You Make The Call

They say confession is good for the soul, so I’m going to have one fine soul after this.

Brother, I have sinned. I helped put baseball cards in cans. I led the Dare to Tear brigade. I endorsed holograms. I perpetuated Sportflics and Action Packed. I never talked Signature Rookies out of anything. I agreed that beer cards were a good idea. I unequivocally asserted there was a market for a tractor-card set. I was there when Campbell’s Soup cards were spawned. I helped Metallic Images make tin cards of Elvis. I created APBA Big League Baseball, the baseball board game for people who find Candy Land too challenging. I was the word guy behind Salvino’s Bammers, the unabashed (and unlicensed) Beanie Baby rip-offs. I created a collectible card game in a morning. I was the world’s worst forger of facsimile autographs. I signed off on Berenstein Bears cards. Lion King 2? That was me.

The reason for all the breast-baring is that I'm going to write something snarky about a set created by some friends of mine, and I want it understood that my raiments are as far from dazzling white as you can get and still be in the color spectrum.

Now that I feel better about things, on to the snark.

In the early ‘90s, baseball cards were so hot that companies sprung up like soldiers sewn from dragon’s teeth to schlep near-baseball and/or near-card products meant to piggyback on licensed baseball issues. These products included the indecipherable Ken Griffey Jr. holograms, the indigestible Donruss Top of the Order collectible card game, the hemi-legendary Little Sun High School Baseball set, Star Company minor-league cards, Star Company major-league cards, Pacific Senior League cards, Flopps cards, Japanese baseball cards, Australian Baseball League cards, the Jim Thome Baseball Game, the Darryl Strawberry Saranac Glove card, the quite perplexing Major League Writers set, the quite gorgeous Conlon Collection cards, the quite less-than-gorgeous Legends of the Negro Leagues cards, and the subject of today’s screed, T&M Umpire Cards.

Umpire cards weren't a new idea. Umpires actually played a supporting role in the classic 1955 Bowman set, the set that brought a half-astonished, half-asleep image of Ed Honochick to a world of bike-riding, striped-T-shirt-wearing, flatopped, disbelieving nine-year-olds. However, a standalone umpire-card set is a different kettle of blue-clad meat, an adventure in Wackyland that makes Don Quixote's excursions look like a spin in one of Richard Branson's flying machines.

Even in a market glowing more white-hot than Satan’s tats, there is no path I can see that would have taken you from umpire cards to the Hamptons, the Framptons, or even the Cramdens. The absolute optimum scenario would have umpire cards scrabbling along for a couple of standalone series before being slurped up by a Fleer or Topps and incorporated into their regular sets. The norm would be dissipation, bankruptcy and ruin.

But you want to hear something really crazy? T&M Umpire Cards survived for three seasons, from 1988 to 1990, in the hot, steaming middle of the baseball-card boom.

Maybe that’s why two of T&M’s main principals, the card photographers Lou Sauritch and Mitch Haddad, are alive and well, and show up in the gutter only by choice.

The initial prognosis for the cards certainly suggests terminal illness. The set’s most intense shot features Rick Reed calling a player out at first on a routine call, an act that falls on the action spectrum somewhere between blowing your nose and ordering a side of bacon at a Waffle House. Furthermore, you look at the mugs of some of these umps and realize there’s a reason why they wear masks. There’s not quite as much avoirdupois as you might expect, but on the other hand, there’s not exactly an excess of flaming youth. A spin through a couple packs of umpire cards actually makes you yearn for a shot, any shot, of Charlie Hough. Heck, even a Jamie Moyer would do.

On the other hand, all is not gloom and doom and out-of-pocket expenses with T&M Umpire Cards. The photographs are great, as might be expected. Sauritch and Haddad are gifted old-school card photographers equally skilled at freezing action or bouncing a flash to capture the perfect portrait pose. The cardstock is quality, the backs include height and family status, and there’s a “You Make The Call” trivia fact on each regular card back. The lagniappe includes four Al Barlick puzzle cards that can be redeemed for an Al Barlick litho and an Al Barlick photo, making Al Barlick the umpire-card equivalent of cilantro. It’s everywhere, or at least it seems like it’s everywhere.

Plus, the cards actually got some distribution. I distinctly remember seeing T&M Umpire Cards for sale at the South Plover Motomart, north-by-northwest of the ostrich sticks, right next to the Swisher Sweets. I'm sure nary a day went by without some tough barrelling into that place and growling, "Yeah, gimme one o' them lighters with the flamin' skull on it, a couple of tins of Copenhagen, a pint of Yukon Jack -- and, yeah, how about a pack of umpire cards."

The ultimate problem with T&M Umpire Cards is that … well, the players aren’t players. They’re inanimate objects, basically, and sports cards of inanimate objects are a tough sell even for the  completist collector deemed too out there for shows like I Live Surrounded By Piles Of Crap. The Starting Gate card from the Harness Heroes set is the ultimate expression of this, but there are plenty more: trophy cards that don’t show the athletes who won the trophies, the stadium and logo cards from Fleer Sport Stickers, all of Big League Bowling, half of every NASCAR set, the Pro Set Puck card, Gibson guitar cards, the SkyBox peach-basket card, cap cards, mask cards, helmet cards, and most immovably of all, the Pro Set Chris Berman card. No one got worked up over the Lady Byng Trophy rookie card, and no one gave a second look to Greg Bonin’s trading-card debut, either.

Given that, we probably should be dumbstruck with admiration that T&M Umpire Cards were able to parlay the same small roster of valueless parking-garages-in-blue into three years of faint-pulsed sales.

