First Mexican Pacific League (Winter ball) Baseball Cards Project

Now that the season is almost half-way gone, is there any news on the set?

DaClyde said:

Now that the season is almost half-way gone, is there any news on the set?

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Not this year. League too busy with planning and organizing for the Caribbean World Series in Hermosillo next February.

r2d2 said:

Not this year. League too busy with planning and organizing for the Caribbean World Series in Hermosillo next February.

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how do soccer cards do in Mexico? Fantastic or just blah?

If they do great, it's hard to see how the league staff doesn't want to just sign off on a contract for you to proceed on
doing the set to promote baseball through trading cards that might also sell well at the stadiums (and for fans to collect or get autographed IP from the home nine or from players the visiting teams that they get to watch often on Cablesports or Beisbol Latino).

rsmath said:

how do soccer cards do in Mexico? Fantastic or just blah?

If they do great, it's hard to see how the league staff doesn't want to just sign off on a contract for you to proceed on
doing the set to promote baseball through trading cards that might also sell well at the stadiums (and for fans to collect or get autographed IP from the home nine or from players the visiting teams that they get to watch often on Cablesports or Beisbol Latino).

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Basically just blah. There's been way more releases than baseball cards, but they been promotional cards or stickers albums. Nothing still like sets produced like Topps. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt because they have a small staff an the Caribbean World Series is a huge event. I can wait another season for the cards to be made.

Ok, so Caribbean World Series has passed with success and still no word from the League if this will get done.

Any advice if I would try to move forward independently? How much does a player usually receives $ from a card company to produce cards? (Just the use of his image, not per auto)

So, no advice on how to start a card company from scratch?

r2d2 said:

So, no advice on how to start a card company from scratch?

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have you tried calling/PM'ing Brian Gray of Leaf? I think that's pretty much what he did with Razor in 2008 (started from scratch) but he did things in grand fashion when he launched it with all those exclusive player deals that probably set him back a ton of coin.

rsmath said:

have you tried calling/PM'ing Brian Gray of Leaf? I think that's pretty much what he did with Razor in 2008 (started from scratch) but he did things in grand fashion when he launched it with all those exclusive player deals that probably set him back a ton of coin.

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I called him last year when I hoped the League would back up this, but didn't keep touch because there wasn't any wheels on motion for this.

I sent a PM last week and I'm waiting for the answer.

I suspect the single biggest issue trying to establish a new card producer is licensing. Back in the day when TCMA and Cramer were putting out sets, MLB had not yet taken over as the business side of the minor league system. The licensing hurdle would likely be much easier to achieve if the push was coming from a team or the league, rather than you trying to chase it down on your own.

You might consider contacting Adam East, who is sort of trying to do the same thing with the Australian Baseball League. The difference is that he started from the hobby side of just creating custom card designs on his blog for fun (http://ozcards.blogspot.com) rather than setting out to approach the league about doing an official set of cards.

Here's an interview with Adam about his custom designs and working with the ABL teams:
Henning's Baseball Musings: Q&A with Adam East

A business proposition like you are proposing to the LMP would probably be more productive if you already had a bunch of mock-up designs to show them. Maybe even consider starting a blog similar to Adam's. If people started seeing images of modern Mexican baseball cards, it might help to generate more interest. Maybe even consider taking a bilingual approach, and make blog posts in both Spanish and English to cover both potential audiences. It would be a lot of work, but at least that way, there is the potential for the league or the individual teams to come to you about producing sets, rather than you having to chase after them with little more than an idea and a few examples from the past sets. Once you start generating traffic, blog comments or "Likes" on Facebook, start to show that there is a potential market for the cards.

If you could provide the photos and player information, you could probably get a few of the custom card designers on FCB or other boards to help out with some original designs. Worse case, I'd think would be some team just stealing the designs and producing the set themselves, but that still accomplishes the original goal (though without putting any money in your pocket).

Moving forward with this. What's the usual card stock used for baseball cards? Very simple, example for base Topps. Thanks

Does this help - the minor league teams in the US have one of these printers make their trading cards.

Trading Card Printing - Print Custom Trading Cards | PrintFirm.com
Choice Sportscards Home

Thanks for the tip =)

or you could go with the company formerly known as Multi-Ad Sports, Brandt Sports Marketing

http://www.brandtco.com/sports/

They print the card sets for the Isotopes and several other PCL Triple-A clubs as well as the PCL Top Prospects sets.

or you could go with the company formerly known as Multi-Ad Sports, Brandt Sports Marketing

Sports - The Brandt Company

They print the card sets for the Isotopes and several other PCL Triple-A clubs as well as the PCL Top Prospects sets.

Great info. I'll check prices on all of them and probably will go that way taking into account I don't know anything about printing.

Have price quotations from Choice and the former MultiAd.

Now start working on the hard stuff, getting money.

Pre-season stars on September and we will be starting to get licensing from the players.

r2d2 said:

Have price quotations from Choice and the former MultiAd.

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Does Choice and/or former MultiAd require you to present licensing legal docs before they will print? I"m curious if they cover themselves liablity-wise by making sure what they print has proper licensing or if they just print anyway and it's up to the customer to face the legal issues if there was no licensing secured.

rsmath said:

Does Choice and/or former MultiAd require you to present licensing legal docs before they will print? I"m curious if they cover themselves liablity-wise by making sure what they print has proper licensing or if they just print anyway and it's up to the customer to face the legal issues if there was no licensing secured.

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No docs required. I read on one of their websites that licensing was responsibility of the costumer.

Does anyone know if minor leaguers get paid to appear on team sets? Or they just get cards in return?

Not being in Hermosillo (my hometown that has the best team of the league historically) turned out to be a bigger problem than I had anticipated due to my brother not being as committed and enthusiastic as I was. Not much I can do from abroad.
Officially this project is dead.