Baseball cards were the original NFT’s--cheaply mass-produced collectibles peddled to people with very little money by opportunistic huckters promising a speculative fantasy.
Unlike NFT’s, however, baseball cards were at least an actual physical thing, and there are a lot of them still floating around. And there was an attempt at creativity in the design and rendering of the data with which baseball is uniquely obsessed.
In this series, I used baseball cards from my collection as a child and worked backwards; if the folly in baseball card collecting was expecting the value of a mass-produced piece of cardboard to shoot to the moon, why not create instead a one-of-a-kind reproduction that sources its value from the time involved in the crafting a single object?
I focused on the backs of baseball cards because each set of detailed stats tell a story. While the intimidating rows and columns of decimals and abbreviations might seem like gibberish, I assure you that an 8-year old can pick it up with the proper motivation, and that in their own language, the backs of baseball cards convey the of the rise and fall of illustrious hall-of-famers, the seasons interrupted by injury, and the short arcs of careers that never materialized. Presented at Art on Paper 2022. Each baseball card is 2.5 by 3.5 inches drawn on 4 by 6 inch paper.