Then again, maybe not. You see, quite a lot of the products destined to fail came out all right. Tractor cards sold to the amazement of all, including the client. Campbell’s Soup cards tickled the fancy of quite a lot of hoarders-in-the-making. The Metallic Images Elvis cards were a semi-hit (mainly because quality control was so bad that it was virtually impossible to find a set without scratched cards and/or a mangled box). Salvino’s Bammers were a scary-huge seller for six months or so. And the baseball cards with my horrible facsimile autographs (intentionally non-authentic, and designed for insertion into Krause Publications sports periodicals) helped move hundreds of thousands of magazines.

The line back then was you could put anything on trading cards and it would sell. Thanks to T&M’s umpire cards, we know one of the boundaries of the term “anything.” It starts at Terry Tata, goes straight to Tim Tschida, and ends definitively at Rocky Roe.

And given that, Mitch and Lou just might forgive me for the snark.

The Steampunk Facebook

January has come in like a lamb in central Wisconsin, stirring thoughts of Toy Fair sooner than usual.

For a time at the conclusion of the Handful O’Landfill era, Toy Fair was the highlight of my year. The show was held in February, in two quite separate buildings in New York, and I loved everything about it – seeing old friends, seeing new toys, doing good work, being immersed in a world where I truly belonged, eating the bagels in the press room, and schlepping from one end to another of the greatest city on earth until my feet bled.

The fair part of Toy Fair was held at the Javits Center, hard to the left-hand middle of Manhattan. Most of the rest of the show took place in the International Toy Building, a nondescript pile on the ugly end of Broadway filled with man-eating staircases, harsh fluorescent lights, artificial flowers, carnie-prize teddy bears, and cheerless people, fat importers and pale novelty-makers who smelled of cigars and tandoori takeaway.

“This is about toys, right?” I remember yelling down a dead-end hallway on the 14th floor. “Where are the kids? Where are the smiles? Where is the fun?”

“Can I light this thing?” was the response from a pot-bellied 60-year-old who proceeded to torch a black cheroot as big as your arm.

The thing I liked best about Toy Fair – and I use the term “best” in an atypical sense – was its death-of-a-salesman aspect. Many of the smaller exhibitors were literally betting the farm on Toy Fair, on their geegaw catching the eye of a floorwalking Mattel exec or, best of all, the Wal-Mart buyer. Their lives were hinging on the vague promise of an informal chat with someone who knew the stateside rep for an offshore manufacturer who private-labeled stuff for Toys ‘R’ Us, the alternative was a career in video-store management, and God, I rooted for them. I hoped against hope their brass ring would turn up gold, but most times there wasn’t even a ring.

I remember two Canadian sisters who had a booth next to the booth of APBA, a respected sports-simulation game maker that had engaged me to create products, boost collectability and engage in general whoop-de-do. The sisters had created a game called Spellcast that they hoped would be their ticket off the prairies and on to – I don’t know; Edmonton, maybe. The game was worthy; less playable games have made it to the back corner at Target. We gave them all the free help we could over the back fence, but it didn’t do much good. They got the usual vague lies from buyers and were robbed at the World Trade Center during their night on the town. By the next year the sisters had split up, the game was scuffling and the WTC was on the ground. Their story wasn't par for the course, but it was a solid double-bogey.

There was a fin-de-siècle feeling to my last trip to Toy Fair. I knew it was going to be my last trip; I had a real paying job that took me reluctantly as far away from Toy Fair as a working stiff can get. The properties that had paid the bills were extinct, on life support or in remission – Gundam Wing, Digimon, Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon, OverPower, even Magic: The Gathering. 9/11 had trashed my business. The Pokémon magazine had folded. APBA had called it a day. The International Toy Building was being sold and all the 60-year-old cigar-chompers were being kicked down the neverending stairs.

I wandered the aisles and chomped the bagels with a greater sense of purpose that year. I was having my own Willy Loman moment; if I didn’t find a match somewhere at the show I was dooming myself to a life of – all right; I’ll say it – dental insurance.

That’s when I stumbled across PeopleCards.

When I saw PeopleCards I thought, "These are the most communist cards ever!" Really. From their workers-walking-side-by-side-into-a-brave-new-world logo to their San Francisco address, PeopleCards couldn't be redder if they featured I.W.W. slogans and lyrics to Joe Hill songs printed on Bolshevik board.

PeopleCards are all that their name implies, and nothing more or less. They're pictures of people on cardboard. The people are just people – your friends and neighbors, assuming you hail from the freakier parts of Greater California – and the pictures range from Uncle-Harry-in-the-backyard Instamatic shots to church-directory portraits.

In keeping with PeopleCards’ DIY aesthetic, the people featured on the card fronts write the card backs, and stray as far from the usual “Mickey hit .268 in the Sally League” prose of trading cards as they can get.

Consider these entries from the Big Book O’People Cards:

Richard Ravine, aka: Big Rich, Motto: Do not do it today!

John Ponsford, aka: Clark Kent, Favorite Book: Other people's diaries

Bob Bukin, Occupation: High Voltage Lineman, Favorite Animal: Poodle

Tamara Moreno, Occupation: Sex Instructor, Motto: If it feels good, do it!

David Chmiel, Ancestry: Polish, Idea of Perfect Happiness: Never being married

Randy Davis, aka Rhino, Most pronounced habit: Being naked at all times possible

(And yes, someone lists Independence Day as their favorite movie ever.)

Or consider in more detail, under the heading “Thermographics”:

My name is Melissa Altman, aka Motley. I'm a Russian/Jewish art restorer from Sherman Oaks, CA. My favorite animals are little monkeys, and my motto is, "Screw them if they can't take a joke!" My favorite TV show is Iron Chef, and I love to pretend I am a pirate. My favorite drink is Orangina and my most-used expression is "Nobody puts baby in the corner!" Oh, and I like anything with BBQ sauce.

