Yo! MTV Saps!

There are far fewer parallels between sports and popular music than people, particularly athletes, would have you believe.

Let’s start with the obvious. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever screamed, “Sex and drugs and harness racing!” No rock ‘n’ roller has ever been traded to another band for a bag of drumsticks, or Joe Foy. (Though the way I heard the lyrics to Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way From Memphis” for many years, I thought Mott’s guitar was griping because he had been traded to REO Speedwagon – a far better story than the actual lyrics, which are a bit of a muddle.) Stevie Ray Vaughan was no one’s first-round draft choice, Echo and the Bunnymen do not play in the English Premier League, and there are few rockers beyond Jason Becker who’ve suffered a career-ending injury not known as death. Hell, the drummer for Def Leppard lost an arm and kept playing. Let’s see Chase Utley try that.

The parallels tend to be superficial. Athletes and rockers have entourages, indulge in excesses, enjoy strip clubs, and don’t know when to quit. Memory loss also figures in there, but I’ve forgotten exactly where.

The major difference between professional sports and rock ‘n’ roll is attitude. Rockers by definition are anti-establishment while athletes are non-establishment. Rockers attack the bourgeoisie running dogs; athletes run like dogs, and like it. Rockers flip off their fans as a sign of endearment; athletes can’t even thumb their nose at a heckler who suggests that the athlete’s wife is sleeping with a rock star. The most beloved athlete hit home runs for orphans; the most beloved rock star had fathers worldwide locking up their daughters. There’s an edge, a threat, an unsettling element to rock ‘n’ roll that sports has never had. It’s pegged pants, torn T-shirts, biker boots, afros, piercings, and tattoos. The best sports can offer in response is Brandy Chastain stripping down to a sports bra after winning a world championship for her country. Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl? Pure rock ‘n’ roll. Which is why rock and sports cannot and should not coexist.

This message has a particular amount of wham right now because the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductions were last week. Alice Cooper, Neil Diamond, and Tom Waits were inducted – three of my favorite rock ‘n’ roll creeps enshrined in one fell swoop. The only way the night could have been better would have been if Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had risen from his now-real coffin and sung “I Put A Spell On You” to the tuxedoed multitude.

I am no fan of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. I find it as ludicrous as Jane Eyre in 3-D. (Not yet, but soon.) It began as a big-moneyed institutionalization of anarchy and has rapidly reached the point where it is scraping the underside of the barrel for inductees – hence the enshrinement of the creative force behind “Longfellow Serenade.”

Put in perspective, the baseball equivalent to this year’s rock hall-of-famers would be a Cooperstown class consisting of Ralph Garr (multiple lightweight No.1s), Frenchy Bordagaray (short weird guy), and George Brunet (pet snakes).

All of which is a roundabout introduction to one of the worst ideas ever to skulk into the trading-card business: rock-‘n’-roll trading cards.

Let’s be clear on the definitions. By rock-‘n’-roll cards I do not mean the Fleer Beatles sets of the early ‘60s. Those cards were celebrating a cultural phenomenon and indulging in the other National Pastime: separating 10-year-old girls from their money.

The rock-‘n’- roll cards I’m talking about were the Handful O’Landfill-era attempts to treat rock like sports and musicians like athletes, right down to rookie cards, stats, foil, and chase.

There were three major attempts to make rock-‘n’-roll the new hockey. Two, in what should come as a shock to absolutely no one, emanated from Pro Set, the Chinese Democracy of trading-card makers. The third was from a company called Brockum, which was far more sincere but no less misguided.

Brockum's RockCards are the better jumping-off point because they are as bone-simple and straightforward – and derivative – as a CCR riff. They're 4/4 time for sure. None of this Led Zappa stuff.

There's a refreshing naiveté to RockCards, from the five-minute front design to the Uncle-Harry-up-against-the-wall photos to the backs, which read the way '52 Topps cards would have read if they were written by Nikki Sixx.

"Jerry Dixon admits that he loves every aspect of his life on the road with Warrant," reads the back of the aforementioned Mr. Dixon's card – "the women, the free booze backstage, the women, the bus trips and the women. But the talented bass beater has other loves too – including his tattoo collection which he'll gladly show to anyone who asks."

As you may have inferred, RockCards walk with pointy-toed boots on the metal side of the road. Bon Jovi is as soft as these cards get. There are individual cards of people like Brad Whitford, who is known to guitar geeks and unconcussed headbangers as a major contributor to the Aerosmith sound, but is just another over-age, Aqua-Netted reprobate to the rest of the world. Brockum included a few foil cards and autographs for the occasional collector who happened by, but they did it with the same sort of enthusiasm displayed by Peter Frampton in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

RockCards, then, were a hardcore trading card for hardcore hard-rock fans, which was as misguided a notion as giving Steve Jobs an IBM Selectric for his birthday. Their demise was as swift as it was expected.

