He Painted 700 Mets Baseballs by Hand — What Happened Next Shocked Even Citi Field. DD

It started with a simple idea: pixels are just colored squares.

For Dylan Siddique, that thought eventually turned into 700 baseballs, gallons of spray paint, and an eight-foot tribute to Francisco Lindor now hanging inside Citi Field.

The 25-year-old New Jersey native — known online as the College Cuber — has built a growing reputation for turning everyday objects into massive mosaics. But his latest creation may be his boldest yet: a 600-pound portrait of the Mets’ superstar shortstop, constructed entirely from painted baseballs.

And it almost never left the stadium once it was finished.

Siddique earned a biomedical engineering degree in 2022. What began as a pandemic-era experiment with Rubik’s Cubes evolved into something much bigger. He realized that digital images are simply grids of color — and that those colors could exist in physical form.

“Pixels on a screen are just tiny colored squares,” Siddique explained. “Rubik’s Cubes are physical colored squares — why not make real-life images?”

That mindset helped launch a full-time art career. His studio now houses hundreds of thousands of cubes and building bricks. He creates large-scale mosaics for sports teams and performs interactive builds in front of live crowds.

But when the Mets approached him, the challenge escalated.

“They literally sent 700 New York Mets baseballs to my house,” Siddique said. “I spray-painted every single one a different color. And mind you, I do not do this. This is not part of my process.”

Unlike plastic cubes, baseball leather doesn’t exactly welcome spray paint. Making the color stick required experimentation. Drying each ball properly became its own operation. Then came the structure — a custom-built frame topped with turf that could support enormous weight.

Once the design was mapped, Siddique secured each baseball into place.

“It was like a big bed of nails,” he said. “I screwed every single baseball onto the frame according to my design.”

When completed, the mosaic stood eight feet tall and weighed roughly 600 pounds. Moving it wasn’t realistic.

So Siddique did something most artists never experience — he finished the final assembly inside Citi Field itself.

“I was just there at night, by myself,” he recalled. “It was a crazy experience. I finished the piece on site because I couldn’t lift it. Wherever it was going, I thought, ‘I’m just going to leave it right here.’”

That’s essentially what happened.

Today, the Francisco Lindor mosaic hangs permanently inside the Mets’ home stadium — a striking, textured tribute built from the very object that defines the sport.

For Siddique, the project represents more than a display piece. His art is often interactive, involving fans in live builds that transform spectators into collaborators.

“I’m not just the artist,” he said. “I’m the moderator, helping people create something they’ve never done before.”

Still, seeing his work mounted inside a Major League ballpark carries a different weight.

“It’s one thing to make it in a studio,” Siddique said. “But to have it on display for fans — that’s the dream.”

In a sport rooted in tradition, it took 700 baseballs and one engineer-turned-artist to create something entirely new.

And for Mets fans walking through Citi Field, Lindor now stands a little taller — eight feet tall, to be exact.