About the 1980 Project, as it gets underway

Projects done in a vacuum have no purpose or direction, and typically do not see themselves through to completion.  The purpose of this project is to have a full working set of 1980 baseball cards for our group (ARAIG) replay.  For those of you who do not already know, ARAIG is a wonderful league that replays full Major League Baseball seasons.  Each team has a real life manager that plays against the AI on their own personal computer.  On occasion we will have two live mangers playing head to head via direct IP Netplay.  On most occasions we play against a pre-programmed manager file submitted by our opponent.  Game play is fine, but most of us crave some sort of baseball "eye candy" to go along with the competition.  We love to see a nice high resolution version of the ballpark and individual player photos on display.  Some of us are ok with the basics, while other (like myself) require that each player be appropriated uniformed on his very own personal baseball card.  4 seasons ago I got the "bug" to start this project.  This is my 4th installment with 1977, 1978 and 1979 preceding this offering.

This project, as always, was tasked with creating cards for:

1. Players who did not have a 1980 Card
2. Players who's 1980 card had them on the wrong team
3. Players who played on multiple teams during the season
4. Players who had poorly airbrushed cards
5. Players with BHNH (Big Head No Hat) cards

Original 1980 Card on wrong team

Updated Card with correct team

Due to time constraints I am not going to work on cards that feature criteria #4 and #5 during my first pass, since the league deadline is 2/1/2015.  As time frees itself up I will begin working on replacing those cards with my updates, but in the essence of time I am concentrating just on the cards that were missing from the original set.

The 1980 template required some work to create.  The team banner is positioned diagonally on the lower right corner of the card.  The position "flag" is in the upper left hand side.  These two area required stock color changes.  Some teams used the same color set, so all that was needed was to change the team name.  Changing the side border piping was not a viable option, since the color density was not uniform and it did not switch over well.  I would estimate that it took 5-6 hours to create all 26 team templates.

The player photos were gathered by the crew over at the OOTP forum.  Those boys love their photos.  Anthony Y. was my key "detective" in gathering those photos.  Some photos were harder to find than others, so I was forced to do my own searches and pull in additional sources such as yearbooks and programs that I collected over the years.  In certain cases I had to colorize B&W photos and airbrush logos and uni's onto existing photos of those hard to find outliers.

I hope you enjoy this body of work and find these cards useful for your own replay and or personal enjoyment.  This was truly a no-profit labor of love.