2017 PENNANT BOX BREAK - PACK 9

278. Carlos González

27. Zach Britton

147. Adam Jones

145. Kyle Schwarber

116. Jason Grilli

138. Seung-hwan Oh

204. Kevin Pillar

15. Aaron Sanchez

51. Dee Gordon

TB5. Jose Quintana - Throwbacks

This is the AL East pack apparently. I really like the Carlos González photo. It fills the frame perfectly, keeping all his limbs unsevered and even getting the ball in frame. The only thing that could make it better is if the Wrigley ivy behind him wasn’t all brown.

THIS IS THE REMIX: 1989 Donruss

Oh, hi there. Long time no blog. Just to bring you up to speed, I'm going to make my first 2015 Spirit post some time in February. But if you don't wanna wait until then to see the 2015 design, I'm in the midst of posting a card a day on my Instagram. Once all 30 teams are up, I'll do a standard post here discussing the designs and whatnot. In the mean, I thought I'd revive the long-dormant feature known as "THIS IS THE REMIX."

1989 was right when baseball cards entered my universe. Up to that point I had acquired a few random cards from either my dad buying me packs or cousins tossing me some of their duplicates. Just stuff stacked along with my Batman trading cards. But the summer 1989 is when I started paying attention to baseball. I would look for wax at every convenient store I entered, saving up quarters and dimes to buy a pack whenever I could. There was a gas station three blocks from my house I could ride my bike to whenever I had 54 cents burning a hole in my pocket. They usually had a box of both Topps and Donruss there amongst the candy. I seemed to favor Donruss. They were more colorful than '89 Topps and they came with a freaking puzzle. How could I resist?

I'm not really sure if there's a consensus regarding the '89 Donruss design. Obviously it's not a masterpiece but I don't seem to recall it garnering hate like so many other designs of that period. My guess is the color strips are kind of endearing. That and the fact that it's not cluttered with unnecessary design elements like little baseballs, Super Mario tubes or paint splatters. All in all it's a pretty simple design, but there's still room for improvement.

The basic build is the same but with just a few minor tweaks. We still have gradient color bars sweeping horizontally from edge to edge. My first decision was obvious – change the colors to team colors. Call me crazy but if you're gonna have the colors vary from card to card, might as well make them fit the player and their uniform. As I continued to tinker, I thought about having the top and bottom bars go opposite directions, i.e. the Braves would go red to blue on top and blue to red on bottom. It wasn't horrible but it just didn't quite work. Then I had the notion to fade each bar to black instead of the opposite team color. Perfect. It put the team colors on opposite corners and kept the whole gradient motif without affecting readability.

After having the black in the corners, I played with the tiled line edges. I made sure to lighten them up so they're visible no matter the ink saturation. On a lot of '89 Donruss cards, the edges just look solid black. Making them fade from black to a light gray would help with that and it really tied into everything else at that point.

I decided to go with team cap logos instead of their primaries. The thought behind that is to try keeping the logo from getting too big. Look at that big, boxy Braves logo from 1989. That thing takes up a lot more space than the A does. And since the logos do dip down into the photo a bit, I thought it would be best to have the option to flip the design to accommodate any particular photograph. For instance, the Mariners logo would cover up the helmet bill on Kyle Seager's card if I had gone with the normal orientation.

The final change was the picking a new typeface. After going through several, I landed on Klavika. It's definitely more modern looking than the previous font but still has some of that same "square but not really" flavor to it. I made the names all caps and just added a bullet after, followed by the player position. It really bugs me how the position is a different typeface and smaller on the '89 cards. Problem solved.

Overall I think this has been one of the smoothest remixes I've done. That probably has a lot to do with the starting point. I've always chalked my '89 Donruss fondness up to nostalgia but I'm starting think it was just a secret little gem in need of a polish.

Summer Standouts

Time to switch gears a bit and introduce another insert for the Clubhouse set. This one is called Summer Standouts. Every team is represented here but by a player who may not necessarily be the #1 player on their squad.

As you can tell from the design, we're really playing up the 'kid-friendly' angle here. We've got a bright, sunny sky and a nice patch of grass framing the top and bottom. The player photos here are the standard stand-and-smile shots from the team photo days at the start of the season. These are very friendly and just give a nice, welcoming feel to the cards. The team-color fence from the base design also made its way over here, though its space has been reduced to make room for the other elements. The player name is in a big, chunky sans-serif with their position in all lowercase beneath.

On the backside, the grass patch has extended upward a bit and the player photos are action shots during day games to keep that sunny feeling going. Player name, position and team are laid over the fences, which fade out for a brief write-up.

Pretty simple insert set. No foil or diecuts or sparkliness. Checklist is below. This may not look like the most appealing set to most collectors since there won't be anybody like Jeter or Braun, but there are still some pretty popular guys from stacked teams.
SS1 - Wandy Rodriguez (HOU)
SS2 - Torii Hunter (LAA)
SS3 - Clayton Kershaw (LAD)
SS4 - Matt Cain (SF)
SS5 - Mark Teixeira (NYY)
SS6 - Alex Avila (DET)
SS7 - Yadier Molina (STL)
SS8 - J.P. Arencibia (TOR)
SS9 - Brian McCann (ATL)
SS10 - Franklin Gutierrez (SEA)
SS11 - Justin Morneau (MIN)
SS12 - Kevin Youkilis (BOS)
SS13 - Jay Bruce (CIN)
SS14 - Jayson Werth (WAS)
SS15 - Carlos Gonzalez (COL)
SS16 - David Price (TB)
SS17 - Daniel Hudson (ARZ)
SS18 - Michael Young (TEX)
SS19 - Billy Butler (KC)
SS20 - Chase Utley (PHI)
SS21 - Logan Morrison (MIA)
SS22 - Rickie Weeks (MIL)
SS23 - Darwin Barney (CHC)
SS24 - Neil Walker (PIT)
SS25 - Gordon Beckham (CWS)
SS26 - Daniel Murphy (NYM)
SS27 - J.J. Hardy (BAL)
SS28 - Coco Crisp (OAK)
SS29 - Asdrubal Cabrera (CLE)
SS30 - Clayton Richard (SD)