Hinchliffe

One of the fun things about being both the co-chair of the SABR Baseball Cards Committee and someone who makes his own customs cards is that my expertise in both design and production is something I get to share with other custom card makers. Since I don’t have a ton of trading inventory, I treat my expertise as part of what I add to the community since I can’t always add cards.

Last month, a new member to the community asked me for printing recommendations for custom cards. While I do my own with Magcloud, I used 4over4.com for SABR’s Mike Aronstein Burdick Award card since I wanted to print on C1s and use a thicker card stock. Plus I wasn’t only printing eight copies.

Donna (@TheLensOfDonnaM) is a new SABR member who, as a photographer, I hope to see adding another voice about photography to the blog. She was interested in printing cards on nice thick uncoated stock so I pointed her toward 4over4. When she got her cards back she asked me if she could send me a set and I was happy to accept.

Donna’s cards are of Hinchliffe Stadium which I was completely unaware of despite it being located only an hour or so away from me. I was aware of the Elysian Fields location in Hoboken and had begun to think about the locations of other stadiums such as the Trenton Giants park where Willie Mays played his first games as a member of the Giants organization. But hadn’t begun to think about things like former Negro League stadiums.

That Hinchliffe is still standing is very cool and Donna’s little set has inspired me to try and take a field trip there some time once such things are feasible to do again.

I especially like Donna’s back design which emulates the text-only backs of 1930s Goudey cards. It’s not an exact match, instead she chose fonts which are proportioned better for the modern card aspect ratio and, as a result, the text balance feels right. This is a subtle thing that a lot of first-time card creators would completely miss.

Very very cool and I can’t wait to try and see Hinchliffe in person.