2010 RobbyT Cards: Brent Dlugach & Ryan Strieby

Found a couple more. Brent and I went to college together. I'm pretty sure he's the only U of Memphis Tiger to ever play for the Detroit Tigers.


I'm pretty sure Ryan Strieby is not.....

2010 RobbyT Cards: Jacob Turner & Phil Dumatrait

A couple more from the weekend. I drafted Turner today in my keeper league. I think I'm in love. I haven't even seen a Bowman card from this guy yet.

File Dumatrait under one and done......

2010 RobbyT Cards: Wilkin Ramirez

I'm beginning to think he's never going to make it with the Tigers.


I didn't realize that this was the third year I made one of his cards.

2010 RobbyT Cards 3-10-10

Here are the latest from sunny FLA.

Don Kelly has been having a nice spring so far.


These are for you Mr. DeArmond.

I have to stay on the ball in Spring Training to get photos of some of these cats because they may not be seen in a Tigers uniform again all season. I hope Mr. Sborz is one of those fellows.....

2010 RobbyT Cards Are Here!

It's been a harrowing night around here, as a roofer fell through my ceiling this afternoon, but the cards are finally signed off on and I'm looking forward to getting started and getting more out as the 2010 Championship Season gets underway!!!

2008 RobbyT Cards

2008 was my first year living in Chicago and I was able to go out and catch a bunch of Tigers games. I went to 7 games here against the White Sox, as well as trips to New York and Detroit. I also started blogging for the first time in '08, so the Tigers' last place finish notwithstanding, it was a great baseball season for me.


This was my biggest set to date, checking in at 73 cards. I really like the look of the base cards, but I'll admit I mailed it in on the Highlights, Down On The Farm, and Negro Leagues Tribute Cards. The cards of Ordonez and Verlander are my favorites, as I was at both of the games pictured. The Ordonez pic was from my only trip to Yankee Stadium. The Verlander pic was from a cold, rainy, nasty Saturday afternoon game against the White Sox early in the season that I went to with a bunch of great friends (the game where Gavin Floyd took a no-hitter into the 8th inning).


The 2009 RobbyT Detroit Tigers:
1 Denny Bautista
2 Yorman Bazardo
3 Francis Beltran
4 Jeremy Bonderman
5 Eddie Bonine
6 Miguel Cabrera
7 Brent Clevlen
8 Francisco Cruceta
9 Freddy Dolsi
10 Jeff Farnsworth
11 Casey Fossum
12 Armando Galarraga
13 Freddy Garcia
14 Gary Glover
15 Curtis Granderson
16 Jason Grilli
17 Carlos Guillen
18 Mike Hessman
19 Mike Holliman
20 Brandon Inge
21 Jacque Jones
22 Todd Jones
23 Matt Joyce
24 Chris Lambert
25 Gene Lamont
26 Jeff Larish
27 Jim Leyland
28 Aquilino Lopez
29 Zach Miner
30 Magglio Ordonez
31 Placido Polanco
32 Ryan Raburn
33 Wilkin Ramirez
34 Clay Rapada
35 Edgar Renteria
36 Nate Robertson
37 Fernando Rodney
38 Ivan Rodriguez
39 Kenny Rogers
40 Dusty Ryan
41 Ramon Santiago
42 Dane Sardinha
43 Bobby Seay
44 Gary Sheffield
45 Marcus Thames
46 Clete Thomas
47 Justin Verlander
48 Dontrelle Willis
49 Joel Zumaya
50 Highlights Dontrelle Willis
51 Highlights Curtis Granderson
52 Highlights Carlos Guillen
53 Highlights Todd Jones
54 Highlights Miss America
55 Highlights Tigers Meeting
56 Highlights Tigers Win
57 Highlights Adopt A Hottie
58 Highlights Mickey Lolich
59 Highlights Booblehead
60 Highlights Carlos Guillen All-Star
61 Highlights Jim Leyland All-Star
62 Highlights Farewell Tiger Stadium
63 Highlights Magglio Ordonez
64 Highlights Placido Polance
65 Highlights Ozzie Virgil
66 Highlights Mike Hessman
67 Highlights Gary Sheffield
68 Down On The Farm Ryan Perry
69 Down On The Farm Rick Procello
70 Down On The Farm Ryan Strieby
71 Down On The Farm Dontrelle Willis
72 Highlights Todd Jones
73 Negro League Tribute Bobby Seay


It was a great year for me as a collector. I went to 4 card shows here including the National. I also bought my last pack of cards in September, making it over a year now since I've bought any packs/boxes. I had a lot of fun at the card shows picking up old Tigers cards that I didn't have before. I also bought alot of oddball 80's stuff that I enjoyed collecting when I was a teenager: Topps Stickers, Fleer 44 Card Box Sets, and Donruss Action All-Stars.