Rick [Savage], also known as “The White Shadow,” can grow a serious mustache in an hour. His idea of perfect happiness is In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. Rick’s most used expressions is “Das Freaky Weak!!”, and a weird thing he does is, “I talk to my food when I eat … ‘Are you precious little chillums ready for The White Shadow?’” Rick’s most pronounced habit: “Knockin’ bootz in the back seat of my Carlo.”

Proletarian pictures of proletarian people describing their proletarian lives, and nobody puts baby in the corner when he’s knockin’ bootz in the back seat of his Carlo. Does this sound like anything to you?

No? Then consider the words of PeopleCards founder Brant Herman in introducing PeopleCards on Feb. 6, 2002:

“As the past months have shown us, it is the real people of this world that make the differences which we all value … Looking into the lives, personalities and experiences of real people, rather than artificial experiences of actors and models, is the way for our culture to realize how truly great we are …

“PeopleCards … celebrate the oddities, quirks and interests of everyday people from around the world … You can … sign up for the chance to have your own PeopleCard printed. You can also visit www.peoplecards.net to experience PeopleCards' extended online community … Our website, PeopleCards.net, will revolutionize the trading-card experience by providing visitors with a myriad of ways to interact with each other – forums, homepages, galleries, email, and more.”

www.peoplecards.net? Forums, homepages, galleries, email, and more? At this point, if you’re not thinking Facebook you’re not thinking.

PeopleCards was Facebook before there was Facebook. Brant Herman was the steam-powered Mark Zuckerberg. He was Charles Babbage to Zuckerberg’s Steve Jobs. And Herman’s takeaway from PeopleCards? Bupkis.

Just as some of the first horseless carriages came festooned with fake horses’ heads so as not to overly upset the four-hoofed status quo, PeopleCards came with some prehensile trading-card appendages, so as not to give buyers too large a chunk of the future at once. For instance, you could play games with PeopleCards. My favorite, called “Connections,” goes like this:

Each player uses one pack of PeopleCards (8 cards). The oldest player throws out the first card. Each player looks for a connection or match between one of the cards in his/her hand and the card in play. Any player may play a card with a connection. Multiple matches are allowed.

When a match is made place your card on one of the four sides of the object card. State the match to the other players. If a player disagrees with your connection he/she may challenge. At this time you plead the case for your connection. The other players may agree or disagree. Majority wins.

Any card that has at least one open side is available for match play. Matches may be made with any open card. Play continues until no other connections can be made.

It’s not exactly Farmville, but look: no single winner. Everybody wins. How positively This Land Is Your Land.

The flaw in Brant Herman’s grand design is the flaw in most dreamers’ master strokes: money. (Socialism, meet capitalism.) PeopleCards cost $2.99 a pack. Two ninety-nine for eight cards where the very best card is literally a common and there are 1:18 odds of getting a Samuel Nandi (“The quality he likes most in himself: ‘Stripped Ego Nude’”) wasn't going to make the Wal-Mart buyer do backflips down the stuffed-plush aisle.

PeopleCards had zero moneymaking potential to an even greater extent than most big ideas. Steve Jobs could come galloping down from Valhalla on the back of Thomas Edison to rescue the franchise, and nothing would change. PeopleCards would still be DOA.

The ironic thing is that if they were flipped around, if the cards were used to push the site, PeopleCards truly were the Next Big Thing. They were Facebook with a homegrown Zynga. Kept as they were, with the site pushing the cards, PeopleCards were barely a footnote.

Just for the heck of it, I tried to track down Brant Herman on LinkedIn, the online PeopleCards for business types. I found a Brant Herman in the San Francisco area. He’s a project manager. He has one connection.

I wanted to ask him if he regretted anything about PeopleCards, but at the last minute I thought better of it. I didn't want to disturb his plans for a clockwork iPad.

Happy HOLidays, Part 1

I have things backward in this entry, so forgive me.

My New Year’s resolution for “Handful O’Landfill” is that I will edit and compile these entries into a book-length something when I hit 50 entries – an event I would very much like to happen early in 2012. So the more posts, the better is my philosophy. But no sacrificing quality. No siree. You can’t do away with something that isn’t there to start with.

With New Year’s disposed of, on to Christmas.

My Christmas gift for you isn’t as tuneful as Phil Spector’s, but it also doesn’t involve wolverine-fur hairpieces or dumpsters full of cocaine. It’s also regifting, in a sense. I’m giving these to you, though I still have them physically. Because they are, like, valuable collectibles.

Nothing says Christmas like a holiday-themed Flik It Kick It Football, right? The fine folks at FIKI sent me this sometime in the early ‘90s and it wound up at work, of all places. I mean, who dreams of playing fingertip tabletop football at work? FIKIs were licensed for many college and pro sports teams, but they couldn’t escape the fact that as a functional item a well-folded-and-taped piece of filler paper worked better, and as collectibles, King-B Jerky Stuff discs beat them eight ways to Sunday. Mele kalikimaka anyway, boyos.

Moving on to the Christmas cards, I miss Inkworks. Not for its formulaic-in-a-pretty-good-way cards but for its Christmas cards, and especially for the folks behind Inkworks. Head Inkworker Allan Caplan defines “impish,” with a voice straight outta Brooklyn. I can still do a great, “Hi, Kiiiiiiiiit. This is Aaaaaaaaaaalan Caaaaaaplaaan.” Martha Modlin is an out-and-out sweetheart. And they both had the wacky idea that trading cards should be fun.

