My brothers collected sports cards during the late sixties and early seventies. I started collecting baseball cards in the late seventies. The first card that I remember opening from a pack was the Dodger's pitcher, Bobby Castillo. My collection grew during the eighties, but there were always cards that I didn't have or cards that did not exist of players. So I started drawing my own baseball cards of those players. When baseball went on strike during the eighties, one of the issues was how to deal with the expansion of new teams in baseball. I asked my brother Chuck what expansion was. He said that it was when new teams are formed from players on existing teams. We kept our cards divided by teams and started picking players out of those teams to form two new teams. My team was the "Portland Pigs" and my brother's team was the "Denver Dopes". I drew the cards of the players that we picked and then we started making up our own players. Chuck went off to college and we lost track of our baseball teams. I stopped collecting and drawing cards in the nineties, but I kept rosters of baseball teams and followed the Dodgers.

While I was a student at Cal-State Dominguez Hills, my classmate, David Yamashita, showed me some of his baseball card collection. We talked about making a deck of playing cards with different people on the face of each card. We never made the deck, but a few years after school he had an art show based upon the people who we considered for the deck. There are 52 cards in a deck, plus 2 jokers and 2 instructional cards equaling 56 cards. My deck of cards consist of the two teams, the "Carson Gallos" and the "San Pedro Deliboys", 50 players, 2 managers, 2 mascots and 2 checklists.

In October 2002 I stared working as a deli clerk in a supermarket. I was given a uniform with a baseball cap. I kept a beard and had to cover it with a hair net. This reminded me of the baseball players from the seventies and eighties with long hair and lots of facial hair. I decided to buy some index cards and draw some baseball players with facial hair. The first card that I drew was first baseman Dan White, named after the former San Francisco councilman and modeled after the former Oakland A's pitcher, Rollie Fingers, who sported a handlebar mustache. I drew another card, catcher Philip Morris, and then another until I had a full team of 25 players. I didn't name the team but I decided that the team was from Carson. I made a second team of cards which I called the “San Pedro Deliboys” relating to my job. I called the Carson team the “Gallos” for a short while, but then decided that the team for Gardena should be called the “Gallos” and the Carson team should be the “Carson Original 25”. The teams grew to a 30-team baseball league called “Southern California League Baseball”. I reintroduced the “Pigs” and the “Dopes” but the “Portland Pigs” became the “Pomona Pigs” and the “Denver Dopes” became the “Duarte Dopes”. The combined players from the past “Pigs” and “Dopes” became the current “Westwood Rapists”. The “Stanton Strikers” and the “La Habra Scabs” came about from the supermarket labor dispute. The “Hawthorne Hunters” came from the American bounty hunter who went to Mexico to catch the Max Factor heir who had jumped bail. The players are named after people that I know (like Fernando Vigil, Re Howse, Refugio Sanchez and Paul Galan), people in the news (like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy) and names that I just make up.

I’ve returned to collecting baseball cards, but with a focus on minor league team sets from small cities like Battle Creek, Altoona, Idaho Falls and Missoula. In these small sets I can find some of the cards of players who have yet to have major league baseball cards. These small sets influence my small teams that I draw.

2005 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LEAGUE BASEBALL