The May Illustration and Baseball

The May Illustration for the Philadelphia Sketch Club

  May is always a busy month for me- our Senior Show at Moore is at the end of April, and I usually spend the first part of May trying to catch up with all the things I put off while getting that show up and running. I started this piece for the Philadelphia Sketch Club May edition of The Portfolio in early April as the major league baseball regular season was just getting  going. Along with it, the baseball season for Newtown, Pennsylvania, was just getting started as well. One of the town baseball fields is directly across the street from me, and I enjoy watching the game and hearing the sounds of kids playing baseball. I just have to be careful where I park my truck, as our yard and the street can be the landing zone for more than a few foul balls.  Baseball is my favorite sport to watch, because it means it is summer. 

   Some of my fondest memories from growing up in Utica include washing the cars with my Dad on a sunny summer afternoon and listening to a ball game on the radio. I rarely ever watch baseball on television, I almost always listen to it on the radio while I work in my studio or around the house, or while I am driving. Subsequently, I am often surprised when I see a photograph of a ball player I have only heard  described on the radio by  the play by play announcers. For instance,  unless a player has a last name that identifies them as being of Latino descent, I picture them in my head as just “a baseball player”; you never hear the announcer say "And here is  Daniel Murphy coming to bat; He is hitting .267 with three home runs, and he is a tall white man with facial hair”...

Mr. Ball Player, prior to his days playing for the NY Mets

  In my head, almost all professional  baseball players  I have not seen look like Art Shamsky from the 1960’s Cincinatti Reds, and are older than me. I guess that is one of the reasons I prefer listening to baseball on the radio; When I do, I always feel like a young guy helping his dad wash the station wagon on a sunny summer afternoon.

-Rich

Philadelphia Sports Weekly Cartoon

On May 6th, the first cartoon I have done for the Philadelphia Daily News weekend paper Philadelphia Sports Week will appear. It's not available on line, so I will post a copy of the weekly cartoon on this blog when it appears each Sunday. The editors help come up with the concept, and then I  (ahem..) take the ball and run with it.

I received a few ideas from the editors, and once the Editor In Chief, Becky Batcha, gave the green light to go with this sketch, I had a lot of fun drawing it. Becky and I go back all the way to our college days at the Daily Orange at Syracuse University, and I wanted to make as good an impression with this first cartoon for PSW as I did with the first cartoon I drew back in 1981 for her DO editorial about martial law in Poland. I hope that I (ahem..) hit a home run with this one, too...

I was worried that after I submitted the final illustration on Thursday at noon that the Phillies would go on an offensive tear for the next 3 games and cause the cartoon to look pretty lame; however, they  managed to hand the Washington Nationals the Friday night game and today rolled over in a 7-1 loss. I can only hope the Nationals get a three-game sweep of the Phils with a shutout on Sunday to keep this cartoon relevant. After that, Philadelphia can go back to being a powerhouse NL East contender again. It might make for good cartoon material this summer.

-Rich