NEW YORK — Ryan Christenson turned lineup cards into art.
After San Francisco Giants manager Bob Melvin chooses a batting order, his bench coach selects the font and color scheme for the day’s sumptuous script. Options include Roman Gothic, a Celtic variation, Chicano tattoo, and graffiti.
“He’s an artist,” said New York Yankees star Juan Soto, who spent a year and a half with Christenson in San Diego.
Players eagerly await the handwriting on the wall, as long as Christenson provides the handwriting. When pitcher Drew Pomeranz arrived at the visitors’ clubhouse at Citi Field to join the Giants last month, the letters were unmistakable.
“I knew as soon as I walked in here who wrote that painting,” he said.
Christenson uses about 10 styles that include cursive letters of various thicknesses to make the letters stand out. It employs the Phillies’ Scriptwurst font for games against Philadelphia and mimics the interlocking “NY” monogram style when playing against the Yankees.
“Whatever floats my boat that day,” he said. “Sometimes if we have a little winning streak, I’ll keep that fountain going until we lose.”
Right-handed hitters usually wear black, left-handed hitters in red, and alternate hitters in blue. He wore orange and blue when the Giants played the Mets and rainbow colors on Pride Night.
“It’s something that the players have fun with,” Christenson said, noting that sometimes when players have a great game, they receive the lineup card as a souvenir.
“This is something unique. You can put it on your wall. Just a little piece of art. It’s unique.”
A 50-year-old former outfielder, Christenson was born in Redlands, California, and grew up in nearby Highland. He never studied calligraphy.
“I started doing this when I was a child. My grandmother, my grandmother, she gave me a calligraphy pen,” Christenson said, thinking fondly of Iva Six. “So all through my childhood, I would pick it up and put it back in the closet and find it and bring it back and doodle with it a little bit and just learn the basics of how it worked.”
Christenson scribbled in his school folders at Apple Valley High School, northeast of Los Angeles. He made the Pepperdine baseball team as a walk-on and was selected by Oakland in the 10th round of the 1995 amateur draft.
He hit .222 in six seasons from 1998 to 2002 with the Athletics, Arizona, Milwaukee and Texas, winning a World Series ring with the 2001 Diamondbacks, although he did not play in the postseason. He retired due to a knee injury after spending 2004 with the Marlins’ Triple-A Albuquerque team and graduated from Pepperdine that year, majoring in business.
“So I kind of have a little left and right mind working,” Christenson said. “I love numbers and the analytical part of baseball. I love reading a horse racing form. All the numbers fascinate me there. And I also like the artistic side.”
After working at a mortgage bank north of San Diego, he opened a baseball academy in Georgia. He was planning a bigger gym, but financing from suburban Fairburn fell through.
Christenson decided to return to baseball and worked his way up through the Athletics organization, managing Class A Beloit (2013) and Stockton (2014), Double-A Midland (2015-16) and Triple-A Nashville (2017). He became Melvin’s bench coach with the A’s from 2018-21, moved to San Diego with Melvin as bench coach in 2022 and associate manager in 2023, then followed Melvin to the Giants this season.
“He’s very analytical and that organization was like that,” Melvin said. “It was a perfect fit at the perfect time. Obviously, I brought it everywhere I went.”
Christenson restarted the fancy calligraphy in 2014 in Stockton, inspired by the fancy lineup letters of Jerry Narron and Don Wakamatsu, both former coaches who also coached. Narron’s creative cards began in Baltimore in 1993, and he appreciates having the stamp of an innovator.
“Imitation is the highest form of flattery, so I thank you,” Narron said.
Wakamatsu’s lineup cards gained prominence when Kansas City reached the 2014 World Series.
“The reason I started was because I remembered when I got to my first game in the big leagues with the White Sox and they gave me my lineup card and it meant something to me,” Wakamatsu said. “When I started making Sharpie pens, like everyone else at the time, I just didn’t like the way they looked. She was an old school baseball guy and I started playing around with that. My first few were really difficult and I think I got a little better as I went along.”
Christenson takes a bag with writing utensils and ink cartridges on the road. He uses Speedball’s Elegant Writer felt markers and also some with metal tips.
Most lineup cards take about 15 minutes, but more complex designs can stretch the draft to 30.
“Nothing too long, just a little Zen moment, kind of takes you away from the numbers work part of the game and just lets my mind relax,” Christenson said.
If a player gets sore during batting practice and gets scratched, Christenson is ready to review.
“I usually take another lineup card and if it’s in hole 7, I write the correct name in hole 7, then cut it out and glue it over the top so the watermarks line up. Unless you really look at it, you can’t tell,” he said.
San Francisco sells most of Christenson’s lineup cards at the Giants’ “From the Clubhouse” store at Oracle Park starting at $75, with the price dependent on the game and milestones.
Melvin has several framed lineup cards in his office.
“I don’t know how he makes time with everything he has to do,” Melvin said. “Players sometimes go to the dugout and the first thing they want to see is what the different handwriting is on the lineup card today.”
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