Every year Inkworks would send its A list a special card that promoted the season and its latest product in a fair-ish 25-75 split. Sometimes the product was good – Kung Fu Panda. Sometimes it was not so good – Angel. Sometimes it was just Inkworks being Inkworks. But they were always welcome, and I’m proud to say I never sold one when they were valuable, because now they’re worthless.

Quiz time! Fifty bonus points and my last unopened box of Pacific Flash Cards if you can tell me what the Bible verse is inside this card. That's right – "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven." I always associate Pete Seeger, Roger McGuinn and the Byrds with Joe DiMaggio, and I know you do, too. This effort is from Major League Marketing, renowned shouters-into-phones and distributors of Score and Pinnacle, and its subliminal purpose under Heaven was to promote Score Masters, one of the first attempts to fuse art and baseball cards, though not the ugliest.

The only thing missing from this card? The reindeer with the computer Photoshopping Eric Lindros' head on Santa's body.

And look! Here's Eric Lindros' head, attached awkwardly to the body of some minor-league hockey player.  "Peace on Earth" is written inside this Major League Marketing card, because minor-league hockey is synonymous with peace on earth. And chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

People paid big money for Pro Set's Santa Claus cards for reasons both clear and obscure. The clear reason was that people thought the trading card was rare, though "rare" in a Pro Set context meant "less than 2.7 million." Otherwise, the delightful Rick Brown art gives you plenty to ponder – cards of what appear to be a Giant and a Viking and a Bear in addition to the Man in Red himself, a Pro Set binder (full of Chris Berman cards, no doubt), and the Great Ones book, an NFL Properties production that like all NFL Properties productions marginalized the league's dynamic past in favor of a much-better-paying present. The faux elves peering through the window are Pro Set demagogue Lud Denny on top and (I believe)  NFL Properties chief John Bello below. Denny is plotting how to get the Big Guy to ditch the toymaking operation in favor of printing presses cranking out more of that great Pro Set Series II. Not sure what Bello is doing there. 

Brown returned in 1990 and ditched Denny and trading cards (except for some Pro Set packs, a Christian Okoye card and a possible Baltimore Ravens sighting, six years before they actually began play) in favor of NFL Properties' Super Bowl book project – another NFL-sanctioned attempt to mess with football's time-space continuum and split league history into B.C. (Before Commercialism) and A.D. (Anno Dominance). Carb-lovers should note the peanut M&Ms in the candy dish and a half-eaten Super Bar, the abortive Official Confection Treat of the NFL, at Santa's right hand. The December Employee of the Month is less of a scary clown than Lud Denny, unless it’s Denny in mufti, in which case it's totally scary-clown.

The next year, a recently-divorced-from-the-NFL Pro Set returned with another take on the Santa-Claus-as-card-collector theme. Note the NHL hat and the skates and stick hanging in the background, but no helmet. Hey, Santa: You really think that mane’s gonna protect you from an Al MacNeil slap shot? All right, man; it’s your Christmas.

Also notice the absence of any Puck/Rondelle bars. Based on last year’s greeting, I know why. They’re sleeping with the Super Bars.

A hockey card appears to be falling into the bag, along with a Yo! MTV Raps Boyz II Men card, a Payne Stewart PGA card, and a card of an unidentified Colt. Lud Denny makes another appearance as a poster elf. If the poster could talk it'd be telling Santa to set a few thousand cases aside for some special distributors who have been real nice.

This is the best Christmas card of all, and it’s from and for no one in particular. The credit line on the back reads “Mudville Baseball Art, Box 334, McIntosh, MN,” and even though you know the rest I’m going to say it anyway. There was no joy in Mudville when the makers of these cards figured out this Babe was not their salvation. But I still love it.

Finally, there was a time when the otherworldly illustrations of Mark Martin were a big part of my professional life. So while this isn’t a valuable sports collectible per se, I reproduce his holiday greeting in all its whacked-out glory, in fervent hopes that you go back and check out his 20 Nude Dancers 20 collections.

Merry Christmas to all. And watch out for the Martians.

Happy Baseball Freaking Birthday

So I reached into one of the file boxes holding the entire history of the Handful O’Landfill era in press releases and sell sheets and pulled out a folder with a Sharpie scrawl that read “Misc. Non-Card Baseball.”

O frabjous day calloo callay. It couldn’t have been better if I had answered the doorbell and found Tim Tebow on my stoop, in the arms of Lindsey Vonn. And Newt Gingrich.

The folder was surprisingly thin. It did contain a press release from demi-legendary semi-legit cardmaker Little Sun touting its first set of high-school all-stars, the set that put Little Sun on the map, albeit somewhere in southwestern Oklahoma. This was the first card that showed Manny before Manny was Manny being Manny, even though technically Manny couldn’t be anything besides Manny being Manny without running afoul of immigration or the Social Security Administration or amazon.com or something.

That’s a topic for a different column, Manny and Little Sun and the first card of big-league malcontent Tyler Houston, sporting a sneer that put to shame even the twisted lips of James Thurber’s great dysfunctional national hero, Pal Smurch. This column is about some of the other stuff in the folder.

In addition to an embarrassingly self-congratulatory press release from the U.S. Playing Card Company, makers of a set of big-leaguer playing cards I was all prepared to like in a future column (how’s this for self-congratulatory: “Sales for the first edition were extraordinary. Over 600 customers eager to receive the new deck called during the first week of the 1990 All-Star playing card release in April.” Six hundred customers? In a week? A hundred customers a day, in a business where press runs of under a million were considered scarce, and collectors rang the phones like Quasimodo on speed? Oh, mur-der), there was this press release, from the legitimately high-falutin’ firm of Silverman, Warren/Kremer (their punctuation, not mine) in New York:

Many Top Baseball Stars To Be Featured In Unique Gift Idea;

‘A Happy Baseball Birthday’ To Reach Retailers In April

A Happy Baseball Birthday. And what goes into a Happy Baseball Birthday, you may well ask?

