Finishing the Black Sox Box Set

A lot of work, but ultimately completely worth it.

This week will see me completing the finishing touches that will culminate in the mailing of my After the Black Sox booklet set.

If you haven’t read about my set before, here’s a little bit about what it is:

One hundred and three years after eight Chicago White Sox players were banished to baseball purgatory, this new booklet series explores what became of each Black Sox. This new series will pick up where most history books end, for these ballplayers did not disappear into obscurity, but continued to play the game they betrayed—far beyond the reaches of Major League Baseball in the murky world of Outsider Baseball. Some continued playing ball as a mercenary-for-hire on small town teams, while others plied their trade alongside other notorious baseball outcasts in outlaw leagues in frontier mining towns of the Southwest.

This special Booklet Series will consist of eight 8-20 page booklets that reveal what each Black Sox did post-scandal. Each booklet comes with an art card with an all-new illustration depicting all eight players with one of their outsider baseball teams: The Universal City Film Stars, Fort Bayard Veterans, Chino Twins, and more.

Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered a set, and for the understanding when I needed to move the completion date out to allow some new information to be included. I just really want this set to be something truly special to fans of obscure baseball history like me.

Here are some photos I took this weekend while assembling some components of the box set:

Hand cutting and scoring the custom slip case boxes

A stack of some of the completed boxes

Assembling the booklets

Tipping in the art cards

Art cards waiting to be put into their booklets

Completed booklets

I’m looking to drop off the first batch of orders at my post office this Friday. I never imagined the amount of work this project would take when I began it months ago, but as exhausting as it has been, I believe it will be one of my most proudest achievements. The Black Sox have always been an interest of mine since I was a kid growing up in North Jersey. There was always rumors that Shoeless Joe Jackson had appeared with a local town team sometime in the 1920s. The idea of the great Joe Jackson playing with a team of local amateurs was mind-blowing to me.

This interest only grew after seeing the final scene in the 1988 movie “Eight Men Out,” which depicts this rumor I had heard growing up.

Out of this early interest grew my curiousity as to what happened to the other seven players after they were banned. This “After the Black Sox” booklet set is all I have discovered, the end cap to an interest that began 40-something years ago.

AFTER THE BLACK SOX can still be pre-ordered HERE. As these are all hand-made in my studio, numbers are very limited and once this series is gone, they're really gone. There are not that many sets left that are unsold, and after the labor that went into putting together the ones I currently have, I don’t think I will make any more…