These Monster Mash-Up Baseball Cards Are Freaking Incredible

We’re keen to guess that whether or not or not you suppose baseball, or baseball playing cards, are cool, you in all probability suppose monsters are cool. Who doesn’t suppose monsters are cool? And if an artist took a bunch of well-known baseball gamers and illustrated them as actually superior, creepy, scary monsters to placed on baseball playing cards, effectively, you’d in all probability suppose that’s cool too.

We hope so a minimum of as a result of that’s precisely what’s occurred. The artist in query is Alex Pardee, greatest recognized for detailed, stringy, brilliant artwork that’s normally creepy and scary even when it’s of one thing cute. This yr Pardee was recruited by Topps to assist with a undertaking referred to as Project 70, an initiative celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the corporate through which artists create distinctive baseball playing cards that might by no means have existed. Modern gamers on outdated designs, outdated gamers on new designs, or typically gamers in the event that they have been the Predator, a zombie, or a skeleton.

Matching gamers to a monster was not often straightforward. Sometimes, like New York Mets star Pete Alonso, it was. He’s already referred to as “the Polar Bear.” But for many others, Pardee needed to dive deep. “For the most part the ‘monster-application’ to the design happened literally when I was drawing the cards,” Pardee advised io9. “I would research photos of them, or read their wiki pages, or watch highlight reels, and sometimes ideas would pop up.”

So you get a stellar third baseman like Pittsburgh Pirates star Ke’bryan Hayes with a ton of arms like a spider. A twin menace like Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim pitcher/hitter Shohei Ohtani as a Malignant-esque set of conjoined twins, and on and on. “I started researching current/modern players and found out that there’s some really FUN players out there now,” Pardee mentioned. “Younger players that genuinely look like they are having an amazing time playing. Players like Ronald Acuna Jr, Fernando Tatis Jr, and Pete Alonso were all just smiling in highlight videos while they were dominating these games. So I decided I wanted to do about half older players and half modern players.”

io9 is solely revealing Pardee’s card for Toronto Blue Jays slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr. proper right here for the primary time. Just click on the following slide to see him, adopted by the remainder of the collection up to now, which can embody two extra yet-to-be-released playing cards. For extra information, you may go to Topps.com or @alexpardee on Twitter or Instagram.