Almost all the content on 57hits.com was deleted.
Many of the blog posts had just a few sentences trimmed at the end of the blog post, so I didn’t notice it for 11 months.
But my most favorite series of posts, the Chicago Cubs World Series scorecards, got hit the hardest. Ten posts detailing all the work and back history behind these custom scorecards were gone.
What happened?
11 months ago, I changed the service that hosts my websites online. All my other sites transferred to the new host just fine. At the time, I thought 57hits.com transferred ok too.
Cubs World Series scorecards totally decimated
Part of the deleted content was a wonderful 10-part series on the 2016 Cubs World Series scorecards.
Recently I noticed that the World Series scorecard blog posts were REALLY short. Like, two words. Literally. Two words long for each blog post.
Due to this server glitch, a total of 14,000 words were deleted down to about 20 words.
This particular series is really dear to my heart for a number of reasons:
- My number one sports team is by far the Cubs.
Cubs blood runs in our family. I grew up on the south side of Chicago, so we were constantly defending our Cubs support. And now, the Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years. - Professional assurance.
I was hired by Chicago magazine to make scorecards for this. - Personal assurance.
That someone took interest in my work, and wanted me to produce more. Thank you, Luke Seemann! - More personal assurance.
Out of all the art projects I’ve done since college, this one has by far, has had the most people I know come up to me and show appreciation. - My firstborn daughter
At six months old, she is in every scorecard. She’s actually the spark that caused this project to have a unique angle, grabbing the attention of Chicago magazine’s Digital Editor. - My twin brother
One of the authors on 57hits.com, my brother was having fun keeping his own scorecards at home of the Cubs run in the NLCS against the Dodgers. His work inspired me to keep a scorecard for the NLCS championship game. That’s the card that eventually got the attention of Chicago magazine. Also, Erik is the one who designed the template of these scorecards. Aren’t they great!? - Eventual book
I’ve been meaning to take all these blog posts, with their incredible detail and backstories, and make it into a little personal book. Not one to sell, because of copyright issues. But just for me. And a couple copies for my dad, brother, and a couple friends.
But now, all these blog posts were gone. Gone for eleven months.
I was pretty sure I had some backups of the site that would still hold these posts, so I wasn’t too worried. However, I was concerned about the eleven months of people who came to the site, only to find nothing in the blog post. Ah well. Not much traffic comes to that site really.
The backups of my site did have the blog posts in tact! I started to restore them one by one. But then I realized that other blog posts on my site were missing content too. Yipes. This site doesn’t have a TON of posts. But it does have 167 posts published. I didn’t really want to go in an manually update 167 posts.
Thankfully, getting the posts updated was as simple as deleting one table in the database, and rey-loading the archived backup table. Bingo! That worked! All the posts are back.
Once the posts were back up, I made sure to archive them indefinitely at archive.org.
The full list of links archived on archive.org
- Chicago magazine commissions me to do World Series scorecards (archive.org version)
- Why I keep score at home (archive.org version)
- Customizing a scorecard for the 2016 World Series (archive.org version)
- Game 1 scorecard for 2016 World Series (archive.org version)
- Game 2 scorecard for 2016 World Series (archive.org version)
- Game 3 scorecard for 2016 World Series (archive.org version)
- Game 4 scorecard for 2016 World Series (archive.org version)
- Game 5 scorecard for 2016 World Series (archive.org version)
- Game 6 scorecard for 2016 World Series (archive.org version)
- Game 7 scorecard for 2016 World Series (archive.org version)
Purpose in life
I tell you what, I’m SOOOOO glad to have them back. Looking back at this series of 10 posts about the Cubs World Series scorecards reminds me just how much people loved this series of scorecards.
I’m always debating what I should be doing in life. What projects I should do. I have a list of 64 art projects I’d like to do. Yeah, 64 projects.
I look at my projects through different lenses
- Which ones I enjoy doing
- Which ones I’m good at
- Which ones have depth of meaning
- Which ones people enjoy
- Which ones can make money
The baseball scorecards hit four of the five lenses. The only thing they lack is a depth of meaning. That’s why I don’t really do a whole ton of them all the time. At the end of the day, it’s baseball. It’s stats. These pieces of trivia are just that—trivia.
Two encouraging thoughts about making scorecards having purpose
1. By simply working on this project, maybe I might find a path to connect this with meaning.
Ok that doesn’t make much sense. As a creative, I’ve found often times the trick is to simply create. Just make. When you are stuck, just make something. Anything. The act of making leads you to new places. Maybe if I explore making these scorecards, the technique of gathering tons of data into one illustration can be applied to something else. Maybe I can make some sort of scorecard for bible verses. Or maybe make freelance illustrations where I connect together people’s big life events.
Plus, I have a resolution this year of using pencils more. I’ve found that pencils are a common thread among many projects that I have enjoyed doing.
- Baseball scorecards
- Webcomics drawn with a pencil (instead of just on the computer)
- Drawing ON a Picasso (why haven’t I blogged about this yet?)
- Graphite rubbings
- Marginalia in books and on printed articles
- Mazes
- Writing thoughts in a notepad
2. Making scorecards already has meaning for me
Just looking back at this list of reasons why this project is important to me. And many of them involve people. And how people were a key part of this project. And that does have lots of meaning and importance.