Pro Set took a different tack for its 1991 run at music-card global domination – but this was SOP for the Lud Denny Band, whose path to the market often ran through Kyrgyzstan.

Its massive (350-plus-card) Super Star MusicCards set included hard rockers (Zakk Wylde), one-hit wonders (Alannah Myles), no-hit blunders (The Party), classics (The Doors, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix) and legit legends (Madonna, Janet Jackson) – their promo photos, anyway – wedged between fuchsia trapezoids and backed with the usual blather, all laid out on a leopard-skin background.

Paula Abdul and fuchsia trapezoids and leopard-skin card backs? Rrrrrowwwwrrrrrr.

For extra texture each pack included a scratch-and-win card (top prize: a trip to swingin’ London) and a handful of Pro Set Points, which could be collected and collected and collected to no apparent effect. You couldn’t even get a Puck bar in the deal.

Unbowed by the lukewarm reception to MusicCards, Pro Set attacked the market the next year with a smaller (150-card) set of Yo! MTV Raps cards.

As part of Pro Set’s attempt to make MusicCards the Standard Rock-‘n’-Roll Trading Card of the World (in the same way that its Flopps cards were the Standard Witless Baseball Parody Trading Card of the World), Yo! MTV Raps are a chip off the Super Stars block o’ rock. The design’s practically the same – maybe a little more gigantic-clock-around-the-neck, but hardly enough to notice – and the backs display the same attention to the press kit … I mean, the same attention to detail. Muckraking, they’re not.

Call me an old softie, but I’m not as repulsed by Yo! MTV Raps cards because they actually document a fascinating period in music history – and by that, I’m not referring to the period when people thought Vanilla Ice had talent. I’m talking about the time when rap went mainstream, powered by Mr. Ice and Mr. Hammer, and the genre was also at a creative peak, thanks to less acclaimed groups like Bell Biv Devoe and the Digital Underground in addition to the critical powerhouses Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys.

Are trading cards the ultimate means of documenting this period? I prefer It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back myself. But at the going rate for Yo! MTV Raps cards (approximately a nickel a gross) it’s tough to say no to the cardboard.

Teenybopper-pop-hero cards will always have a place in the lexicon. Drop by Target and check out the Panini Justin Bieber set for proof. But please, Mr. Panini: Leave rock ‘n’ roll to the sweaty bars and soundstages. You’ll both be better for it.

Peanuts To You -- And You And You And You And You And You

Many months ago, when this column was a mere wee stripling of a refuse-disposal site that only dreamed of become a sprawling, stinking landfill, I asked which trading-card license was more screwed up by its licensee: Looney Tunes or Disney.

I now realize the fallacy of that comparison, in that there were so many other licenses that were Dunkirk – and not merely Dunkirk, but Dunkirk at the Bay of Pigs – compared to those two.

There was Star Wars, reduced by Topps to the level of Shaun Cassidy and Welcome Back, Kotter. There were the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, jacked up to levels of chase and expense by Upper Deck so that the only people who could afford them were the Expense-Account Kids Of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills. There was Marilyn Monroe, which was sold out to someone who knew how to make good-looking cards but whose idea of how to distribute them was – uh, can we get back to you on that? There were rock 'n' roll cards, which will be covered in more detail in a later column, but suffice it to say that at their core they make as much sense as a Stadium Club Anarchists set; Dr. Suess and The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes and Tom and Jerry, which were never made on any scale but should have been; and Dinotopia and Pagemaster and Campbell's Soup and Angel and Berestain Bears and stop me somebody, which never should have been made but were.

Honestly. Never a day went by at good ol' Professional Hobby Consultants when the phone didn't ring with some breathless printer on the other end over the moon at the news that they had just received a license to make UPS or Australian Box Lacrosse or Cop Rock cards and asking us what the hell they should do with it.

"Ask for your guarantee back," we would tell them, which is one of the reasons why I drive a 16-year-old Volvo.

And then we have Peanuts.

Making a good non-sports set is not like building a jet-powered skateboard with a bread knife and a block of wood. There's a formula that you follow, like making Rice Krispies treats, and if the ingredients are of sufficient quality you get a decent 150-card set out the other end. Kids like it, collectors like it, everyone makes a little ching, and you move on to Image vs. Valiant, where everything blows up like the ammo dump in The Fighting Seabees and you get to go back to printing the cute ducky-patterned tapes for Huggies.

The formula doesn't hold your feet to the fire too often, but one thing it absolutely insists on is that you never sell the cards as a complete set.

