I am currently leaning towards using the same awards text on the 1974 cards as the 1973 cards. Here's why:
- I am struggling to find any more card writeups or similar for awards. When I made the '73 cards I used the best sentences I could steal from the back of Topps cards for each award from 2002-2006. With all of the best material used and no other sets featuring distinct cards for Gold Glove, MVP, Cy Young, ROY, and Silver Slugger, I tried to turn to newspapers which leads to the next issue.
- It is very difficult to find useful writeups for baseball award winners older than a few years ago. I tried newspaper databases and google searches as well as the MLB press releases site (which does not allow search by date).
- What I can find is usually not very useful as it states information too specific for use with every player that could possibly win the award OR directly references information that cannot be recalled by the baseball card creator, this year's MLB.com writeups for Gold Glove winners being an excellent example as it frequently referenced stats without tokens (DRS, DWAR, CERA) and previous award history. Some examples:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by MLB.com
...taking home his third straight Gold Glove Award and his fourth in the last five years
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by MLB.com
...en route to taking home his first career Gold Glove Award.
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- That second example brings up a another point. It is currently not possible to create conditional text on baseball cards in OOTP 21. If I wanted to write a line that would work the sentence has to make sense for all numbers. words like first, consecutive, etc. are off limits. This is probably not a bug and should not be a priority so I would not expect it to change soon.
Until I can find a good source of write-ups that would work for OOTP, the game is updated to allow more of the write-ups I have already found, the game offers a token that generates a card write-up based on the player that can be inserted, or I become more confident in my writing skills I'll probably settle for the back of card text being the same for all winners of each award every year.
EDIT: I bit the bullet and wrote custom write-ups. They're probably not ready to adorn the backs of real Topps cards but I'm proud of them. That leaves XML and tracing fun fact images before 1974 is done. The latter could take several weeks... stay tuned.