The New Blog

I've started a new blog which is solely dedicated to RobbyT Cards. I didn't want to "soil" this blog by posting cards of other teams here and since I've now got two full season's worth I thought it was time to start getting some of them out there.

http://robbytcards.blogspot.com/

I'll be posting my cards from 2008 and 2009 over there for the next few months. I'll debut the 2010 cards sometime around Opening Day.

Please check it out and enjoy!

P.S. Pictured here is a 2009 RobbyT Justin Verlander. Once the season ends I'll do an entry here on the entire team set.

2007 RobbyT Cards

Just to make it perfectly clear, even though I love to bag on the card companies when they make a crappy looking card, don't think for one second that I'm not afraid to judge myself in the same fashion.

These flat out suck.

The bad part is I don't really know how it happened. It just sort of did. I had a design, then started tweaking it a little bit here, and then a little bit there, and next thing you know......I ended up with this crap. But at least I never sold them 6 for a $1 and had 14 different variations of the Neifi Perez card....

The 2007 RobbyT Detroit Tigers:

1 Jeremy Bonderman

2 Tim Byrdak

3 Jose Capellan

4 Sean Casey

5 Eulogio De La Cruz

6 Chad Durbin

7 Gorkys Hernandez

8 Curtis Granderson

9 Jason Grilli

10 Carlos Guillen

11 Mike Hessman

12 Omar Infante

13 Brandon Inge

14 Todd Jones

15 Jair Jurrjens

16 Wil Ledezma

17 Jim Leyland

18 Aquilino Lopez

19 Mike Maroth

20 Cameron Maybin

21 Macay McBride

22 Jose Mesa

23 Andrew Miller

24 Zach Miner

25 Craig Monroe

26 Magglio Ordonez

27 Neifi Perez

28 Timo Perez

29 Placido Polanco

30 Mike Rabelo

31 Ryan Raburn

32 Nate Robertson

33 Fernando Rodney

34 Ivan Rodriguez

35 Kenny Rogers

36 Ramon Santiago

37 Bobby Seay

38 Gary Sheffield

39 Jordan Tata

40 Marcus Thames

41 Virgil Vasquez

42 Justin Verlander

43 Joel Zumaya

44 Tigers Special Ernie Harwell

45 Tigers Special Al Kaline

46 Tigers Highlights Justin Verlander No-Hitter

47 Tigers Highlights Maybin & Hernandez Futures Game

48 Tigers Highlights Neifi Perez

49 Tigers Highlights Rod Allen

50 Tigers Special Paws

51 Gene Lamont

52 Lloyd McClendon

53 Remember When Cecil Fielder

54 Remember When Alan Trammell

Yeah, these are easily the least favorite of mine from the 4 years I have made cards. I expanded the set to 54, and it's nice to see some cards of some guys who made brief appearances with us, but I'm not a big fan of this set. It looks too much like '89 Pro Set football gone horribly wrong.

I do like the Kaline card though. I doubt there was another one of him that year in uniform. (At the All-Star Game in San Francisco as an honorary captain) If my buddy Ed goes back to fantasy camp in 2010 I think this will be the card I pass along to see if he can get it autographed for me. I've never had one of my cards autographed before, and this would certainly be the one I would want to have autographed.

I wish I had more to write about these so I could post a lot more of them, but I don't. At least this last line will let me leave one more that's another personal favorite....

Dear Mr. Eisner

By now I'm sure you've had time to let the dust settle a little bit from the announcement that Topps will be the exclusive manufacturer of major league baseball cards in 2010 and beyond. So let's take this time to have a friendly little chat.

You see, I'm one of the adult collectors that your company ran off two years ago. No, I wasn't one of the crybabies who stopped collecting because they felt their cards "weren't worth" anything. I'm also not one of the morons who couldn't discern a box of Topps cards from a box of Upper Deck cards when I was shopping at Target. And I'm damn sure not one of the losers who blog solely to let others know what I've pulled from a pack of baseball cards, or even worse make a youtube video of it for Christ's sake.

