Hib Collins Baseball Card by Matt Fulling
On Display at the Oakland Public Library in April
The 2012 Baseball Season is upon us. Oakland resident, Matt Fulling, will get everyone in the spirit by displaying baseball cards he has designed himself. Both players from bygone years and celebrated newcomers will be featured. The cards will be on display in the Oakland Public Library’s lobby during the month of April. The Library is located in the Oakland Municipal Plaza.
Matt’s work was featured in an Article of The Inside Game by John McMurray. Read the article below and click here to read the article and see more of Matt’s historic cards directly in The Inside Game.
Chairman’s Column: Finally, the Baseball Cards You’ve Been Waiting For
By John McMurray (deadball@sabr.org)
One of the more challenging areas of Deadball Era research is locating high-quality portraits of lesser-known players. The Pictorial History Committee’s Player Image Index Project has taken a great leap forward in this regard. Still, while it is relatively easy to locate photos of most star players, finding sharp portraits of, say, Bill Coughlin or Doc Casey, among others, can be a challenge.
SABR member Matt Fulling has been working since 2003 on a baseball card set which may one day make this task easier. Fulling, who joined SABR in 2005 and is a member of both the Deadball Era and Pictorial History Committees, has been collecting mostly head shots of Deadball Era players and compiling player biographical information to be included on the backs of the cards. Since all of the photos that Fulling has located are in black-and-white, he has been colorizing them in the hopes of bringing the Deadball Era to life for a new generation. Many of the players included have never been pictured on cards before. It takes a few hours for Fulling to complete each card, including the colorization and computer enhancement of the original photos.
“What I intend to do with the cards is to introduce many of these players, even the more popular ones, as if you stepped back in time and saw them in their day. Seeing a colorized portrait—I avoid profile images if I can—is to me the best way possible, if done right.”
Fulling’s interest in Deadball Era players was inspired several years ago by a computer game called “Earl Weaver Baseball,” which contained great players from all periods. Reading The Ballplayers by Mike Shatzkin and The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence S. Ritter deepened Fulling’s interest in the Deadball Era. Playing another game, called OldTime Baseball, which allowed users to import images of vintage players ultimately motivated Fulling to begin this ambitious project: “I spent my time gathering images for the game, and when the game got tiring, I decided that creating a card set of my own would be something that would outlast the computer games.”
Part of Fulling’s motivation in creating the cards is to appeal to generations with little connection to the Deadball Era. He believes that younger fans of the game would be more likely to gravitate towards a card set of Deadball Era players than they would be to a book. He also tries to include the story of the player on the back of each card so that readers may answer the question: “Who was this guy, other than the numbers he posted?”
Fulling, who works in Information Systems for UPS as a project coordinator, has been collaborating with some SABR members as a part of creating these cards. Steve Steinberg has provided feedback and Hall of Fame bio clips for a number of the cards and has helped Fulling to obtain photos from the Detroit Public Library and private collectors, while Mark Fimoff has been helping with the player identifications. Fulling also had relied on Marc Okkonen’s Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century in order to ensure that he has the uniform colors correct. Player identification can be a real challenge, as Fulling found when the Spalding Guide happened to have confused the photos of Cy Morgan and Benny Bowcock, an error which Fulling was able to correct with the help of Fimoff as well as Bill Hickman of the Pictorial History Committee.
The project potentially includes more than the Deadball Era. Fulling would like ultimately to create colorized cards of all players from the 1880s through the 1940s. “I don’t know what a full set would entail,” Fulling says. “It is an ongoing project with no end in sight.” Fulling has completed more than 500 colorized card to this point.
In obtaining images, Fulling has relied on the Hall of Fame Library, the Bain collection at the Library of Congress, the Detroit Public Library, and private collectors. He has recently focused on Paul Thompson photographs, which were used for the classic T205 tobacco cards that were issued between 1909 and 1911. Sometimes, he uses his software to isolate photos of particularly obscure players from team photographs, as no other images may be available.
Currently, the cards are not available anywhere, but Matt hopes they can be available one day as part of a SABR offering. Doing so would require securing licensing from Major League Baseball and from other copyright holders before they can be offered to SABR members.
As the set expands and evolves, Fulling would welcome additional help on identifying players and providing information for the card backs. He believes the set could serve a valuable role in providing the stories of players who were not including in the two Deadball Stars volumes previously published by the Committee. Anyone who would like to help with the project can contact Fulling at mfulling@optonline.net.
Out of what originally a project created for himself and his son, Fulling now has the start of a card set which may one day become a valuable resource for Deadball Era researchers. “It’s been my dream for more than five years to get these cards out there,” says Fulling. “For some time, I’ve wondered what it was like to watch a game 100 years ago and see the players. Using computerized technology, I am able to achieve it as closely as possible.”