The best word to describe the Diamond Kings cards that were part of every Donruss baseball card set from 1982 to 1996? Has to be “iconic,” right?
It’s an overused word, generally, but it’s appropriate for the Diamond Kings, the subset-turned-insert set of paintings produced by renowned artist Dick Perez. Everyone knows the Diamond Kings, and even now they’re a highlight of busting open a junk wax pack in search of nostalgia. But the Diamond Kings are only a small portion of Perez’s life work.
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Documentary filmmaker Marq Evans is producing a feature-length film on Perez, and his Kickstarter campaign to finish the project opens today, May 1. For a special edition of #TheHobby Life, Evans and the artist himself sat down for a video interview last week, talking about the film and Perez’s iconic cards.
Before we jump into that, though, here’s a trailer exclusive to The Sporting News to whet your appetite.
Quick note: This is only a portion of the conversation. It’s been edited for length and for clarity.
TSN: Have you been enjoying this documentary process?
PEREZ: Yes, of course. I really haven't been doing too much baseball painting since I did the update on my book, so this allows me to do some new paintings for a card set that we’re producing for to the documentary.
TSN: Very cool. Do you feel like you’re going back, remembering little details about maybe why you painted this guy this way or did a background another way?
PEREZ: Not really. Those things are always with me. They’re on my website, I look at them and I’ll reminisce about the 15-year run that I had with Donruss, them allowing me to do anything I wanted, you know, in terms of style. Frank Steele and I selected the players, they allowed us to do that. This documentary is good to recap, and be a capping, on my career.
TSN: I wanted to ask about that, the selecting of the players. You two chose them yourselves? How did that work? What was the process for picking those guys each year?
PEREZ: Well, they were selected the year before they appeared on the cards.
TSN: I guess that’s right, you had to work way ahead. Paintings take time.
PEREZ: Yeah. The players would have had to really bomb out the second half, because we started doing this half of the season before, right? By that time, there were pretty clear pictures of people having good seasons, and a lot of these teams had superstars. So if they were doing anywhere near, you wanted to do them, because they’re future Hall of Famers. Some of them even at the time, you know they would be. So we just selected players that were on the 26 teams with the first year, and then it got to the 28 teams.
Some of them were very tough, I know that. It might have been that first year, we were selecting players for that first issue and we came to the Toronto Blue Jays. They were like losing every year. That was a terrible team that had nobody. I think the only guy that had credentials was John Mayberry. I said, ‘Well, we’ve got to go with this guy because at least I've heard of him.’ And nobody said anything. Donruss certainly didn’t offer any suggestions. They just stayed in the background.
TSN: What was your goal with the Diamond Kings?
PEREZ: The whole point was to bring art back to baseball. Now, there’s some great sports artists out there, who are meticulous, and they work from photographs, and they look like photographs when they’re done. But that to me, that’s not my reason. I mean, what would have happened if I said, I’m going to bring art back to baseball, and it’s too much like exact photographs, painted like exact photograph? So they had to be designed in a way that that said, ‘This is art, it’s not a photograph.’ I maintained that through my whole career. In my book, there are a lot of images that I made up from different photographs to create my own photograph, head on somebody that’s not him, but has the same body build. So just to create with my input totally, because that's what an artist does.
TSN: That’s awesome. And that kind of leads to something else I wanted to ask you. So many of the Diamond Kings were head and shoulders images, but then some are full body paintings. The one that sticks out to me is the 1991 Donruss Barry Bonds, a full image of him in his stance. Was that kind of a choice because of who Bonds was or something like that? What were some of the thoughts behind doing those?
PEREZ: Basically, I just got bored doing the same design. I felt I needed a change. I said you know what, I don’t know how long this run is going to be, so I just decided, let me try this. And nobody said anything, so I just I figured that was a good change to do. In the aftermath,I have read online that some people didn't like that, collectors who preferred the headshot and not the body shot. I don’t know why they would say that, but obviously if they would have said it then, it wouldn’t have affected my decision. And then I started playing around with techniques, doing different techniques on the fading, on the art treatment. So that changed too, over a period of a few years.
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TSN: The backgrounds were another thing that always stood out. You clearly always tried to make those unique, too.
PEREZ: It came easy to me because, really, I was a trained graphic designer, that's how I started my art career, as a graphic designer art directing design studios and what have you. So I had a good idea of graphic design and that’s an incorporation of that desire to design something. So, yeah, every background is different.
TSN: The Diamond Kings were a subset for Donruss until 1992, and then they became their own insert sets, harder to get. When you look at the hobby today, it’s all about the insert cards, chase cards and whatnot. You were part of that first wave of these inserts that kind of almost led us to where we are today. Is that kind of cool to look back at?
