC. He was throwing gas and looked really hard to hit. I don’t really look forward to seeing either of these guys against the Royals.

The NL West is always competitive. Here in the Midwest we don’t see these teams much on TV. I would say it is because they play late games but we all know it is because no teams get national televised exposure except the Yankees, Red Sox, and Phillies.

Here are some enemies from the AL Central. Miguel Cabrara looks bigger every time I see him and not in a Frank Thomas way, more of a Pablo Sandoval way. Brandon Inge is one of consistent guys that just always seems to be around, it seems like he has been with Detroit forever now. Carlos Santana is in my mind the best young catcher in the game. I am not forgetting about Buster Posey, Santana is real good, he is a switch hitting catcher with power. He really reminds me of Victor Martinez in many ways.

This is the Zach Greinke card I posted yesterday except I fixed one small mistake on my part. I put the foul pole on the wrong side. I keep in mind the foul pole of these cards when I am cropping the photos and I planned on having it on the right but happened to put it on the left. I like the card much better this way. It is a nice sample from the set.

No rhyme or reason here, just more cards to add to the set. I wanted to do a Greinke pretty bad for some reason, maybe I secretly still like the guy. I think this may be the first mention of him since the trade which oddly coincided with the creation of this website. Maybe the Greinke card is because I am thinking about the trade a lot right now. I think I am ready to jump on the Lorenzo Cain  needs to be called up bandwagon, we’ll see after tonight’s game in the Bronx, it will have to be a chatty post.

Troy Tulowitzki is a monster, he is really good, it is hard not to like a guy like him. Miguel Tejada is random, I was just shocked to see the Giants were playing him primarily at shortstop still. At this point in his career I would think he is definitely third base material, if not DH.

I wanted to do something related to Mother’s Day and didn’t quite know what to do. I thought about trying something about players’ moms but quickly realized that would be way too hard and not make a lot of sense. Then I thought about what baseball does, the pink bat. I could just do a couple of my Just Fair 2011 cards and use pictures of pink bats.

This would actually involve breaking a personal rule of mine. I like to use current pictures. This was something I envisioned when I started my Just Fair set. I wanted to use almost all pictures from the current year and mostly pictures from within a couple days of when I post the cards. I wouldn’t be able to get pink bat pictures from 2011 unless I wait until late in the day I think, so I decided to use pictures from the last couple years. I just needed to be sure all the players were still on the same team.

So here is my tribute to Mother’s Day. Pink Bats to benefit breast cancer which has become a tradition now. I like the idea and the fact that it is special to Mother’s Day and I really hope it continues.

Max Scherzer shut out the Yankees tonight. Probably a career highlight for him, rightfully so. The Yankees payroll is equal to about 7 or 8 other teams I think, maybe more. This means they should be good. I hate the Yankees and I wish them nothing but the worst of luck but with the amount of talent they have they should be winning games.

Scherzer absolutely knocked them on their ass tonight which delighted me. Scherzer is even out of Mizzou and this game will do more for me being a fan of his than that. Anyone who makes that bunch of overpaid losers look foolish is alright by me.

Congrats Max, here is Just Fair 2011’s tribute to you.