The japes Era - Introduction

I decided to get back to doing Flashback Fridays.  Except this time I'm doing a whole set of cards.  We are calling this set the japes Era.  Below is how it all started...

The japes Era

This project started as an idea born when a father and son got trapped in some bad weather while shopping for equipment prior to a baseball season.  We decided to wait it out by having lunch while we were out.  Our family cut the chord some time ago so we haven't had Baseball Network for some time and it just happened to be on the screen just in front of us.  Since the lock out is going on there wasn't any Spring Training news so one of those countdown shows were on and my son said, we should make a set of just our favorite players all time at each position.  

So after some conversation we decided to limit it to 10 players from each position.  Well that became really difficult as well.  So we had to add more constraints.  What was settled on was that we'd make a set heavily influenced by "modern times" while trying to limit, if not avoid, current players.  Mainly due to the fact that many other sets already have the current players covered, and those guys aren't done and we are trying to get a top season.  

 So we went with 1950s and forward.  But even that became difficult. As it left out a lot of players my son knew and he wanted a few additions.  So I pulled an executive decision and decided, "why not limit it to my lifetime and players that played during my consciousness.  Not all the seasons would come from that period but the player would at least be someone that I remembered.  Full disclosure, so while this is sort of a top 10 of the last nearly 50 years,  it's also heavily biased...and sometimes contains more than 10 because...well it's our list and we have a deck size to hit.  Goal is 108 hitter and 108 pitchers.  That's 54x4 for those of you bad at math and is the basic deck size that gets printed.  Since we plan on printing these, the cards will be displayed in full bleed sizes.

So that's the basis.  I'll start with the Catchers.

I had already made these before we decided to limit to the "japes era".  I figured since I made them, that I might as well post them.

  

But these aren't part of our official set and we plan to do another set some day with the earlier seasons in which these guys will headline.