Becooz. Just Becooz.

There is a trading-card equivalent to practically everything, including trading cards. The trading-card equivalent of trading cards is trading cards, and the trading-card equivalent of trading cards that are the trading-cards equivalent of trading cards is trading cards, and the trading-card equivalent of that is Sean Hannity beating on your skull with a hammer.

Yes, Virginia, there is even a trading-card equivalent to the age-old question, "How long after a breakup is the right time to start seeing someone else?" The correct answer to that question is 10-15 minutes, which is not the same as the answer to the trading-card equivalent of that question, which is, "How long after someone is retired or dead or good as dead (i.e., hitting below .270) is the right time to issue a set of cards showing no one else but them?

Just as there is an infinite range of answers to the first question, provided you have an atomic stopwatch, there is an infinite range of answers to the second question.

When the subject of the set is Sam Horn, the correct answer is there is no correct answer. Never is the right time for a Sam Horn set. For Star Company, the Sam Horn set was a spurned suitor who chooses a life of celibacy over more heartbreak, which brings to mind a fantasy-baseball story.

Scheduling issues had made it so the Krause Publications fantasy-baseball draft was to be held on opening day. Though this was in Iola and long before the ascension of the sports bar, there was a TV set above the bar at the Lakeview, and the drafters were paying attention to the game, the Red Sox and the Orioles, between picks.

This game just so happened to be the solitary game when Sam Horn transmogrified into Babe Ruth. He cranked three homers that day, prompting one of the Krauseites to jump on Horn in about the third round.

Naturally, that was it for Sam Horn for the year, but the picker remained defiant. He had gotten enough home runs out of Sam Horn to win his matchup for the week. He was happy and secure in the knowledge that everyone hated him anyway, even without dragging Sam Horn into it.

When the same thing happened even more inexplicably with Tuffy Rhodes, a Krauseite picker was all over him, too. But that person eventually regretted his choice. Besides, no one hated him.

Focus, Kit, focus. The reason this question is asked is not Sam Horn but someone who was as far removed from Sam Horn as you can get without leaving town. This player was epochally great, a winner, bald, and old. We are of course referring to Bob Cousy.

In Boston the right time to issue a Bob Cousy set is ... what time is it now? Bob Cousy and Bobby Orr are all the Beantowners need for life besides beans. And for Fenway Park to remain the charmingly anachronistic dump it is now, with bathrooms that make Adrian Beltre yearn for the slums of San Pedro de Macoris. And another world championship for the Celtics over the Lakers right now. Wait for basketball season, my eye. Oh, and something involving a Kennedy, any Kennedy, even Ian.

Sorry; back to Cousy. Bob Cousy has never been shy to admit that Bob Cousy was the greatest thing to happen to basketball since they booted the women in bloomers off the court. In this regard he is the basketball equivalent of Bob Feller, who we wish a speedy recovery while also noting that he never met a baseball that he didn't think could be improved by the addition of his signature. And that'll be 55 bucks, sonny.

Therefore, a Bob Cousy commemorative set – commemorating what? Oh, any old thing – is in Cousy's mind a capital idea.

In all fairness the set was not positioned as a commemorative set but as the "Bob Cousy Card Collection," which implies that it contains as many cards as my collection, which is somewhere in the millions, even if you leave out the Star Sam Horn set, which suffered fatal injuries by throwing itself in front of a rogue shredder, sacrificing its life to save the lives of its fellow (and much more valuable) cards, including its special friend, the Aurelio Monteagudo Traded card.

And seriously, the fact that this set is devoted to Bob Cousy means there are highlights aplenty, as opposed to the Sam Horn set, which by card three is delving into Horn's exploits with sunflower seeds in Pawtucket.

The Cousy cards are not unattractive, if you like rummage-sale signs. The fact that this card is a numbered specimen from the "Preview Edition" means its value has appreciated from nil to twice nil.

Listen: Cousy was a great basketball player – one of my favorites, truth be told. There would have been a Pete Maravich had there not been a Bob Cousy, but we would have deprived the ill-informed of the opportunity to say otherwise. But the question resonates like the bells in the Old North Church: Why Cousy? Why not Mantle or Mays or Orr or Russell or Williams (who, in all fairness, had his own card company) or Schmidt or Killebrew or Aaron or anyone but Cousy?

