Baseball Card Hall of Fame
January 17, 2011 7:44 AM   Subscribe

Baseball Card Hall of Fame
A new tumblr that recognizes the long-ignored achievements of baseball cards. Fewest Last Names! Deadliest Mindrays! Best Zach Galifianakis Impersonation! And so forth.

This started as a Secret Santa goof; I pulled out one of my boxes I made up a little twelve page booklet for my recipient, and by the time I was done I realized I liked the idea itself a lot, and so I've cranked out a bunch more, organized my cards a bit, and started this blog.

With the cutup baseball card theme, this is a sort of spiritual successor to my old project Buntcake, but a lot simpler to produce; each entry is one or two cards + xacto knife + gluestick, hand-lettered and run through a scanner, so I don't have to futz with much and I'm done producing a given entry before I get tired of it.

I collected baseball cards as a kid, particularly between 1988 and 1990 (and I've got a lot of Donruss from those years to prove it), but at the time I didn't really know why I was collecting them. It's possible it started with a gift from someone who figured that's what 10 year old boys do.

What I do know, looking back with clearer eyes, is that I didn't remotely care about baseball (at least not unless robots were involved); I didn't really care about trying to find out if my cards were valuable, let alone haggling with shop clerks or other kids for money or trades; but I sure did like sorting things, and baseball cards with their index numbers were eminently sortable. If I'd had this revelation back then I probably could have gotten myself some library card catalog drawers and been happy reindexing them.

So this project is a more honest appraisal of my relationship with my card collection than anything I did with it as a kid. These are weird artifacts of a culture I don't follow, that I don't know why I own; why not treat them as a sort of Rorschach and try to find something meaningful and maybe funny in them on my own terms, divorce the card content from its purported cultural context?

Plus since I was ten when I got these things, I can use that as an excuse to giggle about poop jokes.
posted by cortex (6 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
This project was posted to MetaFilter by jjray on January 17, 2011: Baseball Card Hall of Fame

You told me the idea last week and for some reason I thought it sounded like a ho-hum sort of idea but my god the execution is fantastic. Way funnier than I thought a stack of old baseball cards could be.
posted by mathowie at 8:21 AM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


My god man, thank you for this.
posted by IvoShandor at 9:29 AM on January 17, 2011


this is neat, though as a fan and completist i would like it even more if you tagged them with the names of the players.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:28 AM on January 17, 2011


I know you mentioned it on the MFC boards, but I'm glad you decided to run with this, cortex.
posted by JauntyFedora at 10:36 AM on January 17, 2011


as a fan and completist i would like it even more if you tagged them with the names of the players

I'm not totally against the idea, maybe I'll try doing that going forward. But practically speaking I don't know who most of these guys are, and once the bit of card art I'm using has been separated from the remaining bits I have no idea how to reconstruct that identity, so the stuff so far is mostly doomed to taglessness if it's not one of the few guys I actually recognize.
posted by cortex at 10:41 AM on January 17, 2011


An excellent use of the mass quantities of these old cards that so many people have lost in their closet space.
posted by nickthetourist at 7:31 PM on January 17, 2011


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