Think about it: If your whole business model is based on repeat purchases, why would you sell your entire product in one chunk – no matter what you charge for it? It would be like buying a Honda and getting not only this Honda but the next three, all for not much more than the price of one.

Hand-in-hand with that, like The Black-Eyed Peas and sampling software, is the Schwarzenegger-like recommendation that you put something in the product occasionally to keep people coming back to buy more. They're usually called "chase cards," though we used to call them "pretend-valuable cards."

If you don't sell your entire set in one chunk and your pretend-valuable cards are oooey enough, you might even be able to sell Image vs. Valiant. But don't bet the pressure-sensitive labeling machine on it.

Needless to say, the Peanuts set ignored both these venerable pearls of life-enhancing wisdom. And the product stunk.

It would have stunk more if someone had actually seen it. In terms of reaching an audience, the Peanuts set got out less than Howard Hughes in his Las Vegas years.

The 33-card Peanuts "Preview Collection" could have been assembled by anyone with a pair of scissors and a set of Crayolas. Consider the card selection: Picture of Charles Schulz, "first beagle on the moon" panel, Linus in the pumpkin patch, Boy Named Charlie Brown poster, scene from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, Snoopy on doghouse, Lucy holding football, Charlie Brown tied to tree by kite, Linus sucking thumb.

The entire set – it hurts too much to call it a set, so instead we'll just call it "the entire box of cards" – is like that. It's a Cliff's Notes version of a trading-card set shorn of continuity or meaning or any possible reason to buy the product.

You look at this set and wonder: This was Peanuts? This was the most popular and influential comic strip in history – bigger than Dick Tracy, Pogo, L'il Abner, and Little Orphan Annie combined? This sired the most-watched TV special in history, a No. 1 pop single, two balloons in the Macy's parade, a long-running Broadway musical, a dozen best-selling books, several movies, a blimp?

It's not possible. It has less oomph than The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

At this point, after viewing the laundry list of sins this product commits against trading-card orthodoxy, you ask, as any reasonable reader of a column titled "Handful O'Landfill" ought: Who is responsible for this mockery?

Uh, that would be Tuff Stuff Productions. The then-publishers of one of trading-card collecting's most popular periodicals. An organization founded and staffed by trading-card experts.

Let me say right here that I'm sure Tuff Stuff Productions did not think up the Peanuts Preview Collection itsownself. It undoubtedly had help from the Schulz estate and United Features Syndicate, the same sort of help Bugs Bunny provided Yosemite Sam when he was in a dark room full of dynamite and asked for a match. Licensors can be helpful like that.

But some of the blame also falls on the Stuffers for not walking away or at least threatening very strongly to walk away from a promising license when the desired end product is a box of cards.

Despite all of this -- and there is a whole lot of this to not spite, starting with its relentless trivialization of one of the most important culture-transforming phenomena ever crammed into four panels on the funny pages --  the Peanuts Preview Collection does not represent the ultimate manifestation of the screwed-up license. Not as long as Valiant Comics are in the world.

Rest easy, Snoopy. X-O Manowar is on the case.

You're In America. Speak Japanese.

Trading cards are unlike most other collectibles in that part of the enjoyment of having them comes in reading them.

Guitars are not like that, unless you’re into the number 10. Neither are most records, especially the ones with poetry, though I make exceptions for the ones with liner notes by Leonard Feather, Robert Simon, Rich Kienzle, or Cub Koda.

End tables, sewing machines, vases, Currier & Ives prints, cigars, wine, and Nudie suits are likewise light on the metonymies and compound modifiers.

Comic books are the No. 1 exception except when they’re slabbed and the only way you can read them is by cracking the slab and destroying their collectibility for all time, or at least until you fork over another hundred to have them regraded.

Seriously. That’s like buying Frosted Spooners and not eating them because you don’t want to mess with the big, bold “Malt-O-Meal” splashed across the front. 

Baseball cards are closer to comic books than anything previously mentioned, and they have the added advantage of being one page front and back, meaning their deathless prose can be savored and their card-head preserved even in tamper-resistant Lexan. 

After all, where would the Sam Bowens ’64 Topps card be without the immortal words, “Sam hit .324 for Bluefield of the Appalachian League in 1960,” splashed across the back?

Though “the older the better” is an adage that normally applies to baseball cards, it doesn’t always apply to the writing on baseball cards. Even as cardmakers tossed back a few on the party bus to Chapter 7 they continued to fling a few sous in the direction of quality writing on card backs. From NFL Books’ contributions to Pro Set to Keith Olbermann’s work on the “En Fuego” chase set to the anonymous souls (who can remain anonymous no longer: they included myself and Jim McLauchlin) who delivered the vintage goods on Fleer’s Goudey remakes, top-notch writing was one of the hallmarks of sports cards from the early edge of the Handful O’Landfill era, before it was all about the foil.

