Night Owl Cards

    You may have heard that there is a new documentary out on artist Dick Perez, who is well-known for drawing the Diamond King cards for Donruss through the 1980s and 1990s.   I've seen the trailer for the movie and I might watch the whole documentary, but it's not appointment-viewing for me. "Diamond Kings" are a big part of childhood for collectors of a certain age and SABR has been hyping the project, but I've never been interested in the Diamond Kings.   I wrote about this once before, 13 years ago now , and my thoughts are still the same mostly. As a short recap, I first viewed Diamond Kings in 1982 as a 16-year-old when I bought packs of Donruss. I was instantly puzzled by seeing drawings on baseball cards, which had always been photos since I started collecting. I didn't like it, I didn't like the cards. They didn't seem like a full card to me.   I've come around a little since then, mostly by appreciating the first two editions of Diamond...

I'm told that today is baseball card artist and illustrator Dick Perez's birthday. My brief research was only able to turn up a birth year on Perez, not a date. But this guy seems to know, and he's a big Diamond Kings fan, so he probably knows more than I. I'm already on the record as not being a Diamond Kings fan. There are a few reasons for this. The first is, while Diamond Kings are huge favorites among those collectors who were young kids when Donruss first started producing Diamond Kings, I was a junior in high school when they first showed up. And you know how 16-year-old boys like to tear things apart. The world isn't "oh, wow, COOL!" anymore. It's more like "what the f&%# is THIS?" The second is, I will always be a "photography over illustration" guy. It's not that I don't like drawing. I LOVE drawing. I've done it a lot and am a semi-adequate sketcher. (But I've written about that already ). I ...