The Paul Skenes debut card was found, but the the finder is turning down a big offer from the Pirates and Livvy Du
A lucky 11-year-old found the only [autotag]Paul Skenes[/autotag] debut rookie card featuring a jersey patch and a Skenes autograph. He’ll be putting the card up for option, declining an offer from the Pittsburgh Pirates that included season tickets for 30 years behind home plate, a meet and greet with Paul Skenes, and two signed jerseys.
Along with the Pirates’ offer, Skenes’ girlfriend and LSU gymnast [autotag]Olivia Dunne[/autotag] offered to take in a Pirates game in her suite.
Topps shared a journal entry written by the finder. He called finding the card “a dream come true.”
The proceeds from the sale will be donated to Los Angeles fire relief funds.
Skenes made his MLB debut last spring, less than a year after being drafted. In 133 innings, Skenes posted a 1.96 ERA with 170 strikeouts. He won NL Rookie of the Year while finishing third in NL Cy Young voting. He finished No. 19 in the MVP race.
As a Pirates fan for more than three decades, let me assure you it is a curse.
An 11-year-old collector in Los Angeles has found one of the rarest cards released in recent history. He pulled a one-of-one Paul Skenes autograph along with the patch he wore from his Major League Baseball debut with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
It’s a card that only gained value as Skenes blew away batters throughout a brilliant rookie season. The former Air Force cadet turned LSU star proved every bit worthy of the hype that followed him to the top of the 2023 MLB Draft. He was an All-Star, finished third in NL Cy Young Award voting and won rookie of the year honors after 170 strikeouts in 133 innings in his pro debut.
𝐁𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆: The Paul Skenes 1/1 Rookie Debut Patch Autograph card has been pulled by an 11-year-old collector from Los Angeles, CA. pic.twitter.com/tYZe5KuqM2
That gives the card a value starting in the six figures and likely to rise dramatically from there. The Pirates, however, would like to have it on display in the annals of PNC Park. They’re willing to make a deal; two Skenes autographed jerseys, a chance to take batting practice with the team at spring training and, vitally, 30 (thirty!) years of season tickets behind home plate.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DCZqbGXyblZ
Livvy Dunne, the LSU gymnast and social media sensation who dates Skenes, has even offered to share her suite with the lucky kid who pulled the card.
You can’t get a straight answer on Pirates season ticket prices from the team’s website (apparently they’ve gone up in recent years in a non-transparent way, which is a wonderful thing to do when you’re a franchise with three postseason wins in the last three decades and want to alienate your remaining die-hard fans). But NL Central rival Milwaukee prices two seats behind home plate at $214 per game. That’s $520,020 in ticket costs for 81 games across 30 years, not counting for inflation.
That’s before you get into the jerseys, chance to ask Dunne about Arabesques or the 30-person softball game you’d get to stage at PNC Park. Those won’t appreciate in value, however, and season tickets for a kid in California probably isn’t super appealing.
Here’s the other rub; those 2,400-plus baseball tickets? They’re to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates.
That’s the same franchise so poorly run its finest tradition is trading away whatever homegrown stars it creates for cheaper parts. It’s got a cheapskate owner as dedicated to casting malaise over a once-proud franchise as he is dismantling his own newsrooms. Skenes is under contract through 2030, but the moment he looks too expensive to retain — which doesn’t take much when your team hasn’t ranked higher than 28th in payroll in a 30-team league since 2020 — he’ll be shipped out for prospects in hopes Pittsburgh can find someone like, well, Paul Skenes.
The Pirates are an organization that puts cheapness above all else. They wallow in mediocrity because championships may bring pride, but not necessarily profit. They drafted Henry Davis, a catcher batting .192 across a meager major league career to date, first overall in 2021 in part because he’d sign a cheaper bonus than any of the other player considered for the top spot. They cut fan favorite Rowdy Tellez four at-bats shy of a $200,000 bonus.
They perennially waste the backdrop of one of professional sports’ true cathedrals by failing to build meaningfully around the young stars they occasionally create. This is a franchise that births hope, only to let it die of neglect over and over again.
An 11-year-old now has a decision to make. Hold on to a card potentially worth millions of dollars? Or subject himself to three decades of misery watching ambition starve in the nicest prison baseball has to offer?
It’s safe to say that the world was a different place back in the 1930s. Just how different you ask? Let’s look at a certain baseball card and it’s odd connection to Notre Dame football.
