The baseball cards Amelie Mancini makes are not exactly what fans are used to seeing. Sure, they contain player stats, but not the usual ones.

For example, did you know that shortstop and second baseman Clint Barmes fell and broke his collar bone while carrying a package of deer meat up a flight of stairs? Or that former outfielder Glenallen Hill reportedly scraped himself up after having a nightmare about spiders? Or that former pitcher John Smoltz allegedly burned himself while ironing a shirt...while he was still wearing it?

These strange but apparently true injuries are captured for posterity on a set of cards called “Left Field Cards,”and this, the first set, aptly titled “Bizarre Injuries.” They are printed from Mancini’s own linocuts onto letterpress paper.

“It’s fun to have a quirky point of view,” says Mancini from her home in Brooklyn. The artist, who moved from Lyon, France, in 2006, says she fell in love with baseball when she moved to the U.S. Her art reflects it--in addition to the cards she’s done several paintings with baseball themes as well.


She decided to feature the players’ foibles after googling fun facts about baseball. She discovered, as did we when we did our own Internet search (after finding out about Mancini on Design Sponge), that collecting information about peculiar baseball player injuries is a popular pastime. Or making a list about other weird baseball player facts. Apparently it’s a niche.

“I found all these guys who had gotten hurt in very strange ways,” Mancini says, “and I compiled my 10 favorite injuries.”

Though she didn’t include game-related injuries, she did note that some of these unfortunate accidents resulted in missed games. “I tried to pick the injuries that would be most visual and the most absurd and silly and funny,” she says. “Some were pretty horrific and I didn’t want to include anything gruesome.”

Evidently these things don’t just happen to baseball players; Mancini says since she started selling her cards, ordinary people have told her similar things have happened to them--including getting burned while ironing clothes they were wearing.


“I’ve had a lot of people tell me they’ve done that.”