How about: a cassette tape. Hoo doggie.

Lest we forget, there was a time when a cassette was on top of the high-tech ziggurat, when the idea that you could record a whopping 45 minutes of music on a piece of iron-oxide-coated plastic only slightly more expansive than the hook to a Black-Eyed Peas song (but much deeper) had the stupendous import of a French nail treatment done in iPads.

We were discussing this the other day in the context of car CD changers. Cars these days have six-disc changers the way they have engines, but when in-car CD changers came out it was like the day they quit putting whalebone in corsets. You mean I can put six CDs in my car? At once? And I can listen to music five hours straight and not have to do anything else? And at this point most people fainted dead away and had to wait until their cars smashed head-on into telephone poles to be revived. Or not.

Of all the defunct audio technologies I've tried to explain to my kids, they get cassettes least. Phonograph albums they get, in a prop-driven sort of way. Eight-tracks even make more sense to them, probably because they've never heard an eight-track. But they have the idea that the cassette tape and cassette-tape players, especially portable ones like the Walkman, were invented by Playskool and sold to three-year-olds whose parents couldn't afford iPods.

Anyhow, enough about the technology. Think of the execution. The Happy Baseball Birthday card carried an MSRP of $7.99. Now, imagine you're a seven-year-old in 1991 and you're having a birthday party. Your mom has told all the invited guests not to spend more than $10 on you – a reasonable amount in those days. (Heck, a reasonable amount in these days.)

So it comes time for gift opening, and you get the usual hodgepodge: Some G.I. Joe figurines, a couple of LEGO sets, a Furby ("From Tyler" – figures; I never liked the little dweeb anyway) and then a thin package with a couple of lumps and bumps.

"Oh, boy – Sega Game Gear," you think. Just what you'd wanted, forever and ever and EVER! So you tear open the package with trembling fingers and discover (switching back to Silverman, Warren/Kremer mode here), "a high-quality audio cassette with a two-minute birthday greeting from a Major League Baseball star [Kevin Maas, in this case], as well as a special photograph collectible card with the player's autograph printed on the back." And three packs of strawberry Bubble Yum.

You seek out the offender and find him buck-toothed and smiling in the corner, smeared with Rocky Road from ear to ear.

"Get out of my party!" you scream at him, pounding him with tiny fists of rage and shattering his genuine gold-plated-plastic Screaming Siren Sound Effect, imported from China at $15 the gross. "I never want to see you again! You're not my friend any more EVER!" And so on.

Don't be thinking it was just the fact that little C.J. chose as his gift a card of an ineffectual though good-looking slugger with more holes in his swing than in an average Dancing With The Stars costume. The Happy Baseball Birthday thing came in many other flavors, including Tony Gwynn, Dennis Eckersley, John Smoltz, Mark Grace, the Ken Griffeys, Kevin McReynolds, John Franco, Kevin Mitchell, and – look, chicos! – Ruben Sierra, reading his special birthday greeting in Spanish (because if he read it in English you'd think the wow and flutter was all out of whack again). It's just that on the bang-for-the-buck scale it's no Kim Kardashian, if you catch my drift.

It should be obvious from the fact that no one has wished their buddy a Happy Baseball Birthday for a good 20 years that this particular attempt to scoop a ladle off of the gravy train went a-glimmering, and it's probably for the best. Think of what the 2011 model of a Happy Baseball Birthday would look like:

It's Wyoming's seventh birthday and all his friends are there: Cheyenne, Cody, Sheridan, Casper, Douglas, Laramie, Powell, Rock Springs, and Utah, the little neighbor boy.  His mom has told all the invited guests not to spend more than $15 on Wyoming – a more-than-reasonable amount these days.

So it comes time for gift opening, and Wyoming gets the usual hodgepodge: a couple of Bakugans, two LEGO sets, a Wimpy Kid book, a Webkinz ("From Lander," the little dweeb) and then a thin package with a couple of lumps and bumps.

"Oh, boy – Pokemon," you think. Just what you'd wanted, forever and ever and EVER! So you tear open the package with trembling fingers and discover ... nothing.

"It's actually a high-quality mp3 with a two-minute birthday greeting from a Major League Baseball star [Brennan Boesch, in this case]," little Torrington in the corner pipes up, his face smeared with dirt-and-worm cup, "and a special virtual collectible card with the player's autograph printed on the back. Oh, but it's all in the cloud."

Wyoming's little lower lip starts to tremble. "So you got me ... nothing?" he says, as visions of a full-scale evacuation dance through his mother's head.

Well, I also got you this," Torrington says, and reaches into his pocket and produces three packs of strawberry Bubble Yum.

You can take it from here.

Flairum Scarum

The last time we met (and it seems so long, long ago – oooh! I hardly recognize you, you’ve gotten so taaaalllll) we were discussing the unmitigated delight that ensues when you take a series of comic books that is completely non-essential to the war effort, the peace effort, and all efforts in between, and make an utterly unneeded series of trading cards showing characters from those comics and any – ahem! – action involving them. It certainly is unmitigated. Right down to the widdle nubbins.