Simple: 'Cause someone with a little bit of money convinced Cousy it'd be a good idea. That's how it usually works, and that's how it worked here. That's how it worked for Sam Horn, too. And that's where the similarity ends – even in Boston.

Mush, So To Speak

Sometimes the problem with cards is not want-to but how-to.

Now Comic Ball -- that was a want-to thing. Comic Ball had more creative talents behind it than a Beyonce album. It assembled the maker of the world’s most collectible trading cards, the world’s largest media conglomerate and the best animator in cartoon history, fed them carloads of cash, and in return got Ishtar. Or for those of you needing a more recent frame of reference, The Last Airbender, Jonah Hex, and The Losers, remade as musical comedy.

It wasn’t that Upper Deck didn’t know how to make good, honest collectible cards. Whoops -- scratch that. It wasn’t that Upper Deck didn’t know how to make collectible cards. It was all about making collectible cards. And color correction. And slipping cases off the loading dock to certain very special dealers.

It was just that for whatever reason -- creative meddling by Warner Brothers, shuffling the project to the new kid, the person at Upper Deck in charge of collectibility being out that day -- Comic Ball was three years in the wilderness with Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, and nothing to eat but haggis.

Harness Heroes, on the other hand, was 180 degrees removed from Comic Ball. Harness Heroes was created by a printer and someone who knew something about horses, possibly one in the same but most likely not. You can tell that a printer had a hand in it because when you look at the quality of the paper and the printing embellishments it screams “sample book!” Speaking as someone who has spent the last three years trying to convince local printers that trading cards need to be printed on paper at least thick enough to not fit between your front teeth unless you are Lauren Hutton, with Harness Heroes the printer was driving the bus. Or the starting gate, in this case.

And that brings things around to the Iditarod set.

Most of you have likely never heard of an Iditarod set, but take it from me, they’re all over Nome.

The set shows the sled-dog racers who compete in North America’s most grueling sled-dog race, and relax fans of large soulful eyes, each a different color: It shows sled dogs too.

The set is an extremely curious mix of Big League Cards and cards inspired by Big League Cards, which is like being inspired by a ABBA karaoke record, but that criticism aside, the non-Big League Cards parts of the Iditarod set were screwed together admirably. The fronts are on the front and the backs are on the back.

The makers even took a huge step toward ensuring collectibility by having the people pictured on the cards autograph their cards.

Only half of them signed their cards on the back.

I’m sorry, but this is like putting the senator from Louisiana in charge of raking tarballs out of the Gulf, minus the entertainment value inherent in his explanation of how building a four-lane highway from Lafayette to Shreveport helps the oyster beds.

Did the Yankees’ clubhouse boy sign “Best Wishes, Babe Ruth” on the backs of the 8x10 glossies? When you walk into a really old Holiday Inn, the kind with a lounge, and look at the autographed pictures of the Captain and Tennille impersonators on the walls, are they autographed on the back? A pleasant thought for certain, but in general not bloody likely.

I really do like my pictures of Libby Riddles and Joe Redington Sr., the “Father of the Iditarod,” a title which leaves him only 49.85 states behind George Washington. I really like the fact that they’re autographed. But I really would love them if they were autographed on the front.

But I know I’ll be swimming with the oysters before that happens.

Ringworms

Does any guilty pleasure make us guiltier than watching two people smack the nasal discharge out of each other?

That must be the case, because over the last 60 years we’ve come up with allowable ways to indulge our habit while simultaneously painting boxing, the most natural and dramatic form of this pleasure, as brutal and inhumane. First it was pro wrestling, Gorgeous George Edition, and we convinced ourselves this was okay because it was only acting, and besides, Gorgeous George had his own perfume. How serious could that be? You put the sleeper hold on a guy who has his own perfume, it’s because he had it coming.

Then it was cartoons, and we convinced ourselves that was okay because cartoons were ostensibly for kids – but if they were ostensibly for kids, how come Tex Avery’s women all looked like they stepped off of the nose of a B-25?

Then it was football, with Hardy Brown and the snot-knocker and Night Train Lane with the clothesline, and we convinced ourselves that was okay because they were wearing protective gear, and besides, it was a game, like foursquare or tetherball.

Then it was wrestling again, Da Crusher Edition, and you couldn’t convince anyone that Baron von Raschke’s Claw could hurt a chipping sparrow, much less the ever-capable Kenny Jay.

