260. "The Jeffrey Maier Incident" 7" x 10.5"

 Size: 7 × 10.5 inches art print (not a comic book)
ARTIST signed 
Availability: Pre-order ends Sunday, October 18th at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET
Shipping: Expected to ship approximately 40–60 days after the purchase window closes. Estimated timeframe. Not guaranteed.

From the Artist: 

(This is the season finalé for season 13. These last 2-3 seasons have been my favorites artistically.)

I’ve made a few “Incident” pieces over the years, and they’ve been  visually loud. This one started heading that way too, but the more I thought about the Jeffrey Maier moment, the less interested I became in illustrating the part everybody already knows. We’ve seen the glove come over the wall. We’ve seen Tarasco reaching. We know what happens next. The 30th anniversary of it just passed actually. What interested me more was the fraction of a second before any of it had actually happened.

That’s why there’s no baseball in this picture. Tarasco is below the wall, taking up almost all the visual real estate, doing exactly what a ballplayer is supposed to do here . Above him, everybody is reaching, leaning and fighting for something that hasn’t arrived yet. Jeffrey is different. He’s almost completely still, just looking up. Out of an entire stadium, out of all those people and all those hands, the ball is about to come down to one 12-year-old kid who showed up at a game with his parents and had no idea that a few seconds later his name would be attached to this moment forever.

That’s where "THE BALL FOUND HIM." text came from. I went back and forth between “found” & “chose.” “Chose” felt more dramatic, but it also made Jeffrey feel too important, almost as if he had been selected for some grand purpose. “Found” felt stranger. And ya know, I like stranger. It feels accidental and a little less resolved. In it we can examine how we feel about what fate is, and if fate is even anything. The lighting in the piece is doing something different though. It singles him out. It almost looks like fate has already made up its mind. I liked that contradiction. The picture leans toward destiny, while the words aren’t quite so sure. I'm not quite sure actually so I too live in the contradiction. 

That was really what I wanted this piece to hold onto: not the argument after the fact, but that strange instant before an ordinary person forever  becomes part of the story of a game they love so much.