There are four main requirements for good writing on card backs: Eschew surplusage, avoid clichés, accentuate the positive, and work in at least one pertinent fact per back. So while “Opposing hitters teed off on Alfredo’s 70-mph fastball, helping account for last season’s 3-17 mark” would not be good card-back writing, “Alfredo is counting on an improved changeup to help him build on last year’s three-win total” would be good card-back writing. 

Oh, and one more requirement: Backs should be in English, please. 

Let’s be clear about this. Nobody’s getting all bumper-stickery here. This is not about what is or is not the official language of the United States. This is about what needs to be written on baseball-card backs so people can read them. 

Canadian hockey cards get a pass because they’re Canadian, they’re bilingual by law, and because “la rousse est la taille d'une rondelle qualifiée de gestionnaire” (“the big redhead is a skilled puck-handler”) lets you make neat herking noises in your throat.

Donruss and Fleer baseball sets from the early ‘80s do not get a pass, because while they clearly utilize English words, they use them in a random fashion, much like Sarah Palin. 

Also not getting a pass is the Baseball Magazine set from 1991, because it’s in Japanese. I mean, all in Japanese, except for the player name, team, position, and the words “Baseball Magazine.”

This gives Baseball Magazine a license to ill, because while it’s quite clear that Mickey Abarbanel’s raison d’être for being in a baseball-card set is that he went 13-4 with Fox Cities of the Midwest League in 1966 (“Mickey a 13-4 avec les villes Fox de la Ligue du Midwest en 1966”) there is nothing similar for Kozo Shohda other than “Baseball Magazine” – unless you read Japanese. 

Even then it’s not a sure thing. Who knows what’s an appropriate reason for being for a Nippon Ham Fighter? Kozo “I Shohda been a contender” could be in the set because his hands look like turtle doves when they are holding a bat (“宮城の手がバットを持って鳩亀のように見える”).

Oh, the cards have one more phrase in English: A box filled with Japanese characters is headlined with the words “Did you know?” Actually, I did not know that 浩三は、芸者ので、彼ドレスのような彼のチームメイトに人気がある (“Kozo is popular with his teammates because he dresses like a geisha”), but then again, I don’t feel like I’ve missed much. 

Here, I think, is where the importers of the Baseball Magazine set (which may have been Upper Deck, though memory escapes me) made a misstep. Instead of seeing that 99.63 percent of the American card-buying public does not read Japanese, they saw it as 99.63 percent of the American card-buying public does not not read Japanese, and they forged ahead.

The notion that American collectors might want Japanese baseball cards rose with Hideo Nomo and fell before Ichiro Suzuki hit these shores. It’s a shame. We might want to know that 服がなければイチローは、東京と大阪を結ぶ新幹線に似ている (“Without clothes Ichiro resembles the bullet train linking Tokyo and Osaka”). 

On second thought, they probably said the same thing about Mickey Abarbanel.

Floppsy, Toppsy, And A Rotten Tale

I feel like Steve Goodman being taken to the woodshed by David Allan Coe. I did not write the perfect country-and-western song because I didn't say anything at all about mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk. And what's worse, I wrote about the so-called funny baseball cards of the Handful O'Landfill era and didn't say anything about Flopps.

Flopps were a product of Pro Set circa 1992, when the company was well on its way to world domination through pictures on cardboard. It already had the official cards of the National Football League and the National Hockey League, it had the NBA dead in its sights, it had sold hockey cards with a Canadian Nut Goodie so it could sell practically anything, it had an opulent corporate headquarters that seemed to be made entirely of light beams and Walter Payton statues, and it had a corpulent CEO guaranteed to make a thousand Marie Claire editors go “ick!” The only thing it was missing: a baseball license.

In those days the real money in the card biz was still in baseball, because the NFL and its players’ association (the whole “official card of the NFL” thing notwithstanding) gave away licenses to anyone willing to make a seven-figure donation to their respective labor-unrest war chests, and hockey and basketball were still hockey and basketball, no matter what Michael Jordan said.

Major League Baseball had kept a pretty tight lid on things, meaning it had only five licensees making six products each. This was before baseball cards in cans, so almost all those sets made money. And Pro Set wanted a piece. Very badly.

That was one aspect to Pro Set – “good” Pro Set, if you will. Then there was the Sarah Palin operation, Pro Set gone rogue, mainly under the leadership of trading-card deep-thinker Victor Shaffer. The Pro Set skunkworks made Desert Storm cards and Young Indiana Jones cards and Little Mermaids cards and Dinosaurs cards and racing cards and other non-mainstream sets, and badly wanted to get into the comic end of the non-sport biz.

