Yasiel Puig Baseball Art

Yasiel Puig hits a three-run scoring home run to deep left center to give the Dodgers a 5-1 lead over the Milwaukee Brewers. This will probably hold up for the win and a trip to the World Series. This is a second drawing today of the inktober 31 day drawing challenge to do a drawing a day for 31 days. All the other drawings are on paper but I am watching the Dodgers / Brewers 7th game and thought I would try a drawing on my IPad. 

MLB Baseball Opening Day Artist John Robertson Baseball Painting

Opening Day Major League Baseball (MLB)

Is March 29 a national holiday?  Should be, as it is MLB’s opening day of the baseball season.  There should be floats, and the Blue Angels dipping into the stadium – a huge balloon release or five hundred red, white and blue pigeons flying around the stadium.  Fireworks blasting overhead.   For   Every player is nervous with either butterflies in their stomach or a monkey on their back.  It all depends on how their last season ended.  But it is a special day, a birthday for everyone.  Something, somewhere in some stadium something great will happen. 

this is to be the first day we get to see the potential fairy tail team that will go on to win the World Series - or it will be our first sight of a future Hall of Famer.

It is a new dawn with a game opening in a forty degree icebox of a stadium or another stadium opening in a climate conducive to an eighty-two degree warming oven.  Will you be there to see it?  Will you see the first pitch, the first throwing of the hotdog or bag of peanuts?  Are we going to see an opening day shutout?  A no-hitter?  Only happened once. A walk-off home run?  Why not?  It is the ceremonial beginning of spring.

Me?  What will I do?  I will probably create a new baseball painting – something that will remind me of that opening day in late March.  That is what painting is for me – a way of recalling a day or experiencing it again through the act of painting.  It is a part of life that    I can’t let go but need to remind myself of the joys of spring.  Opening day does that for me.  The new year is not in January it is the opening day of spring bringing all the hopes of a great year. 

The baseball sports art painting by sports artist John Robertson is Sports Art baseball painting image of a baseball painting approximately 60“ by 72”, acrylic on unstretched canvas.

New York Yankees Joe DiMaggio Baseball Player Art

About Joe DiMaggio

 I image almost every baseball fan is familiar with the name Joe DiMaggio.  He is considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time playing for at the time one of the greatest baseball teams, the New York Yankees.  There is nothing much I can add to all of his stats.  I have also painted DiMaggio a number of times but thought it would be fun to try and do a simple, small drawing of him.  This ink drawing of Joe DiMaggio by sports artist John Robertson  is 11 inches by 14 inches on

watercolor paper.  Actually the paper is a little bit bigger by one in high to 15 inches.  The watercolor paper I drew Joe on is in a spiral watercolor paper binder so when it is torn out it can be trimmed down to the standard frame size of a 11” x 14” size.

 Interesting Info about Joe DiMaggio

 It seems the only way one generation (who have not followed baseball) of people know Joe DiMaggio is that he was a spokesman for the brand Mr. Coffee.  The older baseball crowd knows him by his nickname “Joltin’ Joe” or “The Yankee Clipper.” He was called by his many fans “Joltin’ Joe“because he was such a strong, hard hitter.  And others called him “The Yankee Clipper” because he sailed so gracefully through the outfield when making a catch in the wide center field of Yankee stadium.   And one of the big reasons people knew him was that he was one time married to Marilyn Monroe.  He was immortalized in the Paul Simon song, ‘Mrs. Robinson” with the line, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio /  Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you” -  meaning where has our heroes gone, where has the innocence of our youth gone and where are the days of the past as times have changes dramatically (this song was written in the sixties) and they are not coming back.  That’s a bit sobering.

Joe DiMaggio retired from baseball just as I was getting interested in the game.  1951.  I was young and listened to the Yankees games on the radio – the LA Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and did not come to L A for another six years.  So I was a Yankees fan and saw DiMaggio as a hero.  Heroes diminish and I lost some of my interest in baseball until the Dodgers showed up in LA. 

 Final Thoughts about Joe DiMaggio

 He was always being quoted and there are plenty around to draw from but I think the most interesting one must have been from when DiMaggio spoke about his days of his own innocence when he first started playing baseball.  He said, "I can remember a reporter asking me for a quote, and I didn't know what a quote was. I thought it was some kind of soft drink."

America's Game of Basebal - Art

Why Baseball is The Game 

 As the great player and Hall of Fame manager, Earl Weaver said, “You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and five the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all. “

 America’s Game

 “The Game” Baseball.  America’s great pastime.  The game most boys and some girls have played at some time in their lives.  It’s called America’s game because it was one of the first sports played seriously in the United State starting 1845.  I played in Little League and then in the Pony League.  After that, not much.  High school grades (bad ones) prevented me from playing in high school and there was no college in my future.

As long as I could play the game of baseball I felt I was still a kid, I forgot everything when I was playing.  The assaults of the world started on me early.  A bad day of playing the game was always better than any other day I had.  I didn’t have to worry about school, or my parents or friends.  All I thought about was hitting the ball and at other times catching the ball with waiting in-between.  And the waiting never bothered me.  I was lost in the dream of playing.  Even when there was no organized game to play, we played out in the streets, home plate a hub cap off a car and bases were curbs and lines in the street.  We’d play until dark and only quit because we could not see the baseball anymore.  And only occasionally did one of us get hit by a car – usually a light tap.

Walt Whitman on America's Pastime

 One of the great American poets, Walt Whitman lived at the time of the founding of baseball  1819 - 1892. He saw the beginning and the development of the game.  Horace L. Traubel who wrote about Whitman in , “Walt Whitman in Camden,” vol. 2 (stated by Whitman in September 1888): “Whitman spoke more about in glowing terms: Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic! That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well—it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.

Sports Painting. About the Baseball Art

 “The Game” painting by sports artist John Robertson is an image of the batter, catcher and umpire that is almost life-size.  The size of the art piece is 6 feet by 10 feet, ink and acrylic on unstretched canvas.

Image Baseball Yankee Batter sports art by John Robertson

Sports Painting.  The sports art painting is that of a New York Yankee batter swinging  at the pitch.  The painting is ink and acrylic on New York maps and a map of the New York subway  system.  There is also a map of the United States.  The baseball player painting is 50" x 70" on unstretched canvas.