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6-1-2006 Recently, I had a revelation: I can do anything I set my mind to. This familiar bit of parental encouragement had all but disappeared from my mind until recently. Generally, when children hear that phrase, they are too young to appreciate it. In fact, kids already believe that idea more so than the adults who share it with them. These same youngsters are the ones out in the backyard pretending to be pirates and professional athletes and astronauts. They aren't envisioning a life of pushing paper, finishing every conversation with "Thanks, have a nice day," or worrying about tomorrow's big presentation. And they certainly aren't stressing about the petty annoyances of office drudgery, like why a co-worker can stroll in ten minutes late, spend half the day on the internet, but still be treated just as well or better because they kiss enough butt or have the right connections. So, the belief you can do anything in life either fades away or is gradually beaten out of you. It just so happens that in all the time I've been collecting and dealing cards, I never gave much thought to actually producing or designing them. There have obviously been subsets and inserts that I've liked more than others. However, being on the flip side and having someone else actually collect a card that you designed must be quite a rush. We'll see what becomes of my dreams. Right now there are probably more card designers than positions in the market since Fleer went belly-up and Donruss didn't get their MLB license renewed. That means I'll have to stick to drawing on cards of Woody Held and Dick Pole, and hope more guys with names like Chien-Ming Wang come into the league. (That's a different story, and one which I'll probably never write about here.) But I would like to share with you a few ideas I had for future card releases. First of all, enough with some of the sissy names these insert sets are receiving. We've become oblivious to these titles we're throwing around. Stuff like Luminaries and Illuminators and Neophytes. Neophytes, please! I don't know what that even means, but it sounds like something Michael Jackson wants to start collecting. What could be next? Nerd Patrol? Bedwetters? Cute Little Bunny Rabbits? What happened to the good old-fashioned insert sets like Rejectors, Leather Company or Fence Busters? Those were some sets we could be proud to collect. With that in mind, here are a few subsets or insert sets I'd like to see: Bad MF'ers: This set would feature mugshots (digitally created, not real ones, which is sad that I have to specifiy anyway) of some of the game's dirtiest, cheating-est players. You could go retro with guys like Danny Ainge and Isiah Thomas, Ty Cobb, Conrad Dobler, even Eddie Harris from Major League. Meltdowns: Action shots of players losing their cool. There are plenty of players who wish their most memorable moments were a little more forgetable, but this set would capture forever the times when grown men acted like babies. Highlights would include Bobby Alomar, Kenny Rogers, Robin Ventura/Nolan Ryan, Milton Bradley, Albert Belle, Kyle Farnsworth, recent addition Michael Barrett, and very recent addition Brad Penny (Does walking half a mile with a bat while looking for something to hit take away a bit of the effect, or is it just me?). Let's not forget about the craziest of them all, the managers! This set wouldn't be complete without Lloyd McClendon and several cards dedicated to each Lou Piniella and Billy Martin.
From there, you could input all of the following: your team name, round when the player was drafted (or off the waiver wire), stats he earned for your team (most leagues have this sorted for you), even a homemade bio. I would kill to be able to write player bios. You could rub in how your draft day bargain put up way better stats than others who were drafted earlier, or how you ripped off one of your friends in a trade. And I'm not done yet. Imagine being able to put together your own team cards! Maybe it wouldn't be very easy to have the typical team picture, but I bet you could rig up a system to generate one of those cards where all the players heads are floating around randomly. You could also say what place your team finished and throw stats from your team leaders in each category on the back. Football owners could indulge themselves with a few Super Bowl cards. Wouldn't it be killer to have a Larry Johnson from 2005 touting his 3 TD, 200+ yard performance in Week 17 against a resting Bengals defense? Being a Larry Johnson owner and Super Bowl winner from last year, I'll answer that... Yes it would! Last but not least, the icing on any team set cake would be a card of the proud manager (or general manager). One quick uploaded picture later, you could put yourself on a card. There's another bio I would love to write. For my own, I might need one of those jumbo cards. Or if a friend and fellow fantasy GM was dumb enough to let you have a picture of them, you could make a card to commemorate how they drove their team into the ground, even finishing behind the guy who stopped playing his team halfway into the season. The possibilities for cards really are endless. I have no idea how the pricing system would work for a "make your own" card system, but I'm sure the companies could figure out both that and the technology to make it happen. There would probably be some quality control and editing involved as well. You couldn't have a BoSox fan hopped up on Dunkin' Donuts coffee creating 1000s of Johnny Damon cards playing for the NY F***wads or anything like that. But again, I'll leave it to the executives and lawyers to figure that stuff out. Like Owen Wilson, I'm an ideas man. Don't bring me down with your logistical negativity. Thanks for reading. Have fun! -T |
Inside My Brain