(There was another level to Pro Set, the money-skimming “evil” Pro Set, but that’s a topic – and a federal investigation -- for another day.)

Somehow the skunkworks got tangled up with the desire for a baseball license and determined the way to get into comic cards and get a baseball license was to use a comic set to slam Topps and many of the superstar baseball players it depicted. The result was Flopps.

Flopps was not Pro Set's finest hour. It was not even its finest couple of seconds. There was nothing about Flopps that was not done elsewhere – and not simply "done better elsewhere," because ha-ha-told-you-so satiric baseball-card sets have never been done well by anyone.

Here are the contents of the promo packs distributed to the media and dealers: Wade Bugs of the Boston Sweat Socks; Stickey Henderson of the Oakland Ughs!; Ken Groovy, Jr., of the Seattle Mindwarps; Barry Bones of the Pusburgh Packrats; and Lance Perishable of the California Airheads.

Laughing yet? If you're not now you never will be, because that's all there is.

The Calvin Coolidge-like lack of humor of the promo cards aside – and remember, promo cards are supposedly the best of the best – the aforementioned Flopps cards point up a bigger problem: sustaining the humor over the course of a set. The promo cards have players hailing from Boston, Oakland, Seattle, California, and Pusbergh. That would be like creating a Garbage Pail Kids set consisting of Adam Bomb, Busted Bertha, Smelly Kelly, Bea Sting, and Glenn Beck. (Yeah, I don't have a problem with it, either.)

And then how big a set do you want? Keeping the knee-slapping mirth going over a handful of superstar cards is one thing; when you get down to cards 466 and 467, Bean Figueroa and Bill Grisly, who's still paying attention? And what, oh what, do you do with Archi Cianfrocco?

The bottom of the theoretical Flopps barrel is the stuff EC Comics were made of: Paul Faires as Paul Fairies. Juan Agosto as Juan Disgusto. Kevin Appier as Kevin Disappear. It would take James Thurber, Dave Barry, and Mark Twain alternating sentences on the back, and Gary Larson and Bill Watterston doing the art, and it still wouldn't come off half as good as a run-of-the-mill Odd Rod.

And that didn't happen. The art has a day-glo sketchiness that makes a Wacky Package look like a DaVinci, and the writing on the back rarely rises above streetwalker level.

"Lance is not a good long-term investment for any team," reads the back of the Lance Perishable card. "Although he's got it together by the early season, by mid-summer he just falls to pieces. Most agree that Lance stinks because he's just plain rottin.'"

There's a perverse, oh-my-God-she's-wearing-that? fascination to Flopps cards. It's like watching your buddy from accounting trying to do karaoke to "Vision of Love" after going four rounds with chocotinis. But that doesn't mean it's something you want to return to time and again.

Rarely has a set been as broken in so many ways as Flopps, so it's probably a good thing it never made it past the promo stage. Why it didn't is a matter of conjecture.

“What we believe happened is that Topps got wind of it and complained to MLB," a former Pro Set staffer says. "The MLB told Pro Set: If you produce Flopps, you will never get a baseball license. Pro Set had every right to produce Flopps; they just realized that it was not worth it to ruin any chance of ever getting a baseball license."

“I remember a giant yawn from the non-sport community when dealers were artificially rigging promo card prices on these weak cards," contends Don Butler, Pro Set expert and former non-sport-card-magazine editor. "I think we received a cello pack -- Wade Buggs was the top card --with an announcement of the set, then it was abandoned either from the threat of a lawsuit or – what I think – the worse threat of no sales."

Whatever did or didn't happen with Flopps, it points up the eternal lesson: Make lemonade when life gives you lemons, but if insist on making your own lemons, don't expect it to taste like Minute Maid.

Nooks and Canooks

The story of trading cards in the late ‘80s in early ‘90s is populated like Churchill Downs on Derby Day with cheaters. You wouldn’t call them cheaters, really, but I would. They were the finest assortment of undercapitalized entrepreneurs, tinhorn bandwagon-chasers, and misanthropic small-businesspeople this side of the 112th Congress.

The only upside to this was that these cheaters were quite entertaining to talk with. They generally had a grandiose idea which tended to work best with someone else’s money, a past that was more littered with potholes than Chicago streets in March, a line of patter that made Professor Harold Hill sound like Shane McGowan, and the idea that the trading-card and sports-memorabilia business was going to divert its course like Mark Twain’s Mississippi and run right through their idea, even if their idea was Dream Team chew toys or Legends of Sea World trading cards. They were a collection of Terry Molloys; they coulda been contenders if they’d only had more money, or the breaks, or the license -- usually the license.