Then it was cartoons again, then hockey, then wrestling again, the Ric Flair Edition this time, and then football again, and now it’s ultimate fighting, which has to be okay because one of its stars is named “Kimbo,” and there’s never been a violent anything where one of the major stars is named Kimbo. No matter that Kimbo will be walking around with a cranium full of guava jelly by age 40, if he’s not drooling his way around town in a power chair; boxing is worse.

More people profess a liking for Ron Santo as a broadcaster than like boxing. If boxing had a Facebook page it would be more friendless than the guy who was just pulled over for marinating a live cat in his trunk.

Furthermore, boxing titles are now like newspaper awards: If you place a sufficient amount of money in this box you can have one. And it isn’t even necessary to spell all the words right.

Boxing has certainly hit itself with a right cross. Gone are the days of the Sweet Science, when Red Smith and Bill Heinz fell over themselves in composing panegyrics to the likes of Beau Jack and Sugar Ray and Jersey Joe. Maybe the sportswriters went overboard in their praise, but just as you can close your eyes and imagine the spectacle they described, Firpo falling through the ropes and Max Baer, his big right hand numbed to the elbow, fighting for his own survival against Joe Louis, you can fast-forward your thoughts and imagine the extent to which television diminished it. It took the smoke, the sweat, the smell, and the spotlights and reduced it to two small, flat images beating on each other in a square. It sold beer and razor blades, but at a huge price.

Well, at least boxing cards had nothing to do with the sport’s downfall. Boxing cards peaked at the turn of the 19th century and have been declining ever since.

Blame it on the audience. Boxers sold the product when the product was tobacco. Chewing gum? Not so much. The kids who had money to spend on a card-gum combo didn’t go to sleep with visions of knocking out Jack Dempsey dancing in their heads. Those were the dreams of the desperate, the street kids, the potato diggers, the kids with cardboard in their soles and chips on their skinny shoulders.

But for the last 130 years seemingly everyone has taken their poke at boxing cards.

Topps has taken several swipes, in the ‘50s and now. Goudey threw a few boxers into its Sport Kings set, and Leaf did boxers in 1948, so the field has not gone unplowed. And naturally, the heady atmosphere of the Handful o’ Landfill days convinced plenty of fledgling cardmakers that a pot of gold rested at the end of a rainbow-colored squared circle.

Never mind that the '90s were to boxing what Kansas in the '30s was to sustainable agriculture. Let’s start with Brown’s Boxing Cards because they sound so … well, friendly. Sort of like Grandma’s Boxing Cards.

Unless the product being sold is pickled, or meant to be enjoyed while listening to sitar music, calling something “so-and-so’s this or that” is not a good indication that this is a ready-for-prime-time player. The only exception to this is Madison’s Lively Stones, which is a gospel band comprised entirely of trombones. I’m not sure what to do with Madison’s Lively Stones.

Or Brown’s Boxing Cards, for that matter. In the great folk-art panorama of boxing issues domestic and imported Brown’s Boxing Cards were the painted plywood cutout of the bending-over grandma, bloomers and all. They were grade-Y cards of grade-Z fighters – what Joe Louis used to call “The Bum-of-the-Month Tour” – so they were better than you had a right to expect, but ultimately not very good at all.

After Brown’s came AW, which invested the money it didn’t spend on Rocket Ismail and the Canadian Football League on boxing cards. All told, AW Boxing was as fine a set as one could make for $14.25 Canadian.

Next up, Kayo. Kayo will be given its full measure later, when we tell the heart-stopping story of the Spring Professional Football League press release, but suffice it to say that Kayo did for boxing cards what Little Sun did for sportswriters: treated them extremely well to no effect. Kayo was the set that took in the mysterious lodger believing him to be the king in mufti, fed him the fatted calf, plied him with the old claret, and put him up in the feather bed, only to find in the morning that he was just a petticoat salesman from Dorset. Kayo cards looked nice, showed a reasonable assortment of fighters, included some Leroy Nieman art cards, sported a clean-but-unspectacular design, and had attractive, fact-filled backs, but had nothing after that first punch. Kayo couldn't answer the question I still can't answer: What’s the proper follow-up to a set full of big-name fighters – another set full of big-name fighters? How many Buster Douglas cards does a body need? For Kayo, the answer was a resounding, "One, I guess” – and then it was off to make skateboard cards. Love the kangaroo, hate the business plan.

