2018 Clubhouse: Tampa Bay Rays

131. Chris Archer 

132. Matt Duffy

133. Kevin Kiermaier

134. Wilson Ramos

135. Blake Snell

Archer and Ramos are gone, leaving us room for, uh, maybe Joey Wendle? I guess Tommy Pham needs a spot, too. The Rays won 90 games...

Snell getting one of the auto spots was a blessing with the season he had. Ramos was tagged for the other.

Miss you, Duffman :/

2018 Spirit: AL East

I may be a little late getting it onto the blog here, but unveiling the 2018 Spirit base design division-by-division. First up is the AL East:

#205: Adam Jones, Baltimore Orioles

  #55: Andrew Benintendi, Boston Red Sox

#52: Aaron Judge, New York Yankees 

#20: Kevin Kiermaier, Tampa Bay Rays

#112: Russell Martin, Toronto Blue Jays

Taking a look at the design, it's once again borderless with full bleed photos. Since I've never done parallels for the Spirit base sets, I feel like the lack of borders is completely normal and cool and acceptable. All the player/team info is on a diagonal banner with a "fold" separating space for the team logo and text. If I'm being honest, it's pretty reminiscent of the 2013 base design. This time around, it's a little cleaner and less busy, mostly due to the lack of foil and font selection. I brought back the 'accolades' line for applicable players like Judge there. Personally, I think it's a cool way to easily show the real standout players from the previous year.

I also did backs for all but I'm just gonna show one example in this post for space's sake.

The angles and colors are here as well. The stat line is pretty basic stuff but with a few more "modern" inclusions like OPS+ and WAR (which is the Baseball Reference variety here). Benny here only has a couple of seasons under his belt so there's a small bit of text added in there. For longer tenured players, the stat box fills all the white space but I refrain from squeezing full career numbers on there because it's 2018 and the internet exists.

Gonna plow through the other divisions here since they're already all made up and ready to post. If I do any inserts this year, they will be very sporadic (especially since this is my first 2018 post and it's basically September). Once again, the pace catches up with me and kinda derails my big plans I have at the beginning of each year. So I'm gonna set my sights low for the rest of the year so I can not come up as short as normal. Stick around if ya want.

2014 Spirit Base: 616-630

#616 - Elian Herrera, #617 - Kennys Vargas, #618 - Matt den Dekker
The bad thing about these late-season photos is the abundance of empty seats in the background.

#619 - Stephen Drew, #620 - Jason Hammel, #621 - Wil Nieves
I tried to get a little bit of the crowd in the Nieves card so you can see he's tossing it into the stands.

#622 - Ike Davis, #623 - Randal Grichuk, #624 - Rene Rivera
I'm finding a lot of cool fielding shots so far. The Rivera one in particular is very dyamic.

#625 - Joe Panik, #626 - Endy Chavez, #627 - Kevin Kiermaier
I really hope Panik's season isn't just a fluke. Also, check out that carpet in St. Petersburg. So gross.

#628 - Nick Martinez, #629 - Munenori Kawasaki, #630 - Jose Lobaton
Look at all that red, white and blue. That Kawasaki sliding pic is a hoot.