Another Spring Training TTM
March 8th, 2010 by slangon

2010 SlangKo Heroes of the Diamond John Maine Black Border

Here is the second of the 26 TTM requests that I sent on down to Port St. Lucie, this one being of John Maine, who I believe is pitching today against the Marlins. I’m actually very interested to see how he fares today. Pretty much outside of Santana, it seems that everyone in the Mets rotation is a big question mark, Maine included. He’s one of those guys though that I feel like when he’s on, he is awesome. Let’s just hope all his shoulder issues are non-issues.

Just because I’m sure that nobody outside of a Mets fan really cares about a John Maine autograph, I just want to talk a little bit about the card itself. I’ve mentioned before that I ended up sending out 26 autograph requests down to the Mets camp. Some of the guys I sent to I had already done or was already planning on doing a custom card of, such as David Wright. In those cases, I just sent them the card that I had done or I hurried up and finished the card that I was planning and sent that. There was also a group of guys, including John here, that I wanted to try and get an autograph from but I didn’t necessarily have any plans to make a card of. I don’t mean that as a slight on them, that was just the case.

In my TTM attempts in general, whenever I come across a guy that I decide I want an autograph from and he isn’t part of any of the custom sets that I’m working on, I fall back on my default autograph design, which is basically the SlangKo Heroes of the Diamond design, resized to standard card size. I’ve sent out many cards using this design in the past.

For some reason, I decided I wanted to differentiate this particular batch from the other ones I’ve done. Maybe it’s because it’s Spring Training, maybe it’s because these aren’t retired players, maybe it’s because it’s a new year. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I reverted to using black borders on this batch of cards, which I must admit, look pretty cool. The only bad part, which card companies have been dealing with for ages when it comes to black borders, is that they easily get chipped and dinged. I guess it’s too late to learn from others past mistakes.

Anyway, normally when I make these cards to be sent out for autographs, I print the card on a copier and then mount it on chipboard (the type of cardboard that cereal boxes are usually made of, but without the printing on it). With these black bordered cards, I though it might look weird having the black border on that grayish-brown cardboard color, so I set out to find black cardboard. The only stuff I could track down however was about twice as thick as the cardboard that I normally used, which made me slightly worried about mailing, but otherwise looked and felt really nice.

Here’s a comparison of the Maine card and one of the regular cards (you can click to enlarge it).

After seeing how nice this one looks, I can wait to hopefully start getting back some more that I sent. I think they’re going to look pretty sweet once they find their way into a binder page.

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