PEREZ: (laughs) I’m sorry to say also that I’m part of the era that made cards a commodity rather than a joyful collecting item. When I collected cards back in the ’50s, it was trying to find a player that I followed, and that was the joy. I would have it. Or you traded for him, traded two other guys for the guy you wanted. You used it in that way. You weren’t thinking of the future, selling them, which is what I think card collecting has become today, a commodity.
TSN: I’m sure this is a question you get all the time, but I’ll ask anyway: Do you have a favorite card you’ve painted? Maybe a couple favorites?
PEREZ: I have a favorite card. I’ve been asked that many times. It’s the 1994 Chili Davis. That's my favorite card. I don’t know why, because there are other cards in that set that equal the dynamics that I was trying to create, you know, a very colorful card. But there’s something about the Chili Davis profile. I don’t know, but, yeah that’s what I say.
TSN: Marq, I want to ask you, as you’ve been going through this process, are there some things that you’ve learned that made you say, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. That’s definitely going in!’ Or how does that process work for you?
EVANS: I think you go in on it on the documentary side knowing as much as you can, reporting as much as you can, being as prepared as you can talk about those things. But you need to be open for discovery, maybe things that Dick has never shared before, or things that weren’t important for an article that was written 20 years ago, let’s say, but when you’re making a feature-length documentary, you can have time to go deeper on things. But, I mean, right off the bat, it was just the personal story of being being from Puerto Rico, losing his father at a young age as a 5-year-old, and but being put on a plane by himself by his mother to New York, looking for a better life, and coming to this country, as a 6-year-old, not knowing the language and learning about learning the language, learning about this country, through, really, the sport of baseball.
TSN: Yeah, that definitely stood out to me, watching the trailer. Dick, what do you remember about that experience?
PEREZ: Well, I was 6 years old, so I know my mother didn’t send me to here to get a job. It was a vague experience. I knew that there was another place far away, and there was family there, relatives of ours. I was put on the plane and I guess the stewardess was told, ‘This little kid is alone.’ My mother and my sister, who stayed behind waving to me at the window at the Puerto Rican airport, she said, ‘They will know you, they will know your name. They’re going to come, they’ll pick you up, hug you and they’ll smile and you can trust them.’ So, OK.
And, sure enough, there were about five of them. They all were great. And they took me to the Bronx, and it was there I experienced my first malted milk, my first egg cream, snowfall, all these things that were unbelievable. It was a wonderful thing. Baseball didn’t enter my life when I was in the Bronx. My mother came and moved to Manhattan, eventually to Harlem. That’s when I was 7-8-9. I started playing with kids, and basically all they were playing was stickball, punch ball, softball, baseball. Everything that centered around the game was being played all over the place. So you just gravitated to it. I made a lot of friends eventually learned the language. And there were also a lot of Latino kids too, that live in Harlem, so that helped.
TSN: So, tell me, what type of player were you? What did you play? Right-handed? Lefty?
PEREZ: Left-handed everything. Everything. That was the reason, I say, that’s probably the reason I didn’t become a professional baseball player. I couldn’t be a catcher. I didn’t have an arm for pitching or for being in the outfield. I was quick to run and catch. And I wound up on first base.
TSN: That’s the default for a lefty, right?
PEREZ: Yes, so that’s what I want. And I thought that was pretty good, but very limited in terms of the other skills. I was a good-fielding first baseman, that’s about it. Bad hitter and not a base-stealer, but a good fielder.
TSN: Marq, tell me a little about the Kickstarter campaign. Do you have a favorite part of it?
EVANS: One reward is a Dick Perez baseball card set that is exclusive just for this campaign. We’re calling it a Diamond Immortals, which plays off the Diamond Kings, but also Dick’s book, “The Immortals,” which is an incredible book. It’s a 22-card set and includes Babe Ruth Mickey Mantle, and Roberto Clemente, and then current players that Dick has recently painted just for the set. We’re calling them Diamond Destiny. They’re not immortals yet, but we’ve got Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani and Julio Rodriguez that are brand new paintings that Dick has done just for these cards.
TSN: That’s a pretty good group of new players to have with that list. Dick, did you have a favorite player growing up?
PEREZ: Oh, Mickey Mantle. He was America. He was my favorite. It's amazing, when you have a favorite like that you don’t remember him striking out, not hitting a home run when it was needed and all these things that he seemed to do all the time, because he didn’t. But that’s the great thing about baseball, you know, all it takes is a good 1-for-4 day or a 2-for-4 day, one of them being a game winner and it’s incredible. It’s a great game.