Finally there were Ringlords. Ringlords had all the production values and all the big names, and a license from the quasi-official World Boxing Association besides, which even back then was worth more than a Ph. D. from the University Of The Spare Room Above The Drugstore. Even now the names in Ringlords resonate, in part because some of them are still fighting: Evander Holyfield, Julio Cesar Chavez, Hector Camacho, Pernell Whitaker, and the big daddy of them all, Muhammad Ali.

Ringlords threw a ton of money at boxing cards with the restrained logic of a Liberian presidential election. It sold its product as a complete set only – a recipe for disaster even back then – pegged the price at Fleer Flair levels, put an image of what appears to be a sleeping weimeraner on the box cover, and had no idea of what to do for an encore. Rarely was such a high-end set so justified in failing so abjectly.

I have nothing against boxing or boxing cards. I believe that submitting yourself to a left hook in return for the right to deliver an uppercut to the jaw is a valid career move. The boxing cards that came out of the Handful O’ Landfill days are certainly better and more justified than the Harness Heroes set. But the companies that made them didn't appear to be thinking clearly.
 
Maybe it was the last shot to the guzzle that did it.

Truly Comic

I am a sick chicken.

Not only do I engage in quasi-intellectual internal dialogues about trading cards, I engage in quasi-intellectual dialogues about trading cards with the people I hang around with, many of whom were in trading cards and are more desperate to forget than a lovesick legionnaire.

This is yet another reason why I have few friends.

I’m usually the one who kick-starts these conversations, my chums being rather hopeful that I keep my big yap shut, and so I started one the other day by asking, “Which property was more screwed up (and over) by trading cards: Disney or Looney Tunes?”

On the cusp of the ‘90s, as we watched trading cards spread from sports to non-sports like some sprawl of cardboard kudzu, we placed bets on which property would be the hottest next. Some bet on Marvel, some had Star Trek, but a surprising number had either Disney or Looney Tunes.

The reasons were obvious: both had compelling graphics – compelling graphics, hell; amazing art -- a huge fan base, and a sizable cadre of kid followers.

You would think that all Mr. Cardmaker would have to do was slap some of that pop-culture-classic art onto cardboard, tart it up with gold foil or serial numbers, create a high-end version for the adult fans, spray it out to mass retail, and then sit back and watch the cash roll in – right?

Right?

Let’s not answer that question; instead, let’s look at Looney Tunes.

Now, Warner in all its various incarnations hasn’t had a handle on Looney Tunes since Jack Warner died and Speedy Gonzalez got painted with the Lester Maddox brush. Warner wants Looney Tunes to be mainstream again, but doesn’t realize that what made them mainstream was their unwillingness to be mainstreamed. If the Dubya-Bush really wants Bugs Bunny to be relevant, it should paint him as he really is: as a better-drawn South Park character with a cleaner mouth, bigger ears, a better sense of comedic timing, and a playing field as big as your imagination.

Warner’s ongoing ineptitude was made more ironic by the fact that while WB was airbrushing the Looney Tunes characters into the cartoon equivalent of Cream of Wheat it gave Steven Spielberg the green light for Animaniacs, soon-to-be-classic cartoons that had all the rough-‘n’-rowdy characteristics of the very best Looney Tunes, save for a certain depth in backgrounds that’s gone forever. In the age of the Animaniacs, Looney Tunes characters were like comatose shells being lapped and slapped and given hot-foots by Yakko, Wakko, and Dot.

Still, in the late ‘80s Looney Tunes were the Michelle Pfeiffer of non-sports franchises, and everyone from Lime Rock to Collect-A-Card to Metallic Impressions to SkyBox to Topps wanted a date. After much deliberation, Time Warner gave its baby's hand to ... Upper Deck. The ax murderer.

It did make a limited amount of sense, if you were cashing the checks.

Upper Deck at the time was the world’s hottest sports-card company, bringing new technology to the collecting masses in the same way that Burger King brought the Whopper to the lost tribes of the Amazon. However, its non-sports-card experience was zero. Its skills as a cardmaker were flinging wads of money at large moving objects, manipulating press runs, threatening licensors with personal appearances by Reggie Jackson, and Photoshopping Mike Alstott until the orange of his uniform and the green of the grass were colors seen only in Kool-Aid.

No matter. Upper Deck’s Big Idea for Looney Tunes was to bring Bugs Bunny and the gang into Major League Baseball. In other words, Upper Deck would make baseball cards of cartoon characters.

