Jesse Marinoff Reyes:
…the Jesse Marinoff Reyes baseball portfolio. This collection has more of the sports book “look” than my other covers, but are I hope, as entertaining to look at for the fans. LET’S GO BATTAH, BATTAH!
JMR Design
The Ball
Viking, 1999
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Photograph: Rich Pilling/Major League Baseball Photos (McGwire)
Photograph: Brad Wilson (the “record-breaking” ball)
Art Director: Paul Buckley
This jacket was influenced by my love of baseball cards—a very similar discipline to designing book covers—both old and new. The background image of Mark McGwire included a “touch-plate” of metallic silver giving the image a shimmery, dreamlike quality, contrasted against the clinical detail of the ball. This was in keeping with a lot of high-production values attended to baseball cards in the late 1990s as the rival card companies tried to top one another with added special effects and printing razzle dazzle.
The title typography however harkens back to baseball cards and other ephemera in the early, more iconic years of the game—thusly the more vintage title lettering treatment with a suggestion of off-register, “cheap” printing.
I’M NOT HERE TO TALK ABOUT THE PAST: McGwire’s feat was short-lived, as San Francisco Giant left fielder Barry Bonds bested the 70 home run mark by three in 2001 (on his way to appropriating the career home run record of Henry Aaron as well, ultimately tallying 756). As suspicions of McGwire’s possible use of performance enhancing drugs increased, critics began to doubt what so many had cheered during the summer of 1998. Then José Canseco’s 2005 memoir, Juiced, claimed McGwire was an early practitioner of steroid use. McGwire himself looked like a fraud as he testified before Congress in 2005, avoiding questions and stating memorably, “I’m not here to talk about the past.” As 2010 approached, with McGwire taking a hitting coach position with the Cardinals, McGwire came clean (to a degree) and admitted he had been a steroid user.
….Though all of baseball’s executives share in some of the blame, that National League President, Leonard S. Coleman, Jr. (in his next-to-last year at that post before Commissioner Bud Selig centralized the league offices under his control) had his name imprinted on the ball is a bit misleading, as it is more accurately under Commissioner Selig’s watch that the “steroid era” had been manifested and allowed to fester and grow. It is fitting though that McGwire’s eligibility for baseball’s hall of fame has only been met with pitiful percentages of approval, though it is disgusting that anyone thinks “Big Mac” belongs in the hall at all.
JMR Design
The Curse of The Bambino
Penguin Books, 2000
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Illustration: Marc Yankus
(Archival photographs: Corbis; inset Photograph: Stan Grossfield/The Boston Globe)
Art Director: Paul Buckley
This was the first of two versions of this title I did (see the second from 2004 leading off the 25-Man Roster album of baseball covers), here teaming-up with collagist supreme Marc Yankus. This one was an odd mix of literary narrative—Yankus’s painterly application of the vintage photography seems like looking through a stereoscope with antique hand-tinted color—and “b” movie matineé trailer titling (based on a suggestion from author Shaughnessy), without going all the way with creepy-horror monster type (drat!). Shaughnessy’s depiction of Boston’s “snakebit” history, after being the dominant American League franchise at the beginning of the last century, is such an
ertaining read that you could go a dozen ways with this book and get it right each time.
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