Because they did not have the money or the breaks they couldn’t get the license, and because they couldn’t get the license they had to cheat. Cheating generally took the form of creating an unlicensed product.

There were a couple of routes nascent cardmakers could take to make unlicensed sets. They could just throw the cards out there, usually at shows, and dare the leagues and lawyers to do something about it. That was the Broder approach. They could go the Star Company route and contract with individual players, bypassing the players’ association. They could contract with individual teams or non-major leagues, though by the time the Handful O’Landfill era had rolled around everything this side of the Australian Baseball League was spoken for. Or they could swoop in and sign players while they were in that unique portal between life and the afterlife, otherwise known as the amateur and professional realms.

These projects usually took the form of draft-pick sets, and while many of them were very nicely done (cf. Star Pics), you can’t say there was ever a need for them. Topps and Upper Deck (the Official Upper Deck, not the Forbidden Upper Deck) would get to these guys shortly, assuming they were worthy, and those companies’ cards would be recognized as the valuable ones anyway, no matter how cool the draft-pick-cards’ backs were or how many autographed Chuck Taylors they threw into the mix.

There was a distinct hierarchy to these sets. Football was on top because people actually follow the football draft, and the path from the draft to the bigs rarely detours through Ankara, Gotebörg, or Moose Jaw. Basketball was next, for the same reasons, followed by baseball, and finally hockey.

Understanding the NHL draft is like understanding how Cam Newton wound up at Auburn for free if people were willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for him to play at places very similar to Auburn, save for a few entrees in the lunch line. Both phenomena involve money seen and unseen, levels of play with “junior” in their name, the promise of professional glory, and repeated blows to the head. But eventually they diverge.

Unless your name is Sidney Crosby, a first-round NHL draft pick can vanish for several years before suddenly appearing in the NHL, usually with a team five places removed from the team that drafted him. No one knows what goes on in between; many meals of french fries and gravy, several thousand Molsons, and extensive bridgework are the best guesses.

Because the NHL draft is as connected to the NHL as Taylor Swift is connected to Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers, naturally hockey-draft-pick sets proliferated like women-on-women talk shows, with about as much worthwhile content.

The production qualities on these sets range from unnecessarily glitzy (Ultimate Hockey) to Home Shopping Network Lite (Classic) to third-world crude, which is where this week’s Handful O’Landfill at last makes an appearance.

The genesis of the “Russian Stars In NHL/National Team of the USSR” has been sucked up in the great Zamboni of time, though it probably wasn’t altogether clear to start with. My guess is that this product of Leningrad’s Ivan Fiodorov Press comes in somewhere between the Joe Smith Indianapolis Racers one-card Wayne Gretzky set profiled in the first installment of Handful O’Landfill and a fundraiser for the Russian Mafia.

Just the name of this set suggests the confusion that still surrounds it. Is it a set of Russian stars in the NHL, the Russian national team, or a national team made up of stars of the NHL? If the set answers these questions it does so in Russian, because the English sure doesn’t get ‘er done.

With that said, this set has its moments, especially at the end of the English portion of the Igor Larionov’s card, which reads, “In 1989-90 he began playing for the Vancouver Canooks.” This falls in perfectly with the Doront Mupplekhleef, Bostabroons and Mondrool Canadeens of Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar. Alexei Gusarov’s titular team, the Quebec Nordics, can’t compete with that.

The set also has a card of Vladislav Tretiak, the best goalie ever, and cards of that guy aren’t exactly spilling over the gunwales.

From the nesting-doll motif on the card backs to the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time photography on the front, there’s a gritty Trabantesque feel to this set, which is just about right. Like the Trabant, the Russian Stars In NHL set is a socialist approximation of a capitalist fad. And like the Trabant, this set didn’t go anywhere, either.

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love, And Baseball Cards?

The idea that baseball could be funny has reverberated through almost the entire history of the game, which leads you to believe that baseball was not really designed to be a game but rather some elaborate Victorian comedy routine played out for the enjoyment of the one-armed Civil War vets at the Grand Army Home. Maybe it was their version of Saturday Night Live, with Abner Doubleday as Amy Poehler, doing U.S. Grant impersonations. It would explain volumes, including, at last, Whammy Douglas.

The first instances of mass-produced baseball humor came in the mid-1880s, with the publication of advertising cards showing baseball players doing the hilarious things baseball players have always done: sliding, catching, batting, and throwing. What made you really split your sides and expel peach melba through your nose was that the players' heads were Macy's-balloon-size, and the slogans on the top engaged in subtle wordplay certain to send the eyeballs of the Henry James set rolling back into their foreheads.

