"Baseball" brief - Different concepts

After the failure of using the detailed floral/illustrative style for the posters, I went back to the initial ideas to try and come up with something a bit simpler with a quicker turn-around. I found I was a lot more positive about the idea of using different baseball players in different poses with the baseball equipment replaced with musical instruments.

There are probably about 8 different kinds of instrument used in the album (including Bass, different guitars, keyboard, drums etc) so it could work really nicely. As a really quick test, I made this in photoshop to see how it might work compositionally or if it really translates from idea to illustration.

It could do with a bit more detail so that it is actually clear that the guy is a baseball player, but I think that it does work realistically as an image. I'm not sure exactly how the type would fit in with this, but it would probably just be relatively simple and obvious alongside the image. 

Just after this I really quickly used the same kind of testing idea to try out the concept of using actual baseball equipment for the images.

I thought this idea had some potential as well, so I took it into illustrator to see if it would work in a vector style illustration as well.

I think it works ok, but would need a bit more work to be suitable as the poster style. It's also a little bit too literal. I am still undecided as to whether to use this idea or the baseball players idea above.