I am one of the guys who collects for the love of the hobby. I am one of the guys who loves sitting down on Saturday afternoons and opening a box of cards while watching a baseball game, then writing down the missing cards I need to complete a set and trying to get those cards by trading with friends or splurging on a few more packs or maybe even another box. Unfortunately, I haven't been that guy for two years now, and it falls directly on the shoulders of your company.

I've told my story a time or two on the blogs, but never before have I had your ear, so I'll tell it again. (BTW, what lovely ears you have. Oh c'mon, you didn't think I wasn't going to slip in a Mickey Mouse pun or two somewhere in here, did you?)

In 2007, I spent approximately $400 buying boxes and packs of Topps Series 1, Series 2, and the Update/Highlights series. And what exactly did that get me? Well it got me 10 cards short of a complete set, that's what it fucking got me. I did however get a boatload of Kenji Johjima insert cards (check it out sometime, there were like 35 different Johjima insert cards...) as well as a dozen or so Joe DiMaggio insert cards THAT ALL LOOKED EXACTLY THE SAME!!! Talk about a Mickey Mouse operation.....(ok, I'm done with the mouse jokes...)

Well that was pretty much all it took for me to give up putting sets together, something I started doing as a 9 year old kid in 1978. Why on earth would I want to drop that kind of cash to put together one set? Hell, why did I? Especially if I can wait until August and pick up a factory set at Target for $50? After 2007 I quit trying to put together sets, which led to me qutting buying boxes, which ultimately led me to quit buying packs. It'll be one year next month since I bought a pack of cards and opened them.

I know you're a busy guy, so I'll try to keep it brief. I'm only going to ask one thing of you. It's not even a big thing.

Please see to it that the Topps base set returns to being an affordable and collectible product.

That's not too much to ask is it?

By affordable, I mean lets stop this 6 cards for a $1 nonsense. I work in printing. You should feel ashamed for ripping people off like that. 12-15 cards is more than a reasonable amount for a pack of cards that costs a buck. It ought to be a crime to go pick up $20 in packs of cards and not even get 100 base cards by the time you subtract doubles and inserts.

By collectible, I mean stop it with the enormous amount of of inserts, short prints, variations, gimmick cards, etc. that flood the Topps base set every year and make it impossible to finish a set. Once upon a time Topps cards sold for the simple reason that they were the best. Now that you've got no competition, you've kinda won that title back by default. How about acting like it now? Produce a great looking set with great players, subsets, and rookie cards and let that be the reason why people want to buy it.

Now I'm not asking for you to revamp all your products. There are always going to be folks who invest simply hoping to pull an expensive card out of a pack and brag about it to all their friends. There are always going to be folks who can't sleep at night until they've hunted down every possible insert and variation to complete a master set. There are always going to be folks who blog about what they got out of a pack of cards. (Neither one of us can help these clowns, but I couldn't resist the temptation to bag on them twice!) The best part is you've already got plenty of products to keep all these people happy.

But how about just returning the base set to the collectors who purely love the fun of collecting?

I know you've talked about returning the hobby to the kids, and I'm all for it. I'd just like to take this time to point that you've lost a lot of the adults over the past few years too. The adults with really good jobs, who like to spend money on little pieces of cardboard. How about doing something to get us back too?

Thanks,

RobbyT

P.S. I've enclosed a 2008 RobbyT Placido Polanco and a 2009 RobbyT Alex Avila rookie card just for you. Since I quit buying cards I just started focusing on making my own. What do you think?

In no way am I trying to influence you to give me the job of restoring the Topps brand back to prestige it once held. But if you think I'm the man, then I'm willing to give it a shot.....

2006 RobbyT Cards

Ladies and Gentleman, my first very own card set. 

It all started with me making a trip up to Comerica Park from Memphis for a Labor Day weekend series against the Angels in 2006. Nothing monumental happened during the trip with regards to my future as an aspiring baseball card designer. Well, nothing that I was cognizant of at the time anyway. 

Upon returning home after the weekend, I was perusing the game pics on the Detroit News website when I came across this photo of Curtis Granderson. I was at the game when he made that catch and and soon as I saw the picture my first thought was, "Wouldn't that look great on a baseball card?" And so the seeds were sewn.