It gets better. After flinging money at Warner for the rights to the characters, and more money at MLB to use team logos on non-sport cards, Upper Deck flung one more pot of money and landed Chuck Jones, the most famous of the Looney Tunes creators and illustrators.

So to recap, Upper Deck – the world’s hottest card company – had a project on the table which united the National Pastime, America’s favorite cartoon characters, and the planet’s most famous animator.

The mind boggles at the possibilities.

And Upper Deck botched the works.

It’s hard to tell exactly where things fell apart. Certainly the holograms didn’t help.

There was a certain point in the history of the card industry when cardmakers had a fascination with holograms that in the annals of demi-sport weirdness can only be matched by Madonna’s thing for Alex Rodriguez. That’s because these early holograms were simply pieces of shiny paper on which you were told an image of Wayne Gretzky or Ken Griffey Jr. or Bugs Bunny resided.

The images weren’t there, of course, but if you stared at the shiny paper long enough you could convince yourself they were there. It was the sports-collectibles equivalent of seeing the Virgin Mary in a screen door.

Upper Deck’s Looney Tunes line – dubbed “Comic Ball” – rolled out with holograms and a set of promotional cards that had a print run in the squillions. Packs of Upper Deck Comic Ball promo cards were sent home from the hospital with newborns, and dropped from planes to convince the Taliban to quit beating up the Russians.

The cards appeared to have been dashed off by Chuck Jones in between mustache waxes. They were a series of storyboards depicting a Bugs Bunny baseball cartoon that never happened, for a very good reason: It was abysmal. It did to Looney Tunes what Sly Stallone did to Judge Dredd.

There's a reason why there aren't any trading-card sets of storyboards outside of Comic Ball. Storyboards are naturally sketchy and by definition chopped up. They’re a cartoon in shorthand, and as such, represent one frame out of a thousand.

Putting storyboards on trading cards requires that they be chopped up further, then dropped into packs.

It’s to Upper Deck’s credit that it realized a random assortment of chopped-up storyboards dropped into a pack would be as logical as the lyrics in a Shonen Knife song. Upper Deck’s solution was to tell collectors which cards were in a pack. Pack No. 1 had cards one through 10, pack No. 2 had cards 11-20, and so forth.

That solves the problem, all right. It also totally scotches any possibility of selling more than nine packs to any single buyer – because once you have one of these sets, believe me, you don’t want another. And that caused a bit of an issue because Upper Deck back then didn't stop the presses until a million per ran off the line.

Okay, but does it work? Viewed in sequence in nine-pocket sheets, as it should be, the unicellular plot moves along logically. Bugs Bunny throws his eephus ball, Porky Pig does color, Yosemite Sam swings three times at one pitch, and you’re done.

And that's another fly in the holograms, because you truly are done. There's nowhere to go other than to chop up another cartoon, and another, and another, and if the cartoons aren't any good or don't make sense the set is lost.

A good trading card stands on its own merits, except when it shows Mickey Abarbanel. Someone can slip a trading card into a trick-or-treat bag and it can be savored in between bites of Lik-M-Aid. But a Comic Ball card needs other Comic Ball cards put in order to make sense.

That was just way too much to expect of collectors who were used to instant gratification card-by-card, weren't used to non-sport cards and weren't blown away by the production values of Comic Ball.

Undaunted and with bills to pay, Upper Deck soldiered on with Comic Ball. Its Other Big Idea was to intersperse athletes from the Upper Deck stable with Looney Tunes characters. This concept placed Ken Griffey Jr. and Wayne Gretzky in close proximity with Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, and if it in any way inspired Space Jam then it's really hateworthy.

One can only imagine the hilarity that ensued at the photo session when Kid Griff was told, "Okay, now you have to pretend you're playing catch with Bugs Bunny." And Junior sold it as well as MC Hammer sold Cash For Gold.

The fact that Upper Deck completely blew the pooch with Comic Ball was pointed up in 1995, when Topps did an Animaniacs set. Eight cards and a sticker in each pack, irreverent humor, good fun, less than a buck.

Upper Deck tried too hard with Comic Ball in the same way that BP tried too hard to get oil out of the Gulf of Mexico. You can't even give UD bonus points for trying, because what it was trying to do was idiocy. It reflected the arrogance of the era, and of a company that thought it could do no wrong.

