From the Pedro Binder

2001 Stadium Club Capture the Action

I loved Stadium Club. I know I’m not alone in that feeling. To me, they just made cards the way they should be made. They focus in the picture, and not the noise around it. Even on an insert set like this one, they still keep the picture front and center.

The Stadium Club logo and player name are tucked onto a colored border on the bottom. In fact, if you look closely enough, you realize that it’s not even a colored border. The red is translucent, so you can see what’s going on behind it. Even when Stadium Club is forced to obscure the picture, they make sure they don’t really do it. The name of the set is stuck out of the way at the top. It’s not scrawled in gold foil across the middle of the card. It’s not printed four times in various sizes all around the card. It’s just there, so you know which set it’s from. They put it inside a pennant because, hey, it’s baseball. Like the red on the bottom, the pennant feature allows as much of the picture to be seen as possible. Almost the entire top can be full bleed. Fantastic.

My only slight problem is with the picture selection. For a set named “Capture the Action” there’s not a lot of action in the shot. Sure, Pedro’s in the middle of his delivery, but the shot doesn’t scream movement to me. Pedro’s base card in both the 1999 and 2000 Stadium Club sets both suggest more “action” to me than this one, even though they are just shots of different points in his delivery. I get that there aren’t a lot of times a pitcher is truly active. He’s not leaping to make a catch, or avoiding a runner as he turns a double play. But, I think they could have done slightly better with this one.

If that’s my only complaint, it must be a good card.