Thursday, July 23, 2020

Play Ball! - Bob Laughlin Style

As we get ready for the most unique season in MLB history, I thought this would be a good time to show a Sporting News cover from 1967 that I recently came across featuring the artwork of Bob Laughlin with his representations for each team at the start of the season:


 Here is the full cover from the Feb 25, 1967 issue:

Card collectors will recognize Bob's work from his World Series sets that he initially produced himself in B&W

as well as the color World Series and other sets he did for Fleer and other self produced sets in the early to mid-70s:
In fact, in his initial ad for the World Series sets, he mentions doing the above cover for the Sporting News:
If you are interested in checking out The Sporting News archives, they are currently available through a subscription to newspaperarchive.com.  I bought a one month subscription and had a great time reading through articles from the 50's through the 80's.  The database is searchable, so if you want to search for articles on a particular player or team, you can quickly find the pages you are looking for.

3 comments:

John Bateman said...

I m surprised that Laughlin did not do more Sporting News covers in the 1960s because the seemed to use that comic type pictures alot.

Fuji said...

That 1967 cover is fantastic. I really enjoy Mr. Laughlin's work (especially the B&W stuff).

Unknown said...

Bob did have a couple of other artwork pieces published in the Sporting News, but this was his only cover. Thanks, Fleerfan, for the post!