Anyhow, in that last column I took on (or down, depending on your point of view) Upper Deck/Pyramid’s Valiant cards and Fleer/SkyBox’s Marvel vs. Wildstorm cards. Their putridity did not go unpunished, but I still feel like David Allan Coe in “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.” You know, my friend Kit Kiefer wrote that column, and he told me it was the perfect crappy-comics-card column. Well, I wrote him back and told him he did not write the legendary perfect crappy-comics-card column because he didn’t say anything about pickup trucks, rain, mama, prison, or getting drunk. So he wrote me back these paragraphs, and now I’m proud to say he did write the legendary perfect crappy-comics-card column, and I’m privileged to repeat it here for all of you.

Basically, I was drunk the day my ma got out of prison, and I went to pick her up in the rain. But before I could get to the station in my pickup ………………. truck, she got runned over by a damned old train carrying Fleer Flair comic-book cards.

If I had thought Marvel vs. Wildstorm was the nadir, I realize now that not only was it not the nadir, it wasn’t even the top of the bottom of the middle of the place two spaces above the nadir. Fleer Flair comic-book cards may not be the nadir, either, but I think I can see it from here – or I could, if the goldarn holoflake glitter crud wasn’t blinding me.

If, Allah be praised, you had forgotten about Fleer Flair, let me refresh your memory. For a time there was a space race going on among the major manufacturers seeing who could make the most needlessly flashy, wretchedly excessive trading card. Basically, they were in a duel to the death to create a card that could sing “Benny and the Jets” in six-inch platforms with goldfish swimming around in the heels. Now I look at that competition and wonder why companies simply didn’t include a decoupage kit and a tube of glitter in every pack, because that’s what it amounted to.

Fleer Flair’s No. 1 shtick was ... wait for it ... thickness. No other card was thicker than Fleer Flair. Fleer Flair could stop a hollow-point .38; everyone else couldn't stop a BB. Fleer Flair was the New Oxford Dictionary; everyone else was Funk & Wagnalls. Fleer Flair was Hardee's; everyone else was McDonald's. Never you mind that as product attributes go a thicker card is like a more colorful abbatoir, but it belonged to Fleer Flair and ain’t nobody touchin’ it.

Flair’s other hat-hook was holofoil – i.e., glitter – which many other cards had, but not to the extent that Fleer Flair had it. Glitter seemed to escape from the cards into the surrounding atmosphere, so that when you flipped open one of Flair’s short-lived cigarette-styled packs (still the best thing about the product by far) you expected to be greeted by a puff of glitter, like what you’d see if you were in the bathroom while Tinker Bell was taking a shower.

Okay, there was some method to this über-düber-ultra-premium madness. The ineffable logic of the trading-card business was that if Product Y (in the spirit of the moment, we’ll relabel that “Product Why?”) sells x cases the first time around, the next time around you make x-minus-5 percent. And then the next next time around you make x-minus-5 percent-minus-5 percent. Drove the Harvard Business School grads nuts, that logic. If you follow that logic all the way down the drain, eventually you get to a point where you’re making one case of a product one year and 95/100ths of a case the year after that, and so on.

I figured it would take maybe not 100 years but at least a decade to get near Zerosumville. It actually took about 20 months.

Now, I realize I'm being a bit ambiguous, but it's only because those darn facts keep messing with my recollections. I will swear to you on a stack of Heroes of the Old Testament cards that there was a Fleer Flair set showing characters from selected Malibu and Image comics. I am haunted by a Flair card of the much-more-immortal-than-inimitable Prime, though I can produce no evidence to suport my claim. There's plenty of evidence of Fleer Flair Marvel cards, if only because the half-life of those babies is north of an epoch -- about six miles north, if Google Maps can be believed.

Image or Malibu or no, one of the few redeeming qualities of Fleer Flair comic-book cards was that they came out toward the end of the zero-sum games, so there aren’t many of them around to clog up the commons bins or hang out on barbecue grills prior to being eaten by a dog.

You think I jest? My friend John B. Seals had a good thing going for the better part of a decade where he comparison-tested trading cards by flinging them at things ninja-star fashion, cooking them on a barbecue grill and having his dog, the immortal Zach Malamute, try to eat them. I daresay I’ve never seen a better test of a card’s worthiness, probably because there aren’t any.

"I remember that Fleer Flair gave Sportflics a run for their money as the most indestructible card," Seals says. "But dip it in bacon grease or cover it in barbecue sauce, and Zach would have eaten either one of them. Maybe the plastic on a Sportflic would have stopped him for a second compared to a Fleer Flair, but this was a dog who ate the aluminum siding off my house. And Fleer Flairs were superior to early every other card when put in your bicycle spokes."

Given that there aren't any of these cards around, their essential pork-barrel-project uselessness becomes easier to bear. It's hard to criticize something for being useless when there's none of it around to use, even if that means substituting for a pig ear in the eyes (and jowls) of a siding-chomping canine.

So I won't say that the Deadpool cover collection could subsitute for Rick Santorum's presidental candidacy, or that the various Spider-Man cards could replace a whole season of DC Cupcakes, because it doesn't matter. It's like that thing Superman did to Lois Lane afer she discovered his identity in Superman 2. It never happened, and you can't prove that it did.

So to wrap all this up in a bacon-scented bow, Fleer Flair comic-book cards are a needless application of unwanted technology applied in the service of a useless series of worthless comics. Zach might disagree, but he's a dog, and a non-pretend dead one at that. So the verdict stands.

WildC.R.A.P.

The trading-card boom didn’t occur in a vacuum, though if it did it would have been easier to suck up the 8.4 million excess cards that flooded the market during its peak. And those were just the Gregg Jeffries cards.

The hangover from those days won’t go away. At least once a week I have this conversation with someone other than myself:

THEM: Are you still doing that trading-card thing?

ME: I have a basement full of cards. But they’re worthless.

THEM: Yeah, but I have cards of Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens.

