Archive for the ‘Kansas City Royals’ Tag
This is an original design I did to use exclusively on Royals minor league players. My plan is to familiarize myself with prospects in the Royals minor league system by posted one of these “Prospect Watch” cards of them and doing a quick blurb about them as well. To choose Tim Melville, I just looked at the Blue Rocks roster to decide and simply picked a name I had heard of.
The Wilmington Blue Rocks are a high single A affiliate for the Royals so the players they have still have a couple more steps before making it to the big leagues. Melville appears to have his hands full at that level this year though. He has posted a 4.56 ERA so far with a record of 8-8 in 24 games. He has tossed just over 100 innings and has struck out 83 with a WHIP of 1.56.
As I will always reccommend; if you want to know more about Royals prospects, head over to The Pine Tar Press. It is a great site featuring prospects from all levels and the amount of knowlege about them on that site is amazing.
Salvador Perez got a surprising call to the major leagues and made his debut on August 10, 2011 against the Tampa Bay Rays. The game might forever be known for what happened in the 9th inning but it really doesn’t matter all that much.
Perez collected his first major league hit in a 1-3 effort at the plate that included a sacrifice fly that resulted in his first career RBI. His biggest contribution came with the catcher’s gear on. He picked off two base runners wandering too far off base after pitches. One of which was the tying run on third base at the time. One was at first and one was at third base and it should also be mentioned that he narrowly missed a pick-off on second base as well.
I can’t even imagine the excitement when a baseball player gets the call to the big leagues. Salvador Perez got the call last night and I heard he said he couldn’t talk for 2 hours. This is a shocking call-up to me. I am very excited about it. Here are a couple cards I have made of Perez so far. Tonight he will get his major league debut card as I have done for the other 10 Royals to make their major league debut this year.
When Manny Pina made his major league debut on August 3rd I posted this card. I said that Johnny G was next to get a major league debut card, I never thought it would only be 2 days later. Gio landed with a splash the same way Manny Pina did. He went 2-3 with a double for his first major league hit. He also drove in a run, stole a base and looked comfortable in the field. His scrappy Dustin Pedroia-like play is sure to win over Kansas City Royals fans. His call-up got a lot of momentum of late, so fans were really excited to see him in the lineup. It was great to see the infield of Hosmer-Giavotella-Escobar-Moustakas, that is a lot of young talent on one field.
1955 Topps is an interesting set. The cards are all sideways, one of very few sets ever to do that. The card also features two pictures and a signature. The one picture is typically a close up and the second is a full body shot. Most of the full body pictures were the typical baseball card poses, a pitcher having just thrown, a batter in his backswing, etc. They are all poses of some sort. The solid color background is a gradient and were usually red, green or yellow. The pictures on the card were usually painted looking. I don’t think I achieved the “painted” look and I think that is the most difficult part of re-creating these early cards.
I recently picked up a couple Paul Splittorff rookie cards and immediately thought of doing this with the design. Splittorff’s rookie was the nice black 1971 Topps set. He was on a dual rookie stars card with Jerry Cram. I couldn’t resist the urge to do this card with Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer. Right now Hosmer is a lot more of a rookie star than Moustakas but they are both everyday players in the major leagues and are well deserving of this card.
Will Smith’s no-hitter on Tuesday made me dig out this card I made this spring training. At that time I really thought that either Everett Teaford or Will Smith were going to make the opening day roster.
1971 Topps is an amazing set. I have consistently called it my favorite set design of all time. That still holds up today. It was really the first year Topps used action shots on their cards and they had some great action shots too. This particular card is from the very first set I ever did as custom cards. I did a set that year and didn’t do anything with it. I never had a site to post it on so it just got buried on my hard drive. I should post some of the cards from this set because many of the players are long, long gone. I can’t remember the exact time frame but I believe it was right around the time the Royals traded Mark Teahan which would put it at the end of the 2009 season I think. It would be roughly a year and a half before I would dig the set out and I haven’t changed a thing on them since I made them. I recently added the signature on top of Soria’s card to be true to the original design but the picture and design was done a couple years ago. This Soria is likely one of the first 5 cards I ever made.
This was a tough one to re-create. It has an inset picture like 83-84 Topps, a very thin pinstripe around the baseball field shaped picture and name block, a two tone Topps logo, a rounded corner and a white glow around the edge of the picture. All this adds up to a difficult card to create. I cropped a picture that would have fit better on a sideways card to fit a portrait card. I think this makes the card really nice. You don’t see many cards cropped like this but I feel it really works. I think I will pull this template out and do a few cards with it because it looks so nice.
I’m done! This is the last of my 1983 Royals Topps set. I have posted a 1983 Topps card for every person to appear on the Royals 25 man roster this year. It is currently a total of 34 cards. With the trade deadline approaching I’m sure this set will need expanded on, I can’t wait to add Lorenzo Cain and Johnny Giavotella. Until that happens, the set is complete.
This is an original design I did to use exclusively on Royals minor league players. My plan is to familiarize myself with prospects in the Royals minor league system by posted one of these “Prospect Watch” cards of them and doing a quick blurb about them as well. To choose Tim Melville, I just looked at the Blue Rocks roster to decide and simply picked a name I had heard of.
A Hair Off Square 