From the Pedro Binder

1999 Stadium Club

Another Stadium Club card, another great picture.

Sure, there’s nothing exceptional about the picture itself. It’s a fairly routine shot of Pedro getting ready to fire another strike. But, it’s perfectly cropped to make sure the focus is on Pedro. Even the fact that the crowd behind him is blurry makes Pedro just pop. The information on the card is as unobtrusive as I’ve seen it. The Stadium Club logo, while centered horizontally, is low enough to be out of the way. The main design elements of the swooping line and the baseball seams are so unobtrusive that I didn’t even realize there were baseball seams there until I started writing this. It especially helps with this card that the mound provides an obvious area to stuff all the non-picture stuff. The team logo in the upper corner is opaque, to make it blend into the background. All this makes the most important part of the card actually seem like it’s the most important part. Well done.

This picture also clearly shows how Pedro used to cut the sleeves of his uniform. All the better to unleash his fastball. Oddly, he didn’t seem to cut the undershirt. Wouldn’t that also be restrictive? I believe Pedro was eventually yelled at for altering his uniform. But, I don’t recall him changing. I remember thinking it odd that the Sox didn’t create an “alternate uniform” with cut sleeves to wear during Pedro starts. I’m sure everyone on the team would be willing to cut their sleeves, if it made Pedro pitch better. I seem to remember a team (The Reds, maybe?) doing something similar when one of their stars cut the sleeves of their uniform. They went to a sleeveless shirt, so that everyone would look the same. I also thought it was weird that the sleeves weren’t “finished” off a bit. Did Pedro literally just take a knife and slice them up himself in the clubhouse? He couldn’t ask one of the uniform guys to finish off the edges a bit? Maybe if he did that it would definitely be a uniform alteration. This way, maybe he could claim the shirt just “ripped” due to the force of his fastball.

I’d probably believe him.