I have had a career in printing for the last twenty years with fifteen of those years spent in desktop publishing. I worked in layout programs such as Quark and InDesign on a daily basis, so building a baseball card was certainly no challenge from a technical standpoint. All I needed to do was collect the photographs and place them into a design of my own. Unfortunately my desktop publishing experience didn't translate into me being a top flight graphic designer/artist. But I think I was able to use that to my benefit here, as it forced me to come up with a crisp, clean, and simple design, which regular readers of this blog know generally translates into me liking a set. 

I like to think this set pays a lot of homage to one of my favorite card sets of all time, 1981 Fleer. I don't think this is the best set I've ever designed in the four years I have been doing this, but as the first it will always be pretty special to me. It adds to the coolness for me that I was putting this set together during the fantastic post-season run of 2006. In fact, the little mug shots in the bottom corner were not in the original design, but before the post-season started, the Free Press made these available as downloadable masks that you could print off. So I downloaded all the faces, made a few tweaks, and voila! A set was born.

The 2006 RobbyT Detroit Tigers:

1 Jeremy Bonderman

2 Sean Casey

3 Alexis Gomez

4 Curtis Granderson

5 Jason Grilli

6 Carlos Guillen

7 Omar Infante

8 Brandon Inge

9 Todd Jones

10 Wilfredo Ledezma

11 Jim Leyland

12 Zach Miner

13 Craig Monroe

14 Magglio Ordonez

15 Neifi Perez

16 Placido Polanco

17 Nate Robertson

18 Fernando Rodney

19 Ivan Rodriguez

20 Kenny Rogers

21 Ramon Santiago

22 Marcus Thames

23 Justin Verlander

24 Jamie Walker

25 Vance Wilson

26 Joel Zumaya

27 Tigers Future Stars: Cameron Maybin and Andrew Miller

28 Tigers Future Stars: Brent Clevlen and Kevin Hooper

29 Tigers First Basemen: Chris Shelton and Matt Stairs

30 Tigers Hurlers: Chad Durbin and Mike Maroth

31 Tigers Specials: Gene Lamont

32 Tigers Specials: Dave Dombrowski

33 Tigers Specials: Mike Illitch and Ivan Rodriguez

34 Tigers Specials: Jim Leyland

35 Tigers Specials: Dmitri Young

36 Tigers Specials: Ernie Harwell

The downside about using the mask photos though was that there weren't masks for everybody that I'd already made cards for. So I decided to make up my own Specials cards with a nod towards the Fleer Specials of the 80's. Some are rookies, some recap events and the season, and some feature guys like the GM and owner who normally wouldn't get their own cards.

One final thing of note. When I was a kid starting out collecting cards, I never knew they were "classified" by dates. I just knew that there were baseball cards for different seasons, but I had no idea that they were labeled by the year of issue, and not the year that they recapped. I still get confused to this day when I am thinking about Topps sets from '76-'80. When I first designed this set, I referred to it as my 2007 set, but that never set right with me. The photos are from 2006, it was designed in 2006, and technically it was issued in 2006. So I have decided to call it my 2006 set. Being the designer does have it's privileges.....

Taking matters into my own hands

Sometime during the middle of the 2006 baseball season, as it became obvious the season was shaping up to be a special one, I decided what could be more fun than building my own Tigers' team set. I'd been in desktop publishing for almost 11 years and collecting cards for almost three times that long. I don't know how I hadn't thought of it earlier.

I started collecting the photographs from the Detroit News web site throughout the second half of the season and by November I had produced my own team set of 36 cards. Working for a printing company I was able to get my cards printed and professionally cut for the low, low price of free. Here's a sample of my favorite card from that set.

I was at the game where Granderson made this awesome shoestring catch. Being able to have that on a card kicks ass.

For my 2008 cards, I was able to expand my set to 45 cards. I was also able to find a wide array of pics to use so that I could capture pics showing the Tigers in throwbacks, Negro Leagues, and All-Star uniforms. Here's a sample of a 2008 RobbyT Justin Verlander card.

All it took to design was a source for pics and a bootlegged copy of InDesign. All it took to produce was an outdated Kodak Approval proofing system, a t-square, and a razor blade, and voila, I had my own team set. 

One of the coolest things about making my own cards was knowing that I was finally able to get my hands on a whole set of 1/1's. Another was being able to have a card highlighting Neifi Perez's suspension for using PED's. Plus I didn't have to spend $200 opening packs to get a full set. 

There's certainly room for improvement with the designs, but I can live with the fact that my first two years were better than Fleer's.

Once I figure out how to upload a pdf, I'll get both sets posted.

If anybody else has done any card designs, send them along and I'll get them up.