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Merging retro influences with contemporary concepts,

St. Louisan Mike Right creates timeless Cardinals imagery on

the front of the team’s

By ELLIS MONTGOMERY

Score one for tradition

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for many baseball fans, a scorecard represents something irreplaceable – a memory from a special trip, a keepsake from a first game, an experience shared

between a parent and a child.For some it is a mandatory record,

a necessity to properly experience a baseball game. For others it is simply a handy guide, the best way to keep track of who’s on first and what’s on second.

The baseball scorecard has been around nearly as long as the game itself. Some of the earliest documents that score games predate the Civil War. In the 1860s, sportswriter Henry Chadwick

polished an accepted form of baseball scorekeeping. Since those embryonic stages, the scorecard has been a fixture at ballparks, part encyclopedia, part dictionary.

It is where baseball’s unique language is written, where its celebrated statistics are kept, where its storied players come to life. For many, the scorecard is a Rosetta stone of American culture.

For Mike Right, a scorecard is even more. It is both form and content. It is expressive and stimulating, rich in color and provocative in message, lively and fresh, treasured and traditional.

Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” For

Right, the baseball scorecard is a piece of art.

As an illustrator at the Momentum advertising agency, Right was working on some drawings for Cardinals Gameday Magazine in 2002 when he showed the team’s publications department a concept he had created for the scorecard.

Not that there was anything particularly wrong with the scorecard at the time. But the visual elements had been trending toward photographic. Right had envisioned a scorecard with a more traditional look, with elements more colorful and imaginative.

“Back in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the scorecard was more painter-oriented,

Progressing from a rough sketch to a detailed thumbnail to finished product, Right hit one out of the park with a soaring tribute to the final season of Busch Memorial Stadium.

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After the Cardinals finished alone atop the NL Central in 2009, Right took extra time to give his Redbird some company on the 2010 scorecard, with lively characters depicting each division foe.

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with rich colors and airbrush paintings that really stood out,” Right said. “I always had an appreciation for the retro look of the old scorecards. Then for a while they had gone to all photography, and I just liked the punch of the old, retro ones.”

With that in mind, Right had begun sketching designs for a scorecard, merging influences from Cardinals scorecards of the past with his own contemporary ideas to develop a Cardinal bird caricature. After he showed the concept to the Cardinals, the team gave Right the illustrative keys to the project in 2003. He has been creating the Cardinals scorecard cover designs for

every year but one since then. (Coming off a championship season in 2006, the cover of the 2007 scorecard featured a photo collage anchored with the World Series trophy.)

As a native St. Louisan, the 46-year-old Right is, by definition, virtually infused with baseball and the lore of the Birds on the Bat.

While still in college at Washington University, he worked at Busch Memorial Stadium as a Costello usher in 1986-87. Upon graduating with a bachelor of fine arts degree, he jumped right into a comic book project called Lil’ Redbirds, which ran for the 1988 and a portion of the ’89 baseball seasons.

Like any number of people, one of Right’s fondest baseball memories can be directly connected to the purchase of a ballpark scorecard.

“I got George Hendrick to sign a scorecard,” Right said, smiling about his encounter with “Silent” George, who was frequently anything but – when he wasn’t asked to speak for publication.

“It was the ‘Game of the Week’ back in 1981, a Saturday afternoon game against the Phillies, and we got there real early. I got Hendrick, Darrell Porter, Tommy Herr and (TV announcers) Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek.”

Right loves the artistic flair of scorecards-gone-by, such as those

Right begins each year’s scorecard with an old-school, pencil sketch; as he adds color with modern, computerized illustration tools, careful attention to detail ensures the finished product retains a retro look.

Art and Design ©2011 A&E Television Networks, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Marketed and Distributed in the U.S. by New Video. Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of Major League Baseball Properties, Inc. All rights reserved.

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designed by the late artist Otis Shepard. An illustrator and art director for the Wrigley Gum company, Shepard designed scorecards for the Chicago Cubs for more than 30 years, beginning in the 1930s. Right also appreciates the creative portraits and caricatures created by sports cartoonists like Willard Mullin, who illustrated the original “Brooklyn Bum,” and Amadee Wohlschlaeger, who did Cardinals illustrations for many years – including the covers of the 1952 and ’97 scorecards – and created the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s iconic “Weatherbird.”

“I would research all these old caricatures and artists and I thought, ‘You just don’t see that anymore,’” Right said. “I hate the (team) logos now that don’t have a character in them, that are just type. When I was a kid, I used to draw the logos all the time – the caricatures of the Cleveland Indian, the Cardinal, the Baltimore Oriole – and it seems they have gotten away from that.”

In these computer-programming, Photoshopping times, the tools and utensils of graphic art and illustration have changed. Pieces once sketched, hand-painted or mechanically airbrushed are now most often computer-generated. The canvas has given way to the computer screen, the pallet replaced by a keyboard and software.