ME: They’re worthless.

THEM: And a lot of rookie cards.

ME: They’re worthless.

THEM: And football and basketball too.

ME: They’re worthless.

THEM: Are they worth anything?

ME: They’re worthless.

THEM: You want to buy them?

ME: [sound of me gnawing off my own arm]

My friends in the comic-book business went through the same rigmarole with the comic books of that era. Almost all of them have at least one limp sleeve. One guy who was heavily into the business is down to half a lip and a medulla oblongata.

One of the huge advantages comic-book publishers had then that’s a major disadvantage now is that it doesn’t take licenses from leagues and players’ associations to make comic books. All it takes is a reasonably derivative idea, some India ink, a gum eraser, and the right kind of people. And a kiss on the cheek from Todd McFarlane.

As a result, new comic-book titles sprang up more frequently than new card sets throughout the early ‘90s. And for every worthy indie title blown onto a larger stage as a result of the boom (Bone comes to mind), there were 10 puerile concepts that commanded big bucks for no apparent reason than their gravity-defying high-school binder-cover babes were more gravity-defying than Archie for one, and anything Marvel or DC was laying on the table.

As art they were passable; as literature they were laughable; as pop culture they were execrable. Really. I would rather watch the promo campaign for Whitney for 58 hours straight than read a single issue of WildC.A.T.S. They were the literary equivalent of a Kia Rio tricked out to look like a Mitsubishi Evo: fast, flashy, loud, and buzzy, but ultimately poop.

Speculation in these hooters-and-shooters titles ran to insane, Nyjer-Morgan-on-Red-Bull levels, with the bulk of the speculation surrounding a couple of upstart publishers: Valiant and Image.

The Valiant titles included Harbinger, X-O Manowar, Rai, Shadowman, Eternal Warrior and Archer & Armstrong. Sound familiar? No? You haven’t been following the Mothergod story arc? You didn’t cry big weepy tears at the death of Bloodstone? Me neither.

The Image titles – Spawn, The Maxx, Pitt -- were much more coherent, seeing as they mostly featured the same character, a reconstituted Venom that really needs to herk and swallow.

I was tangentially in the comic-book business through most of the maddest days. I was the part-owner of a comic-book distributor that dealt in Valiant and Image, and in those days that was like being the guy with the pipeline to the Crown Royal during prohibition. Cartons of comics would arrive one hour and depart the next. I’ve been around slower-moving hummingbirds.

Seeing as cards were hot and comic books were hot it was only natural that these two hotties would team up in some way, and since the comic-book publishers weren’t big on putting cards in their books, the only option left was to put the books on cards. It was like the star point guard dating the cheerleader, only the cheerleader was actually a him and the point guard liked it that way.

Valiant and Image were two of the hottest licenses in non-sport cards, and you could literally feel the earth move when it was announced that Upper Deck had won the Valiant license, and had started a non-sports-card imprint called Pyramid in honor of the occasion. Maybe Vanessa Hudgens getting it on with Zac Efron had more oomph, but not much.

So imagine the card world’s surprise when the world’s most unscrewable pairing since chocolate and peanut butter produced crickets.

Okay, it produced a trading-card set – a couple of them, actually, from 1992-94. But no one came.

In the words of Jim McLauchlin, who covered comics and occasionally cards for the late and marginally lamented periodical Wizard and its much more lamented brother pub, Collectors' Sportslook, "Upper Deck got the license for Valiant about 12 seconds after Valiant lost all relevance. But Upper Deck had their big guys like Joe Montana and Michael Jordan signed to personal-services contracts, so they were gonna make those guys 'Secret Harbingers' in a chase-card set a la the Harbinger comic. That set never made it to light of day.

“Upper Deck [-slash-Pyramid] had Chaz Fitzhugh heading an entertainment-card division that had no entertainment cards. We guessed that he'd go into work every day, go to his office, close the door, and pray that no one knocked."

That might have been enough, but for comic books and cards in those days, enough was never enough. Fleer/SkyBox followed up the UD/Valiant joint plunge into the holding tank with Marvel vs. Wildstorm cards.

Wildstorm was the comic-book label founded by writer/illustrator Jim Lee. Lee specialized in pencilly guys with cheekbones on their elbows and girls with cushion-ride appendages and weapons the size of the Flatiron Building. As literature and art went, the average Wildstorm title was no Phineas and Ferb. Instead, it was no good.

But as Mae West used to say, goodness had nothing to do with it. Marvel, the Joe Montana of comic-book publishers (i.e., the only comic-book publisher that would do a Skechers Shape-Ups ad if the money was right), was crossing over with Wildstorm at that very minute.

The creative heat generated by the Marvel-Wildstorm pairing first turned on Al Gore to the dangers of global warming, and the cards sucked, too.

Okay, “sucked” is too strong. “Unnecessary” is more apt.

Hey, I can always stand another quality image of Captain America, or Spidey, or Golden Age Wolvie. But I am way beyond totally good on qualityish images of Brass and Backlash and Majestic and Grunge and Wynnona Earp. I don’t need to see them in the base set, I don’t need to see them in the parallel refractor chase, and I don’t need to see them on Clearchrome cards. You could have taken their images wherever they appeared in the set and replaced them with lampposts without changing the set’s impact. The best Wildstorm cards were the commons to the most insignificant Marvel character’s star cards. So what would that make a Wildstorm common? Exactly.

No kicks with the quality of the cards. They were as nice a bunch of comics cards as ever decorated the bottom of a two-for-a-penny bin. But they were as unessential as Brett Favre’s announcement that he was staying retired. All they did was off a few hundred trees, and Clearchrome plants.

