Gross, man!

Such a sponge for the illustrators of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, I was bound to leak my influences here and there.

The sketches for this project didn't hint at where I was going, but once I ran this through the computer and started fitting the pieces, my fascination for Robert Grossman spilled out. Take a look and call me a hack thief. Or a well-meaning zealot. Whatever.

Grossman worked his wizardry with airbrush; I paid homage with ones and zeroes and Bézier curves.

Maybe it looks like I'm playing to the worst stereotypes here — and I am! — but the images come from the book of baseball quotations and anecdotes, for which this is the cover art.

Typecast are, left to right, Lou Piniella, Yankee's slugger turned paunchy volcanic manager; Tommy Lasorda, longtime Dodgers manager with more controlled capacity for eruption, whom Giants fans still revile; Yankees catcher and manager Yogi Berra, he of legendary sayings; Reds outfielder/former manager/Major League pariah Pete Rose, who redefined intensity; and Yankees Manager Casey Stengel, Berra's wise predecessor who as a player once won over a jeering rival crowd by tipping his cap at the plate and releasing a sparrow he had somehow tucked inside.

Play ball! By the way, last I checked the Giants — with a big assist from umpires — still suck.

Spring flung

Hell-bent as my team seems to be in letting opponents win their home openers (in other words, the World Champion San Francisco Giants have come out swinging and missing and bobbling and throwing wide), maybe I shouldn't have wished so hard for baseball to resume.

But it has, and despite the Giants' near-daily disasters, I'm glad (and they won soundly yesterday, with 13 Tim Lincecum strikeouts, so life isn't so awful). Which remind me of some baseball-themed editorial cartoons:

Pete Rose woulda fit right in with the Black Sox.

This was for The Stockton Record, which let me draw cartoons for $25 a piece.

Yeah, I know, that's practically nothing, and I would have drawn the cartoons for nothing. Hell, I did, because this was before the wonder of email, when I would have to drive the 115-mile round trip in the night to deliver each cartoon to a back door in the bowels of the Record, itself nestled in the bowels of Stockton. I blew more in gas than I got paid, but it was a foot in the door toward a cartooning job.

Pete Rose bet on baseball. Or he didn't. Because really, who cares? As much as I love baseball, professional baseball is the Great Hypocrite. Arguably the best all-around player of the modern era, Pete Rose not only sits outside the Hall of Fame, he's not even allowed to go to Major League (and probably Minor League) ballparks, because he tainted the game. Enough already! Let Pete Rose in the Hall. Bring him back to baseball. So what if he's not the most honorable player baseball ever saw. Like someone wise once said, if the yardstick for induction to the Hall was honor, the Hall would echo with its emptiness.

Then baseball went on strike, and I broke allegiance with it (until my son, who might have been named for Will Clark before reason prevailed, began to play baseball and I came back to the sport.) This cartoon is flawed (and not just because some would say I can't draw) but because I violated a cardinal rule of how people read cartoons, which is left to right. If you want to sing this song aloud (go ahead, no one's watching), you need to read top to bottom. I like this cartoon very much, except for that stupid error.

Finally, Gov. George Deukmejian didn't seem to want to face a $3.6 billion budget deficit. Isn't that quaint? A cute little $3.6 billion deficit, just a chip off the $26.6 billion deficit California is buried under today. New Gov. Jerry Brown, who may have played a role in setting the table for Deukmejian's budget struggles when the Dukester ended Brown's second term, would think himself a hero if he had to face a trifling $3.6 billion deficit. It's like the $3.6 billion deficit got hold of some steroids and became the Monster that ate California 2011.