FREE! On Boxes Of Shlabotnik’s Snack Cakes…

My custom card-making has been spotty over the past year or two… to say the least.  One type of custom I always enjoy making, however, are the off-season ones where I test my amateur “photoshopping” skills (in quotes because I don’t use Adobe Photoshop) and create my annual Hot Stove set.

This year I wasn’t sure what design to use… In the past I’ve done these up like cards from Kellogg’s cards, 1974 Topps Traded, Bazooka, Post Cereal and even the occasional original design.

This year I wanted to do some sort of oddball set and cast my net far and wide, did some test runs of a few different designs and finally decided on using the 1987 Drake’s Big Hitters / Super Pitchers design… here’s an image of the real thing:

The funny thing is that it took my picking a custom card design to make me realize I didn’t have any of these cards.  I don’t know why, I lived in New York in 1987, was out of college and certainly capable of buying my own snack cakes.

Anyway, the general idea with these is not just to duplicate (more or less) an oddball card design from the 1980s.  I also want to make the digital manipulation of the photos look decent, but not *too* good.  There’s a reason for that… Most obviously, I do this for fun and I don’t want to take a huge amount of time on each of these.  I try to limit it to no more than 20-30 minutes per custom.

The other reason is that I aim to make it look something similar to airbrush work of the 1980s, if not in technique then certainly in the cheats I take to minimize my work .

We start off with the first significant move of the offseason, the Giants hiring Bob Melvin away from the Padres.  Word on the street was that Melvin didn’t always see eye-to-eye with the Padres front office and that bears itself out with the Padres saying “You want him?  He’s yours”.

This custom of Mark Canha is a perfect example of “working smarter, not harder” through photo selection.  Canha played for the Mets and Brewers in 2023, and I wanted something that looks kinda sorta like a Tigers uniform.  I was originally going to adjust the coloring on a Brewers uniform until I realized that there are a bunch of photos out there which show Canha in the Mets’ black alternates.  Some judicious cropping and a hint of a Tigers logo on Canha’s helmet and voila!  Instant Tiger uni.

For Craig Counsell I started off with a photo where he’s wearing the Brewers batting practice cap, one which has a fairly large round logo on it.  The Cubs logo on my custom ended up a little large because I was trying to match it to that logo as best I could in terms of size and perceived angle.

This photo of new Guardians manager Stephen Vogt actually comes from 2022 when Vogt was an active player with the Athletics.  That’s why there’s a green wall and a fragment of the yellow A’s logo behind him.  That’s also probably why he looks a little pained.

This custom of new Mets manager Carlos Mendoza turned out a little better than I expected… or more to the point better than it should given the crude attempt I made at colorizing the Yankees pinstripes.

And finally, Joe Espada had been Dusty Baker’s bench coach, so there’s no digital manipulation on this image.

Sometimes I think that one day we’ll all look back at this point in time and say “Hey, remember when pretty much every manager wore a hoodie?”

You might notice that the very top of the card went from “7th ANNUAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION” to “12th ANNUAL CUSTOM CARD EDITION”… That’s because this is, indeed, my 12th attempt to do some form of offseason set (even while I didn’t always call it “Hot Stove”).

There will be more of these customs at some point.  We shall see…