Personalized Back-of-Card Cartoon

If you enjoy the cartoons on the back of vintage baseball cards, then it's possible you've thought about what your personal cartoon would depict.

I know what mine would be, and recently I had some time to scan through a bunch of vintage cards in an effort to find one that at least partially matched.

Well, I found one. It took a bit of editing, adding, and removing of text in Photoshop, but here's the finished custom card back:

The cartoon fielder and words "triple play" were from the back of Luis Aparicio's 1973 Topps card. The rest of the text I had to cull from a few other cards in the set.

And I really did complete an unassisted triple play in Little League. Here's how it happened:

Back then I loved to play the middle infield and third base positions. However, I loved to pitch even more. And in this particular game, I was pitching. Bases were loaded, and I wheeled in a pitch that produced a high pop-up just to the right of the mound. Yelling "I got it!", I sidestepped over as the ball began to drift toward third. It continued to drift, so I backpedaled and moved closer and closer to the third baseman, a classmate who at this point had heard my call and kindly moved into foul territory. By the time I caught the ball (out #1), I was just a stride from the third base bag. I expected to nearly bump into the baserunner there, but he'd mistakenly broken for home before I caught the ball. So, I quickly stepped on third (out #2). Then I heard their coaches yelling "No! Get back to second!" Incredulous, I looked toward second base, and the runner who'd been on second was sprinting straight toward me. As he slid into third, I crouched down, baseball still in glove, and tapped him on the foot before he touched the base (out #3).

Now, of course this unassisted triple play was mostly the result of very, very poor base running, combined with a third baseman who allowed me to track the pop-up all the way over to his position (probably should have been his glory, not mine). But it was a triple play nonetheless, and I still remember walking back to our team's bench on the third base side, my coaches noogie-ing my head and slapping me on the back while they laughed and cheered.