Baseball is a game built on the art of numbers.
Philadelphia graphic designer Dan Duffy takes those numbers and turns them into art.
To celebrate the Atlanta Braves’ unlikely 2021 World Series championship, Duffy inscribed, by hand, a list of every engagement in the Braves’ 2021 season and turned that grid into a portrait of an overjoyed Freddie Freeman.
The first baseman is seen in the exultant moment that he catches the last out in Game 6 of the World Series, his arms up, his eyes alight, his face transformed with a shout of happiness.
Look closely and you can see that the image of Freeman is composed of thousands of words and numbers, a grid of statistics from the bumpy ride that was the 2021 season.
Credit: Dan Duffy
Credit: Dan Duffy
Every game, every date, every opponent, every score. Some of those scores were painful to behold. The Braves didn’t have a winning record up until Aug. 6; MLB.com called their ultimate triumph “mathematically improbable.”
The ecstasy on Freeman’s face tells that story.
“I don’t know if he looks as much like Freddie Freeman as I wanted him to,” said Duffy, “but he looks like Freddie Freeman in the moment that he won the World Series.”
Duffy, 41, a former ne’er-do-well in college, began creating his handwritten mosaics in 2008, when the Philadelphia Phillies won it all. He has created perhaps 150 mosaic artworks since then, in an enterprise he calls Art of Words.
To enshrine the Braves’ World Series win, Duffy focused on Freeman, not just because his catch at first base sealed the deal, but because Freeman was the glue that held the team together.
“He’s such a distinctive-looking guy,” said Duffy. “He’s got this cool red hair, these eyebrows and all that, and there he was, when they won, in that moment of jubilation.”
Duffy took a screengrab from a broadcast of the game and started with a pencil sketch of Freeman in that moment, working on heavy watercolor-type paper. Then, on top of that image, he overlaid a handwritten grid of statistics from the Braves’ season, 177 games, 4,869 letters and numbers, using ballpoints, Sharpies and gel pens, in a hundred different colors.
Atlanta snuffed Philadelphia’s chances at a National League East title this year, extending the Phillies’ postseason losing streak to 10 years. The Braves also spoiled Philadelphia’s chances a variety of times in the 1990s. “You guys ruined my childhood,” said Duffy.
But the artist doesn’t hold it against Atlanta, and he is, in fact, planning another graphic that will charm Braves fans. Sometime next year he hopes to finish an image that will celebrate the Braves’ 151 years as a team, with a mosaic composed of the names of every Brave to have ever played with the team, from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta.
Credit: Dan Duffy
Credit: Dan Duffy
In addition to baseball images, Duffy creates images from football, basketball and major league soccer, as well as images that pay homage to great rock ‘n’ roll bands and figures from history.
(He created a portrait of John F. Kennedy using the words from Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, in which the new president told his listeners, “Ask not what your country can do for you.”)
Duffy also immortalizes college football teams and has optimistic words for University of Georgia fans in search of a national championship. “I did Alabama in 2020, and I’m hoping not for a repeat,” he said. The Bulldogs, said Duffy, “have another shot at it. Alabama could lose.”
Your lips to God’s ear.
Daniel Duffy will create about 1,000 prints from his Freddie Freeman drawing, at $49.99 each. For more information, go to artofwords.com.
