This is not a great picture of the thing, but my dad made me this baseball-card mural for Christmas. For better or worse, the reflection of the living-room light blocks out Willie McGee’s face in the photo:
The cards all came from the duffel bag full of cards in my parents’ basement. Somehow a now-creased 1987 Topps Barry Bonds was in there, even though my brother and I once worked pretty hard to separate the cards we thought might be good from the duffel-bag cards.
I made a couple of similar murals before I first moved to Brooklyn about seven years ago, but I didn’t do nearly as good a job with them so some of the cards were a little crooked and a bunch eventually fell off. I got the idea from the Park Slope music venue Southpaw, which has its basement basically wallpapered in old cards.
Anyway, if you have a lot of old, hilarious baseball cards laying around somewhere, I suggest putting them to this good use. I find myself staring at the thing all the time, transfixed by all the amazing mustaches and awful uniforms of yesteryear.