Zeke Bonura was a Major League first baseman from 1934-1940 as he spent time with the Chicago White Sox, Washington Senators, New York Giants, and Chicago Cubs during his career. His 1936 Goudey World Wide Gum card (No. 112) was brought to my attention Friday night and I just feel the need to share.
Bonura looks like a handsome fella on the front of the card as the picture captures him in a suit instead of his uniform. It’s the back of the card however that you’ll likely be a bit more interested in as that offers an observation from former Notre Dame football coach that, well, is certainly an observation that was made:
If you can’t see the photo clear enough, it reads:
The late Knute Rockne, glimpsing this handsome youth under a shower at Notre Dame, promptly remarked: “Get a load of that fellow’s physique! Where upon Henry John was named “Zeke.”
Also, if you’re at all a baseball fan you should be following Christopher Kamka on Twitter. He’s the biggest stat-head I’ve ever come across and loves baseball as much as anyone I know, especially the White Sox.
On that note I’ll be signing off now. Talk to you all for the game on Saturday afternoon.
“I love finding avenues to flex my own creative muscles of what I’m doing outside of sports while still meshing it with sports.”
For The Win is introducing a new series featuring people whose work focuses on the more creative elements of sports. We spoke with several of the leading artists, authors and editors who are helping push sports to a more beautiful place.
NEW YORK – Eric Friedensohn didn’t even have time to get nervous. He was about to take the mound at Wrigley Field in July.
But it wasn’t going to be easy. He hadn’t thrown a baseball in a long time, and the mound feels like it’s twice as far away from home plate when you’re suddenly in front of a big crowd. It didn’t matter if he was ready. It was finally his time.
“I still don’t think I’ve fully processed it,” Friedensohn told For The Win. “I was elated. I was surprised. I had 15 minutes warning, so I was a little bit scared.”
The pitch wasn’t amazing. It landed outside the strike zone, and Clark, the official mascot of the Cubs who was waiting with a glove behind the plate, wasn’t able to catch it. For a ceremonial first pitch, though, it wasn’t as embarrassing as someone like 50 Cent or Dr. Fauci.
All things considered, it wasn’t a bad look for Friedensohn, especially since he makes his living as an abstract artist.
***
Friedensohn, also known as Efdot, is a visual artist and creative director based in Brooklyn who works with large-scale mural installations, fine art, screenprints and product collaborations. He has a few people employed on his team at his studio in Buschwick, which he said functions like a “mini creative agency” that he runs in tandem with his fine art practice.
He describes himself as very community-driven, and he has painted all types of murals, reaching as local as nearby small businesses and as expansive as co-working spaces around the world.
One example of his community-driven mindset includes his efforts to raise more than $60,000 for the charity Bring Change 2 Mind (BC2M) with the Cubs. Efdot was actually throwing the first pitch at Wrigley because the Cubs asked him to collaborate on a limited-edition collection for Mental Health Awareness Month. The project included a screen print and several pieces of apparel. He also appeared on Chicago outfielder Ian Happ’s podcast about mental health.
“Mixing my art with sports on that project was really interesting to me because it felt soft and tender,” explained Efdot.
When he caught up with For The Win, he was days into a project for the nonprofit New Heights NYC, which is a youth development program that aims to empower and educate underserved children. Part of its curriculum includes after-school basketball programs, and some of its notable alumni include NBA players, such as Precious Achiuwa, Moses Brown and Lance Thomas.
For this particular project, Efdot was installing a mural for New Heights NYC’s soon-to-open relocated home at the Bedford Union Armory in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. The center will feature multiple brand-new basketball courts, and through his energetic style that sometimes resembles a city grid, his mural shared the story of the organization’s history.
The primary theme of this mural is ascension, with staircases a common motif. He included fun nods to NYC like a metro card, a big apple and other representations of the community and the New Heights organization itself.
Alex Dzialo / For The Win
“This is our new home so we really wanted to work with an artist that could come in and tell the story of where we’ve started and where we’ve come to,” Ashley Faison, the chief development officer for New Heights, told For The Win. “He has done a beautiful job marrying the concepts of books and basketball, and that stands out right away.”
This piece is one of many he has done with sports as a subject matter, which is an increasingly popular trend among some artists. Efdot is one of several contemporary artists who has become known for making art about sports.
Like many, sports were a big part of Friedensohn’s life when he was growing up. He played baseball and tennis and soccer. But the Brooklyn-based artist described his participation in athletics as a love-hate relationship. At a certain point, he said, he felt like he was playing more for his parents than he was for himself.