Right, however, combines a bit of the old-school approach with the dynamics of the modern era to try to capture the hands-on, retro look. His first step in the process is to sketch thumbnails of his concept for a new scorecard in pencil. There’s no precise accounting for inspiration, so there have been times when he has worked on his designs in

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airplanes or restaurants, on napkins or scraps of paper.

Once he arrives at a basic sketch, he scans the black-and-white pencil drawing into his computer and begins filling the picture with color. Using a computer illustration program, Right continues to do as much detail as possible, in order to create the retro feel.

Fresh ideas are among the biggest challenges for Right. The 2011 scorecard illustration represents his eighth edition, and he’s posed the Cardinal character in a different fashion each season, while adopting appropriate themes for the rest of the illustration.

For instance, Right’s first scorecard in 2003 featured the Cardinal bird at the plate, following through on a powerful swing that had Albert Pujols-like qualities. In 2005, the club’s last season at Busch Memorial Stadium, Right pictured the bird soaring out of the park to catch a fly ball, with the circular old ballpark beneath in the background. The following season, 2006, he perched the Cardinal atop a detailed illustration of the new ballpark.

Whether it’s the pose of the bird, the environment in which he’s placed, or the other elements of the illustration, Right aspires to give the design a new and exciting look each season. Oftentimes, he sketches his drawing over and over again, zeroing in on a particular dynamic, determined to capture on paper what he can see in his head.

“A lot of times I’ll come up with the pose for the Cardinal even before I have the reference,” Right said. “That’s kind of backwards to what you might normally do. But I have the idea, and I know how I want it to look, and once I

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get that, everything else kind of falls into place.”

While variety is the spice of Right’s work, one aspect remains the same – the look and personality of the Cardinal itself.

“It’s actually a morphing, a little bit of reference from everything,” said Right, who also illustrated the cover for the Cardinals’ 2003 media guide. “It’s kind of like a little part of each of the Cardinal birds they have had in the past, along with a little bit of uniqueness. I wanted him to look strong. He has a big, old barrel chest.

“I didn’t want him to have bird legs, didn’t want to do an ‘Audubon’ thing. He has human qualities, calf muscles and

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rib muscles – which I use feathers for. So it’s kind of neat to play with it – to find a way to give a bird those qualities. You want people to look at it and feel the power and the movement, and you want him to be consistent.”

Depending on the amount of detail, Right’s scorecard illustrations are time-consuming projects – particularly in 2010, when the scorecard featured separate caricatures representing each team in the NL Central. He acknowledges a keen sense of province in the work, an obligation to produce something befitting the profound,

historic culture of Cardinals baseball and the timeless capacity of a scorecard.

After all, there are no pinch-hitters in scorecard illustration, no double-switch, no bullpen. Right’s finished product has to pass the test for 81 games, an entire St. Louis summer and who knows how many years more as a piece of memorabilia. Maybe it will contain a George Hendrick autograph.

Right held up a copy of an old scorecard. “I mean, you look at this, it’s from 1954,” he said. “People are going to be there the whole season and then maybe have that forever to represent

their time in St. Louis, or maybe their first ballgame ever.

“So it’s definitely something I take very seriously. You’re very passionate about it, and you hope everyone else feels the same way.”

The notoriety Right gets from the work doesn’t nearly match the responsibility. From his home office in the St. Louis suburb of Oakville, he works in relative anonymity. You wouldn’t know him from the mailman. He has never had a ballplayer slap him on the back and offer, “Man, you crushed that one!”

While Right strives for variety in his poses, there is one constant in his efforts to give the Redbird a distinct personality. This is no shy, retiring Cardinal, but rather one with a powerful attitude and an imposing physique befitting its 17 NL championships and 10 World Series titles.

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He is like an umpire in some respects. He is likely to hear feedback only if someone doesn’t like something. Still, although he continues to do work on a number of high-profile advertising accounts, the scorecard is his most personally gratifying assignment.

“It’s my favorite job,” said Right, who has done occasional illustrations for the Chicago Bears and Minnesota Twins, as well. “It’s a lot of fun, because I like doing anything with action and doing it without showing motion marks or anything like that, trying to capture that energy.”

That’s not to say Right’s scorecard art is completely anonymous. Right and his wife, Dina, have four children, including one girl and three boys. They know who creates the Cardinals scorecards.

“I bought three of them (recently) and Mickey, my 13-year-old, wanted to take one to school,” Right said. “He just wanted to hang it in his locker.”

Which is only fair. After all, it was Mickey who provided the key input for Right’s second scorecard, which showed a Redbird sliding into home plate in 2004.

It was the best possible proof that

scorecard inspiration not only comes from all corners of Cardinal Nation, but that creativity can be a family affair.

And so it goes when putting the Redbird within the framework of an illustration – one that helps give context to a game and yet still exists in a realm extending beyond a season or even any particular era.

Leonardo da Vinci would be proud. Mike Right’s finished work of art never gets abandoned.

Ellis Montgomery is a free-lance writer based in St. Louis.

A native St. Louisan who has experienced Cardinals lore on many levels, Right stands ready to put pencil to paper whenever, and wherever, artistic inspiration strikes.