For instance, there is the caricature of the Detroit Wolverines’ Dan Brouthers with the slogan, “Watch me soak one.” No, smart individual, the ball isn’t even made of water like the balls in those razor ads. It’s just a ball and a slogan and a caricature of Dan Brouthers that made Thomas Nast’s work on Boss Tweed look like Gainsbrough. A chicken feather lightly waved across the foot is not half so effective as a Moran's Coffee card, let me tell you.

This sort of hilarity continued with the Old Judge set, otherwise known as the card set of the masses, by the masses, for the masses, and containing all the masses. There the humorous hook designed to get people to set fire to dried leaves rolled in paper and stuck in their mouth was the old ball-on-a-string trick. Arlie Latham is reaching for a ball that will never, ever have the giddyup to reach his glove, which makes "Who's On First?" come off like Pacino and DiNiro doing Aristophanes. Combine that with handlebar mustaches and nicknames like "Death to Flying Things" and you're only a couple of gallons of blackberry brandy away from a rip-roaring party.

And around the turn of the century came the Edith Wharton-esque Mayo Comics set, which shows, among other moments that could have been outtakes from Airplane!, a drawing of an evicted family with their belongings on the street and the slogan "Put Out At 1st" beneath.

Boy, a two-handed eye-poke has nothing on social-consciousness humor from the meat-packing-trust days.

We could go through the hysterical hijinks for years and launch nasal chunks at the mere thought of baseball humor being used to sell paints and suits, but this is "Handful O'Landfill" and our objective is to ridicule the cards of baseball's salad days. So let's fast-forward to '91 – 1991, if you don’t mind -- and sharpen the long knives.

The humorous baseball cards of the HOL-i-days took one of two tacks, neither of which would hurt you much if you sat on them. The first was the historical approach, as embodied by Star Company’s “Baseball Hall of Shame” set.

Star Company was well-acquainted with baseball humor, having made a 20-card set of Sam Horn. It delved further into the history books with its Baseball Hall of Shame set and produced Chaplinesque moments like the following, delivered under the headline, “Blooperstown News”:

“1902 – Cubs pitcher Jimmy St. Vrain had a problem finding first base. This was understandable since he seldom made it to first, batting a weak .097 for the year.

“St. Vrain usually batted right-handed but, following a suggestion by his manager, he attempted to bat left-handed.

“On his very next trip to the plate, St. Vrain hit a slow grounder to shortstop Honus Wagner. Thrilled that he had simply hit the ball, St. Vrain dropped his bat and took off on a dead run – toward third base!

“The stunned Wagner didn’t know whether to throw him out at first or third. He recovered in time and fired to first for the out. It was probably the first time a runner was thrown out by 180 feet!”

Probably. And we wonder where the next James Thurber is coming from.

Forgive me for interrupting your paroxysms and convulsions, but I have a column to run and a question to ask: Would you pay money for more of the same?

Maybe if you’re Jerry Seinfeld and you find yourself with a standup act to write and no material to write it from. But for the mere mortals it would be like giving every new driver’s-ed graduate a Ferrari Testarossa. Watch out for the corners.

While the Baseball Hall of Shame set stuck to the facts with gut-jiggling results, the set known by no other name than "Fun Stuff" tossed aside the history books in favor of a no-holds-barred assault on the funny bone. The result was like a Steven Wright monologue with the punch line not merely delayed but completely eliminated.

Consider the card of "Bubble Dumb" Bonkus, Backup Catcher. Paired with a drawing of a player trying to remove what appears to be characters from a Dreamworks cartoon from his face are the deathless couplets, "If a guy can't blow bubbles, there is just no way he can make it in baseball./So despite his great arm and great bat, Bonkus will always be just a backup player if he can't master bubble gum."

Twain, Thurber, Benchley, Wolfe, Barry -- they were all just a run-up, laying the groundwork for "Bubble Dumb" Bonkus. You have to go all the way back to Chaucer to find something labeled as humor so completely hidden behind a veil of nondescript language.

I have no idea where this card came from. I'm guessing somewhere in the candy realm, based on the name "Confex" following the copyright circle. On the other hand, Confex may be the name of a clandestine operation, much like the Killer Joke Project from the Monty Python sketch, where hundreds of little gray men toil endlessly in an airless bunker, striving under threat of death to create the ultimate funny baseball card that will leave millions of eight-year-old boys so paralyzed with laughter that the Confex operation can swoop in and harvest their organs or swipe their iPod Touches. I know which one I'd prefer. Give me a good, fresh kidney over a mini-hard drive full of Taylor Swift anyday.

It's a thought. So is not bothering to joke up baseball. Let it roast – a celebrity roast, of course – on its own spit.

