Amelie Mancini's Left Field Cards

Amelie Mancini is a painter and printmaker. She lives in Brooklyn and roots for the Mets. And she draws, carves, and prints baseball cards - one by one - on an ancient Washington hand press located in the basement of a church in Greenpoint.

Here are four cards from the initial series - Bizarre Injuries:

Future sets from Left Field Cards will include Edible All-Stars, Remarkable Mustaches, and Men With A Van.

Mancini answered a few questions about her art and her introduction to baseball via email:

I'm originally a painter and I had just finished a big series of paintings about ballplayers as the modern gods and heros of our times which you can see here. After that series I wanted to do something very different, light, silly, easy, small. With painting the process is usually long and demanding. Printmaking seemed, to the novice I was, easy and fast, even if of course it's not that simple. The idea of baseball cards in a postcard size came naturally. I didn't see the point in simply listing the best players of all time so I went for the silly, quirky approach.

The cards are linocuts: they're printed from linoleum blocks that I carve after drawing on them. I then print them on a letterpress one by one. Everything is hand made, by me, one card at a time. On the back of the cards there is a postcard design with room for a note and stamp. The idea is that you can mail the cards to the baseball persons in your life, or frame them, whatever you like.

I became a Mets fan after a couple of friends took me to Shea Stadium in September 2007 to see the Mets lose to the Phillies. I had no notion of baseball back then and spent the evening asking dumb questions and eating hot dogs, but I had lots of fun. It took me another year of watching games and talking to people and reading about it before I fully realize what a terrible mistake I had made by choosing the Mets. By then it was too late. I'm a loyal fan.