Uni Watch: The coolest baseball cards of the year

From SABR member Paul Lukas at ESPN.com on July 12, 2012:

Everyone loves baseball cards, whether they’re made by Topps, Donruss or Fleer. But what if I told you that the coolest baseball cards of the past year weren’t made by any of those companies, but were instead produced by a 30-year-old European woman who’d never even seen a baseball game until five years ago?

That’s the story behind Left Field Cards, the increasingly buzz-worthy project headed by Amelie Mancini, a pixie-ish artist who grew up in France and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her cards aren’t conventional baseball cards — they’re postcard-sized and they feature themes such as ballplayers with mustaches, ballplayers with “edible names” (Darryl Strawberry, Jim Rice, etc.) and my favorite, ballplayers who’ve had bizarre injuries (all non-game-related). The cards are fun and playful, plus you can mail them to friends. They’ve become so popular over the past nine months or so that Left Field Cards has become Mancini’s full-time gig.

All of which is pretty remarkable given that Mancini was completely baseball-oblivious when she arrived in Brooklyn in 2006. Some friends invited her to join them for a Mets-Phillies game the following year and it turned out to be a life-changing experience.

Read the full article here: http://espn.go.com/blog/playbook/fandom/post/_/id/6053/the-coolest-baseball-cards-of-the-year



Originally published: July 12, 2012. Last Updated: July 12, 2012.