It would be nice if Marvel vs. Wildstorm represented the death throes of the comics-cards syndicate, but it was actually just the tip-top layer in the vacuum bag. We haven’t even gotten to Spawn cards yet.

But soon, grasshopper. Soon.

Action Pecked

I absolutely cannot believe that I’ve gone more than a year in Handful O’Landfill without featuring Action Packed. It’s like being locked inside Donovan McNabb’s head and not noticing all the room.

If ever a cardmaker not named Pacific Trading Cards was worthy of a marquee spot in HoL, it’s Action Packed, if for no other reason than its cards take up twice as much space in a landfill because they’re actually two-two-two cards in one. The cards use two pieces of cardboard, one embossed to mimic the outline a featured player (the “Action”) or sometimes surrounding players (the “Packed”), and one affixed to the back to keep the derriere of the embossing process from showing through.

The idea was that the embossing would make the photograph pop – literally. The only way Action Packed could have taken that to the next level would have been if the cards made their own field in the microwave.

However, as I pointed out in the last HoL, any mechanical means of displaying action on a collectible short of a flipbook (and no one collects flipbooks) runs head-on into an immutable fact: the technology doesn’t work.

Sportflics didn’t work. SkyBox basketball (remember the other swoosh?) didn’t work. Upper Deck holograms didn’t work. And Action Packed didn’t work. They didn’t work so much that you would have thought that, like the appliances in the Nissan ad, they ran on gasoline. Or wood. And got their power from steam.

As failed technologies, these products were the trading-card equivalent of mechanical television. Back in the early ‘20s, there were two parallel tracks of television development. One used electrical means to transmit images from one place to another. The other, mechanical television, used a whirling disk and a photoelectric cell to transmit images. It wasn’t quite wooden scaffolding and gnashing gears, but it was a positively 19th-century solution to a 20th-century challenge. And in what should have been a lesson for mechanical-action trading cards to follow, it didn’t work.

What the cathode-ray tube did to mechanical television, the CD, DVD and computer did to the trading card. And no one except the holders of a billion-odd Sportflics, UD holograms and Action Packed cards really minded.

In Action Packed’s case, collectors were saddled with a bunch of thick, clunky cards that didn’t stack, balked at going into nine-pocket sheets, separated easily, and were the card of choice only if you pursued all your collecting activity in caves.

Still, Action Packed took this pre-Phoenician technology and made something of it. It rode a combination of reasonable print runs and the occasional inspired side set (like the All-Madden Team), built a modest market share, and then sold itself to Pinnacle Brands, the original cash-flinging, buy-high trading-card capitalists, at the absolute peak of the baseball-card tsunami.

Pinnacle turned its back on the obvious Sportflics-Action Packed combo, diddled around with the technology for a couple of football-card seasons, kept PR wündermädchen Laurie Goldberg and jettisoned the rest, like so much flotsam over the side of the Titanic.

This is the long way ‘round to this column’s topic, but understanding Action Packed’s place in the trading-card cosmos in the early ‘90s will help put into perspective the actual subject of this column. Or not.

To reprise: In the early ‘90s football cards have been strapped to a Saturn V and 2 million tons of thrust are propelling them into orbit. Action Packed is on board. So in the midst of this explosive growth Action Packed assaults the market with … birds.

Birds? As in Falcons, Ravens and Eagles?

Not exactly.

Cardinals, Blue Jays and Orioles?

Uh, no. Not really.

Thrashers?

Un-unh.

Hawks?

Sorry.

Ducks?

No … well, yes … well, let me explain.

At the absolute apogee of its existence Action Packed made cards of real birds.

In other words, when other cardmakers were going football-basketball-baseball-hockey, Action Packed went football-birds.

Looking back, I wonder what the hell Action Packed was thinking. At the time, I went, “Oooh … birds. On cards.”

Specifically I said this: "If you're a bird-card collector you are absolutely going to drop your binoculars over these Action Packed bird cards. The 84-card (approximately) set lacks the trademark Action Packed embossing but instead features the world-renowned bird art of Roger Tory Peterson. He's the Roger Clemens of bird art, if that's any help, and Action Packed's got him.

"He really does some great work on these cards, too. His technically perfect depictions of birds on the card fronts is matched by slick color backs which describe where the birds breed and winter, what they eat, what their song is like, where they go for a real good frosty mug of root beer, and any other distinguishing characteristics.

"The set is broken down into Bird-Feeder Birds, Owls of America and Birds of the Sea, and to be honest, they're all exceptionally beautiful cards. Action Packed's regular cards should look as nice as these.”

These really are darn fine cards of birds. Maybe Player’s Cigarettes’ Birds and Their Young cards have the edge on Action Packed by virtue of their fine-jewel size and elegance (and a bitchin' album), but Action Packed certainly showed it was capable of creating an extremely attractive card set.

Of birds.

And that’s where this reverie breaks down. Action Packed threw every last bit of faux-action-packed technology it had into these cards and wound up with Owls of America on really thick cardboard. It’s like making the perfect cup of gruel. All the elements may be singing in harmony like the Beach Boys, but it’s still bloody gruel.

There really is no market for Action Packed bird cards these days, and that’s fitting. There shouldn’t be a market for these cards. They don’t frame well, they’re not worth trading, there’s no chance that the Rose-Breasted Grosbeak rookie card will take off or the Lesser Scaup will be elected to the National Bird Hall of Fame, and the chase, such as it is, isn’t worth chasing.

So when you combine an obsolete 19th-century technology with a subject that has zero collector value, what do you get? Steam-powered barbed-wire cards, for one. And the Action Packed Birds set, for two.

If you hand me some cordwood, I’ll see what these barbed-wire babies can do.