Baseball Card Vandals: Over 200 Decent Jokes on Worthless Cards!

by Beau Abbott, Bryan Abbott

The true story and bizarrely brilliant art of the creative duo Mashable called "the Rembrandt and Picasso of vandalized baseball cards."

Every day since 2012, brothers Beau and Bryan Abbott have drawn crude jokes on their old trading cards from the '80s and '90s and posted them on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram as Baseball Card Vandals. Now the fruits of this completely unnecessary labor have been collected in this stunningly absurd book.

Inside you'll find a collection of over 200 "expertly" vandalized cards—including dozens of never-before-seen artworks—that blend the Vandals' signature oddball humor and artistic flair with a charming dose of sports nostalgia.

Featuring an introduction on the Baseball Card Vandals history and process as well as a beautiful design inspired by vintage baseball cards, this book will be a hit with sports fans, art lovers, memorabilia collectors, pop culture watchers, Internet geeks, comedy connoisseurs, and permanent marker sniffers everywhere.

Genres: Baseball, Humor

224 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 5, 2019

Reviews

[Jay French · Rating 3 out of 5]

This art book contains copies of the fronts of vintage baseball (and a few other sports) cards that have been “vandalized” with markers to make them humorous, or, in cases where there’s a swing and a miss on humorous, odd and arty. A typical example: for a Mark Belanger card, the artists added words to the top saying “The best thing to hang clothes on”, and modified his name below to say “BEHANGER S” while drawing a clothes hanger over the bat in his hands. The book contains mostly photos of the modified cards (you can find many of the ones in this book and many more searching the title on Google) with some introductory text describing the germ of the concept. Many funny, most weird (i.e., “The receipts at CVS are out of control”), a few just clever. Good for a half hour or hour of perusing. The examples on Google seem a bit randier, the book is tame in comparison.

[ALLEN · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review is of the hardcover edition. Having made it to adulthood, the Abbott brothers found themselves hip-deep in dross: baseball cards anywhere from 30 to 50 years old, largely based on photos of players long since forgotten who left the sport to develop permanent careers. So the brothers turned this dross into dreck -- good dreck, as the cover photo of a baseballer emitting flatus attests. Funny, vulgar and often surprisingly agile, these parody baseball cards made me laugh. I then turned the book over to another waggish fan. Recommended, though used copies will probably go cheap.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is basically an art book, albeit a wonderfully twisted Alfred E. Newman-esque version of art. These guys took old baseball cards and a sharpie and doctored them into hilarious jokes with gut-punch immediacy. I followed their social media and when the book came out, grabbed a copy. I will admit that many of the people in my life don't seem to understand exactly how hilarious I find this to be, but that's not an apology. Hilarious.

[Sean Kottke · Rating 3 out of 5]

For Read Harder: a humor book