It could, though. It could take the National Pastime, America’s favorite cartoon characters, and the planet’s most famous animator, and turn them into mush.

Not even the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator could have pulled that off.

Woo. Who?

Trading cards have always been a problem child in terms of what we expect from them. We want them to show baseball the way we remember baseball: Hall of Famers on top and then a human pyramid with Sammy Khalifa at the bottom. We want Nap Lajoie rookie cards and a Jack Quinn card for each year he played. After that, we want trading cards of the other sports in order of modern importance: football, basketball, and hockey, please, but only football, basketball, and hockey.

Trouble is, our memories are faulty and our expectations are whacked. Sport wasn’t always a Gang of Four, and trading cards, in the process of doing their job, which was selling stuff other than trading cards, were not about to wrap themselves around modern conceptions of a point-in-time process. Trading cards started out showing pictures of weeds and butterflies and billiard players, graduated to burning babies, went from there to space aliens, and then capped it all off with an orgy that took them from Playboy centerfolds to lady bowlers to Flavor Flav.  The 1990s were simply the blowout beer party at the end of a misbehaving adolescence. We should not be surprised, but invariably, we are.

So it is in that rather conciliatory light that we consider Woo Daves.

Woo Daves was a bass fisherman. He still is a bass fisherman, in the same way that The White Stripes are still a garage band. His empire ranges from lures to videos to the Woo Daves Fishing Shoe, which “come with an exclusive footbed made of a polyurethane ‘comfort core’ orthotic.”

After reading up on Woo, it appears he was to bass fishing what Larry the Cable Guy was to standup comedy. Woo snatched bass fishing from the intellectual eastern bourgeois elite and returned it to its rightful owners, the proletariat of the American heartland. And by “eastern” we mean eastern Missouri and parts of Tennessee.

Woo was also in part responsible for bass fishing landing its network-TV gig, which is a wonderful thing. Seeing a professional bass fisherman extracting a fish the size of a Smart Car from a live well is a thrill that blows away a pair of sevens on the PocketCam, though it lacks the made-for-TV zing of a sea cucumber playing Minute To Win It.

Plus, his name is Woo. This makes him a perfect candidate for the role of dorky boyfriend in the classic song “Da Doo Ron Ron.” (“Yeah, my hair turned blue/Yeah, his name was Woo/And when he walked me home/Da doo ron ron/Da doo ron ron” etc.)

Given that, and given history, it is entirely meet, right, and salutary that Woo Daves should be on a trading card. And it just as meet, right, and salutary that we, as responsible collectors, should ignore the heck out of it.

Nothing against Woo, or his card, or the set which contains his card. Au contraire, Eau Claire; we think the Big League Bass set is wonderful. In contrast to many so-called “mainstream” sports-card sets, Big League Bass cards fished the weed beds at the edge of the current. They knew their audience. They were all about the fish, the guy holding the fish, the hat, the lure, the rod, the reel, the boat, the fish locator, and the comfort-core orthotic, in that order. They were never wildly overgrown or microscopic, and they never deigned to pose a fisherman in a gray herringbone from Yards 4 Pards.

If the Big League Bass set had wanted to make itself more alluring it would have infused its cards with the smell of pork rind and added wiggle action.

However, there is a difference between knowing and servicing the audience and creating a collectible. What Big League Bass did was extremely straightforward: it made a product aimed at fishermen. The product was a set of trading cards. It didn’t have hooks or monofilament or a smell that made retrievers want to roll in it, but it was a fisherman’s product just the same. Asking collectors to buy and collect it would have been the same as asking them to collect angleworms.

But hey, it’s a big collecting world out there. Maybe someone does collect angleworms. I inadvertently collected field mice, and fed them on a diet of ’64 Topps football cards. (Sob!)

There is hope for Woo Daves and the Big League Bass set as a collectible. Still, it’d be more appropriate to attach a treble hook to its butt end, troll it through a weed patch and see what bites.

Call it turnabout is fair play.

Straw Dogs

Aw, to heck with it. I can't find this week's card. But here's the post anyway.


As I’ve mentioned several times on these electronic pages, when it comes to sports collectibles I have the world’s largest collection of worthless rarities. I am the person you call upon to fill out your Comic Ball 3 set, to score that elusive Pro Line Portraits autographed card of Aaron Cox, to hold in your hands the glory that is a Star Company Sam Horn set.

