Isn’t it annoying when you meet people who seem able to do everything?
That might be my friend Jeff Brain.
Okay, Jeff can’t pitch and hit like Shohei Ohtani. But he is an accomplished artist who won his first award at age six. He’s been a sports reporter. He invented his own dice baseball game. He’s played softball since he was a kid and still competes in a senior league at age 72. And he’s an award-winning baseball poet.
Sure, it’s admirable. . . But isn’t it just a little annoying?
Fortunately, Jeff has one redeeming quality: he combines his artistic talent with my favorite sport.
I met Jeff through the National Baseball Poetry Festival, where his artwork has become part of the festival’s identity. Long before that, he was already drawing. At six years old, he won the Junior Championship in the San Francisco Chronicle’s youth art competition. He never stopped.
One of Jeff’s biggest influences was legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer, whose expressive line drawings appeared in The Village Voice for more than four decades. Feiffer went on to win both a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award, and you can see echoes of his style in Jeff’s work.
“My passion for baseball really took off in 1980,” Jeff told me, “when I got a job covering Cal baseball for the Piedmont Times.” (For my out-of-state readers, “Cal” is UC Berkeley.)
“I found myself sketching the action while I watched the games. Eventually I realized baseball was all I wanted to draw.”
Here are some of those early sketches.
Jeff’s creativity doesn’t stop with drawing.
Jeff’s poem, Neruda Meets Basie, was recognized in the first year of the Festival and his work (both written and visual) has gone on to be published in Baseball Bard and Twin Bills. He’s also a lifelong gamer who designed his own tabletop baseball game, plays Magic: The Gathering, and serves as a longtime Dungeon Master for Dungeons & Dragons.
In other words, if baseball has a creative side, Jeff has probably tried it.
Rather than tell you more, I will let his artwork speak for itself. I apologize for the thumbnail size and suggest you go to Jeff’s website for a better view.
What I love most is the way Jeff captures baseball’s movement. The swing. The follow-through. The dive. The split-second balance between power and grace.
My father used to say his favorite part of going to a game wasn’t the game itself. It was watching infield practice because it was so graceful.
He would have loved Jeff’s art.
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