He began to realize that when he was finding more joy in art — he was inspired by his grandmother, who made stained glass as a material — and skateboarding. Eventually, he stopped playing altogether.
“But I always loved the art of sports,” said Efdot, who said he appreciated the rich history of design, typography and color on ephemera such as uniforms, patches, pins, hats and scoreboards. “I loved the nostalgia of seeing Brooklyn Dodgers in script. It still gives me a really warm feeling when I [see] those logos.”
Even though he was no longer playing, he still held fond memories from his childhood, like when he collected baseball cards with his brother. The two of them would sell items in their collection at school during recess.
***
Alex Dzialo / For The Win
Everything came full circle for Efdot when this past year, he was selected as one of the 20 artists featured to team up with baseball card trading company Topps for its Project 2020. He felt really lucky, of course, but he knew it wasn’t going to be an easy task. He typically didn’t draw faces and hadn’t paid as much attention to baseball as he did when he was younger.
“I was pretty nervous about it,” he admitted. “But it brought me back. It forced me to go back to my childhood memories. That was such a healthy thing for me to do during the early parts of the pandemic. It was a little bit of an escape with nostalgia.”
At first, because he didn’t want to redraw the players and represent them wrong, he mostly drew around their silhouettes to create an abstract environment or background while leaving their photographs intact.
Since then, Efdot pitched his own spin-off series that he sold through Topps in which he paid tribute to 10 iconic stadiums around the league. Those subjects didn’t have to use the human form, which gave him some more creative freedom than he had with the previous endeavor.
After completing that, he now is one of more than 50 artists currently participating in Topps’ Project 70. Unlike in Project 2020, where he was assigned cards to remix, he now has more creative flexibility to design any card from within 70 years of archival material in the Topps collections.
This time around, with the increased experience under his belt, he has leaned more into illustrations. He also changed the background of his images from black to white.
Meanwhile, with the booming markets of NFTs and the somewhat surprising popularity of remixed trading cards like his own, it’s as clear as ever that people love owning things. These days, he’s thinking about his submissions to Topps more in terms of how it relates to a series in the mind of a collector.
Topps
Within his creative process, that means doing as much research as possible on his subject so that he can add layers to the piece. He doesn’t have as much space to add as many details as he would in a mural, but he was able to pay tribute to the infamous Billy Ripken card with a swear word on it by sneaking in a reference on his card for Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
Of course, Efdot acknowledged that there is only a small subset of people who like both sports and art, let alone his specific style of art.
But once those people found him, he was able to cultivate a collector base and reward them in unique ways. One idea he executed was to sell companion cards — featuring his own intellectual property with his original abstract figurative Blob character — that he printed himself in Queens.
Alex Dzialo / For The Win
The Blob character shows up again on his mural in Crown Heights, this time while wearing a basketball uniform sporting the No. 8 on the front. Like in much of his work, which is both playful and accessible, the figure evokes fluidity and motion in an otherwise static image.
“I could be myself, fully, but also express it through sports,” explained Efdot. “I love finding avenues to flex my own creative muscles of what I’m doing outside of sports while still meshing it with sports.”
He aims to take the essence of his subject and boil it down to one icon, almost like a logo in sports. Over time, he hopes that people begin to associate his creations with certain feelings in their own life.
As he continues to hone his style, in all of his practice, Efdot looks to create images simple enough so they can be easily digestible and recognizable while still remaining unique and full of personality.
For example, when he collaborated with Topps, his intentions were to move away from the uber- sleek digital photography of contemporary baseball cards and more toward the illustrated look that was found on the back of baseball cards in the 1950s.
Topps
One recent example of that was his card for Satchel Paige. Artistically, this is one of his most successful pieces to date because it captures the recognizable motion that is found within both Paige’s pitching windup (where his arm is whipping upon release) and marries that to the visual language of Efdot’s iconic, wavy style.
“It’s almost a wink in each design,” explained Efdot. “For me, finding that balance has been fun.”
Of course, working with Topps has also attracted a new group of sports fans to his art. For some, his style hasn’t resonated, and he said he had to build up a thicker skin to the criticism.
However, he said the overwhelming majority are supportive and understand what he is doing and understand the vision. People have questions about the art, and they want to know what is happening next. In fact, he’s even seen some folks who bought his baseball cards go on to buy one of his original pieces, like a line drawing of the city or of one of his characters in nature.
“The passion from the audience is bigger than anything I’ve ever experienced before,” said Efdot. “One of my favorite things is seeing these baseball card collectors become art collectors.”
