More Snack Cakes (Of The Hot Stove Variety)

Up until this week the baseball hot stove has been fairly quiet, so I haven’t done a huge number of my 2023-23 TSR Hot Stove custom set, based on the design from the 1987 Drake’s Big Hitters / Super Pitchers set.

You can see the original post here, but to recap quickly the general idea is to make a set that sort of summarizes the baseball offseason, with my objective to make it look like something that might’ve come out in the 1980s, including the primitive-by-today’s-standards photo manipulation.

There’s actually not a lot of photoshoppery going on in this batch of customs, but I’ll be up front about such things as we go along.  BTW, I’ll be sharing these in the order I made them.

After Dusty Baker’s retirement, the Astros turned to bench coach Joe Espada to assume the managerial duties.  Since Espada has been in uniform it was just a matter of picking out a photo I liked.

Eugenio Suarez going to the Diamondbacks wasn’t exactly a blockbuster deal, but I like Eugenio for reasons I don’t really understand.

Like with the Astros, the Padres hired from within when replacing manager Bob Melvin (whose custom was in the previous post).  Again, it ended up a matter of finding a good image of Mike Shildt to use.

Getting back to the Diamondbacks, they unveiled new uniforms for 2024 which weren’t complete overhauls, but significant enough.  There are more alternate uniforms than what I’ll be showing here, but this is the new base home uniform.  One particular element got a big old “Ewwwww” from me.

So the key thing is that Nike is introducing a new jersey template for 2024, and it involves narrower plackets (the part around the collar and buttons where the fabric is doubled over).  Because the plackets are narrower it means that the piping around the plackets (forming the “head spoon” or the “baseball piping” or whatever you might want to call it) are closer together than they used to be.  I can’t explain why I hate this, but it just got an instant negative reaction from me… it just looks like crap.  As a comparison, you can kind of tell by scrolling back up and look at Eugenio Suarez, who’s got a “head spoon” from 2023.

Here’s the base road uniform for the D-Backs.  Largely an upgrade except for the piping.

Another managerial opening, another spot filled from within.  Pat Murphy has a certain old school look about him.

I finished this Juan Soto custom in the hours before the trade became official.  While I removed the hue from his Padres uniform to approximate the navy cap & pinstripes of the Yankees, I left the Padres collar on his uniform because it’s the kind of thing Topps would’ve done back in the day.

It’s interesting that when you take Padres pinstripes and effectively colorize them, they still don’t look like Yankees pinstripes.  I think the Padres pinstripes are narrower and spaced a touch farther apart.

One final custom that isn’t my best work, but I felt like I needed to get it out here… Shohei Ohtani with the Dodgers.  I expected Ohtani to go to the Dodgers but it was still a bit of a letdown. The Blue Jays or Giants would’ve been a more fun destination.

It just so happened that Ohtani is #13 in my set and I’d say that would hopefully be a bad sign for the Dodgers (not for Shohei, I have nothing against him), but those years of Dodgers being card #666 in a few Upper Deck sets didn’t seem to have any lasting effect on those bums.

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…