Gotta Trash 'Em All

I’m not quite sure where trading-card manufacturers got their sense of humor from. Kim Jong Il, maybe.

With the exception of Topps, which had pop-culture coolness hard-wired into its chicle-powered consciousness, card companies’ attempts at humor have gone over as well as Jackie Mason at the Umm Al-Quwain Dairy Bar.

I know why, and I’ve known ever since I first met the guys behind Fleer. In those days Fleer was run by a bunch of characters straight out of Dickens – I mean, straight out of Dickens, right down to the quill pens and knee breeches -- and they were trying to keep up with Wacky Packages. And with what? The hopelessly hopeless Baseball Weird-Ohs. CB Convoy Code. Jet Set Stickers.

Fleer showed same sort of creative comic thinking behind the German killer joke in the classic Monty Python sketch -- which is about what you’d expect from a bunch of Bartleby-the-scrivener types from the land of the scrapple and the cheesesteak.

If Fleer had done this in Veterans Stadium instead an nondescript industrial pile they would have been booed.

The problem with funny trading cards is the problem with Fleer trying to be Topps: ancient gummakers have no idea what’s funny to kids. It’s completely beyond them. It’s like handing an iPhone to Benjamin Franklin and telling him to call his girlfriend in Paris.

And this doesn’t simply apply to gummakers; makers of trading cards from the Handful O’Landfill Era were equally clueless.

Lime Rock’s Mad magazine set, for instance, took the most relentlessly hysterical magazine in history and reduced it to a hopeless mélange of cover art and teensy-weensy Spy Vs. Spy comics. It was like Reader’s Digest condensing The Great Gatsby by cutting three pages out of every four, and printing the remainder in single-spaced four-point type.

And then there was Pokémon. I have great admiration for the makers of Pokémon cards, because they’ve been able to convince kids to collect cards of half-baked pieces of neo-Shinto environmental bric-a-brac (a rock? A lily-of-the-valley? A sparrow?) with powers that rank just above exhaling on the Ability-O-Meter.

In any other milieu these characters would be as collectible as janitors – and yet Pokémon has kept it going for 15 years! Topps can’t get anyone to buy a LeBron James card more than once every couple of years, and Pokémon has kids lining up for yet another Shellder.

Naturally that sort of success raised the cackles (thanks, Duke) of the cardmakers who paid millions of dollars for the right to make Roland Melanson cards only to find that no one wants a Roland Melanson card, not even Rollie the Goalie.

Chief among the raised-cackle crowd was Pacific Trading Cards, whose president, Mike Cramer, by-God vowed to do something about it. And the name of this pre-emptive nuclear strike? Pukey-mon.

There may be a non-sport parody set more mean-spirited, more clumsily executed, more ugly on so many levels than Pukey-mon, but I haven’t seen it. If you took the most evil political attack ad imaginable – “Russ Feingold wants to send American jobs overseas so he can elect Iranian terrorists to the Supreme Court,” along those lines – and had its creators make a Pokémon parody set, it would still lack the putrid tang of Pukey-mon.

Consider this set’s construction: one-toilet, two-toilet, and three-toilet chase levels. Names like Blewchow, Yuhorrid, Upchuckmander, Starpee, Hitmongroin, Crampy, Gastricate, and of course, Yuk. The deathless slogan, “Time to flush ‘em all.” The value statement, "A new low in trading cards." The disclaimer, “These cards are a parody and are not authorized or licensed by the makers of Pokémon. In fact, Pokémon makes us puke.” And, finally, the irresistible sales pitch, “Pukey-mon cards have no purpose, value, or reason to exist; therefore, everyone will want to collect them.”

Talk about biting off the hand that feeds you. At the shoulder.

Regardless of your station or how much skin you have in its game, you have to give Pokémon props. When the rest of the collectible card world was falling apart like a ’99 Hyundai, Pokémon kept interest, kept collectability, and kept making money, and did so largely by selling pictures on cardboard to kids.

Pukey-mon is a cardboard hissy-fit thrown by a cardmaker spurned, seething with jealousy at the thought  of some stupid monster game stealing away his kids from his crown-shaped, die-cut Shyrone Stith pictures.

Eric Clapton got jealous of George Harrison and produced “Layla.” The Beach Boys got jealous of Sgt. Pepper and made Pet Sounds. Beyond that, there aren’t many instances of raging jealousy producing great art – especially when the jealousee is something of a hack to start with. You don’t have to look any further for proof than Pukey-mon.

I’ll be back next time with more examples of not-quite-comic cards extricated from the landfill. And in the meantime, here’s a memo to Mike Cramer: If you’re going to make stuff for kids that they really want, grow up a little yourownself.