Author: njwv

My sixth post featuring Spanish-language baseball cards released in the United States. I didn’t intentionally plan on posting a bunch of these during Hispanic Heritage Month but the timing just worked out that way. Previous posts are:

1. Introduction and 1978 Topps Zest
2. 1993–2000 Pacific and Pacific Crown
3. Other assorted Pacific cards and oddballs
4. 1991 Kellog’s Leyendas
5. 1994 Topps and beyond

After Pacific stopped releasing bilingual cards in 2000, Donruss picked up the Spanish-language mantle in 2002. From 2002–2004 Donruss released a small 100–150 card set* of Spanish-only cards.

*Set count depends on whether you think short-printed “base” cards count as the main set.

Since this is exclusively in Spanish I have fewer comments to make except to note that comparing the Spanish-language abbreviations across all the cards I’ve covered in this series reveals that there’s no real standard in terms of what each stat means. Some cards say “AVG” while others have “PRO.” Some have “D” and “T” versus “2B” or “3B.” It’s clear that part of being a Spanish-speaking baseball fan is to have a certain flexibility for the multiple names that each statistic has.

Anyway the best example for this flexibility is how on previous cards I’ve featured Home Runs have been abbreviated as HR or called cuadrangulares, in this case Donruss has abbreviated them as JR for “jonrón.”

Donruss’s 2003 offering is much the same as the 2002 one. My same observation about stats applies here. Where Topps has used G and P (ganado and perdido) for wins and losses, Donruss uses V and D (victoria and derrota). All equivalent to words that we use in English (wins, losses, victories, and defeats) but as someone whose understanding of the game came from stats I’m kind of amazed now that stats in English are so standardized.

I think the only thing that comes up as a standard variant in English is SO vs K. And yes this variant exists in Spanish as well where Donruss uses K while Topps used P for strikeouts.

Donruss also had inserts in its sets. Surprise surprise this one is called “Leyendas” as well—making it the third different “Leyendas” set I’ve mentioned in these posts.* The text here feels a bit more like it was written in Spanish rather than translated from English and is an example of “cuadrangulares” being used for home runs. Also of note is that where the other Cepeda Leyendas cards have all mentioned him winning the “MVP,” this one says “Jugador Más Valioso” instead.

*Yes I have an Orlando Cepeda card from each of them.

And in 2004 Donruss mailed it in with a third Spanish-language set the indicates how low a priority this set was for them. Yes, this is a completely different card than the 2003 card. No I wouldn’t fault anyone for thinking they were the same.

To be fair, the checklists between 2003 and 2004 aren’t identical. But there’s also nothing new for me to comment on with the 2004 set.

It’s been 14 years now since the last Spanish-language set. With all the #PonleAcento action and Latino fan outreach in the past couple of years,* I’d love to see a new set come out. A checklist like Pacific’s which focused more on the Latino players would be cool but even a 200-card Topps Latino could be fun at this point. I’d be first in line to get it for my kids to help them with their Spanish lessons. And I’d love to add a few more posts to this series as well.

*Though it’s been impressively difficult to actually find a #PonleAcento shirt available for purchase.

Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of those brand-name famous artists whose work I’m familiar enough with to recognize when I see it in a museum but who I otherwise don’t actually know much about. I only have a sense of him being a “graffiti” artist who transitioned to painting.

Last winter I started seeing writeups about the big show at the Barbican. So I started skimming; those kind of retrospectives—when done right—are an easy way to get a bit more context about an artist and even the reviews of them tend to be pretty educational. In this case, the writeups often mentioned how before he made it big he sold defaced baseball cards outside MoMA for a buck. Interest seriously piqued. I needed to check out the catalog once it arrived at the library.

The baseball cards are part of a larger project called “Anti-Product Baseball Cards” consisting of postcards that Basquiat and Jennifer Stein collaborated on. They’d make a collage consisting of printed material, paste four of them on a letter-sized page, photocopy the page, spraymount the copy to cardboard, then cut it into fourths to create four 4¼”×5½” postcards.

Basquiat was a visual-literacy sponge who remixed everything he saw—from academic “high” art to mass-produced disposable items—into new creations. This feels extremely familiar now since it’s the core competency of the internet but 40 years ago when color photocopying was not only new but expensive* so this kind of remixing had a higher barrier of entry.**

*At a couple of dollars per sheet, Basquiat and Stein would have have to sell 75% of their inventory to break even.

**Though it’s worth noting that this is a long-standing thing in photography and there’s no surprise that many of Basquiat’s postcards include photographic material.

What’s particularly notable about Basquiat is how broad his visual literacy was. folk art, western art, indigenous art, african art, advertising, graffiti, packaging. Everything was fair game.

The Anti-Product Baseball Cards in particular tend to operate more on the pop culture side of things. Basquiat draws from mass-produced art—not exactly vernacular art since it’s being produced by professionals but not at all what people consider Art™—and turns the designs back from being products to art objects.

So we have items that we recognize as being ubiquitous and effectively valueless—e.g. product packaging—turned into something new and distinct. That Baseball Cards are both the subject of many of these postcards and the title of them is especially noteworthy. Unlike other Pop Art which foregrounds design that people don’t think of as art and puts it into a museum space,* Basquiat’s work is still semi-mass-produced and intended to be purchased and traded.

*e.g. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans.

My takeaway is that “trading card” and “baseball card” are often synonymous. Baseball cards are part of our common visual and cultural literacy. Tapping into the ways they’re produced and distributed while messing with all the branding and productization aspects is a way of both asking what it is that we’re collecting and pointing out how familiar we are with them. Outside of the collecting world baseball cards just are. They’re the kind of things everyone recognizes and is aware of but which few people take the time to look at and see. It’s only after someone changes the context and de-productizes them that they get interesting.

If whiting out all identifying information makes these anti-product, the implication is that face, team, and brand information is what makes these “products.” This feels about right to me. These aren’t about Baseball,* they’re about the object, how it’s distributed, and reclaiming the process on a more personal level.

*A point of view which sets them apart from the current crop of baseball card vandals who are having fun but are also very much fans of baseball too.

Basquiat’s art literacy came mostly through books—meaning that he learned via mechanical reproductions of artwork. I love the idea of using mechanical reproduction to transform mechanical reproductions into art themselves.

A note on the “checklist”

Aside from the two images in the catalog I’ve only been able to find one other image of Basquiat and Stein’s cards online. It’s not high enough resolution to inspect properly but it does kind of look like all the cards are from the 1979 Topps set. JOE is Steve Henderson. JERK is Bob Randall. I haven’t combed through the other small images here to figure out the rest.