“By the time I was a freshman in high school, I realized that playing professional baseball was not in the cards for me,” Mark Ulriksen says, the player behind this week’s cover, “Hitting Forty.” “I still liked to draw and paint baseball, so I feel fortunate that I can continue my love for the sport with what I do for a living. As soon as spring training rolls around, I start reading the sports pages much more. I’m not a Yankees fan per se, but I’m a New Yorker at heart, and I can say the Yankees are sure old and beat up. In this lineup I put together, I added the ages of all the players and found the average was forty. And forty in baseball is old,” he says, with a laugh.
See below for a slide show of more New Yorker illustrations, sketchbooks, and covers about baseball by Ulriksen.
