ARTIST CHRONICLES THE NATIONAL PASTIME
Baseball and art have always been intertwined throughout Graig Kreindler’s life. While he may have drifted away from one at some point or questioned his commitment to the other, his love of the sport and his ability to depict it on canvas would come together in a way that would make his work as much of a national treasure as the game he was detailing.
Kreindler, 40, grew up in Monsey, N.Y., a small town some 30 miles north of New York City. His first experience with baseball was with the underachieving Yankee teams of the mid-to-late ‘80s while one of his first works of art was Mickey Mantle.
“The first stuff I remember drawing at that age was cartoons, G.I. Joe, He Man, that kind of stuff,” said Kreindler, who was named after former Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles. “When I was 4 or 5, though, I became conscious of my dad’s baseball card collection. He grew up collecting cards in the ‘40s and ‘50s. While my grandmother threw out a lot of them, he was able to keep a number of them. The majority of the cards in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the Topps and Bowman cards, were illustrated.
“I’d like to think that subconsciously I was drawn to those cards, thinking these are drawn and