But what does that mean exactly? Does that mean I am the world’s greatest pure collector of sports memorabilia in the same unbearable, unlistenable way that Ornette Coleman was the world’s greatest pure musician, because I do not allow the joy of collecting to be sullied by the ogre of value?

I hope not. I wouldn’t wish that on BP. Besides, I have kids to put through college.

But to continue, grasshopper, what makes a worthless rarity outside of its lack of value, which is self-evident?

I guess to do that you need to know what makes a valuable rarity.

The valuable rarities I’ve seen have a couple of things going for them. First, they have a story. The Wagner card is the Wagner card in part because of the story, apocryphal or not, that it was pulled from circulation because Honus Wagner did not want his visage associated with tobacco products, Henry Reccius cigar cards notwithstanding.

Second, they need to be associated with a mainstream card set. There are baking issues and candy cards from the 1910s that are much rarer than the Honus Wagner card, but they’re also from obscure regional sets. It’s much more newsworthy when a T206 Honus Wagner showed up in a Maine farmhouse than when the aforementioned Reccius card appeared in a Louisville cigar box.

Then there’s star value and eye appeal, and after that is perhaps the most important thing: quantity. Having the only example of a collectible is not the road to the fortunes of Kubla Khan. Ideally you need somewhere between 10 and 25 examples of a collectible for it to be actively sought-after. Fewer than that and the known examples don’t show up frequently enough to keep the fervor bubbling along. More than that and the rarity deteriorates and takes the value along with it.

That’s why owners of one of 24 known valuable cards root with the fervor of a drunken Scottish soccer fan the existence of No. 25. They don’t want to spend $500,000 for a picture on cardboard and wake up one morning and discover it’s been replaced by a Kia Rio.

Here’s how this wickedness works. About 20 years ago an auction-house proprietor named Joshua Evans turned up what he claimed to be the most valuable card in existence: A U.S. Caramel card from 1932 showing Hall of Fame shortstop Freddie Lindstrom. The Lindstrom was the one card necessary to complete one of the toughest sets from the ‘30s and at that point was the only known example of that card.

This card has star value after a fashion, if you believe Lindstrom qualifies for Cooperstown on his accomplishments and not because Ted Williams got the Veterans’ Committee smashed on grain alcohol and Lithia water and what they wrote sure looks like “Lindstrom” from here.

It has a story. The Lindstrom card was withheld from circulation because kids who got a complete set of U.S. Caramel cards could redeem them for a baseball glove and U.S. Caramel wanted to keep the glove expenditures to a minimum. As in zero.

It wasn’t the best-looking card of the era, even before someone cancelled it. And while the U.S. Caramel set was national after a fashion, U.S. Caramel did not have the zillion slimy tentacles of the tobacco trust. So compared to the Wagner card the Lindstrom card was definitely minor-league.

But Joshua Evans laughs at such hindrances. He dubbed the Lindstrom card “The Million-Dollar Card” and took it on a barnstorming tour that made what C.C. Pyle did with Red Grange look like REO Speedwagon’s summer schedule.

And then he sold it. For less than a million. For less than $100,000 even. For around $90,000, if reports can be believed.

Again we ask, wha’ happen? The easy answer: not enough star power and too much scarcity. One card cannot make a market. Two cards, which is currently the number of known Lindstrom cards, cannot make a market, even if the owners of these cards, once they get them home, realize that $90,000 in the raw is far better-looking, even if it’s in pennies salvaged from automobile upholstery.

(Let this be a lesson to all those Fleer Flair and Stadium Club collectors waiting for the right moment to cash out their one-of-one Terry Puhl cards. Amen.)

So to bring things ‘round again, a worthless rarity has to lack star power, eye appeal, national scope, a marketable quantity, and a story. In short, it needs to be one of nothing.

Meet the 1989 Saranac Glove Darryl Strawberry card.

Let’s dispense with the story, such as it is. Green Bay-based Saranac Glove wanted to package a baseball card with its batting gloves and didn’t think a photo would properly showcase its product, so it commissioned Green Bay artist Dan Gardiner to paint Darryl Strawberry wearing a Metsish uniform and sporting Saranac gloves. It came off fine except for one thing: the Straw Man didn’t like his nose.

Now, Darryl Strawberry resembles nothing so much as a resident of the planet Zorg. For him to complain that they got his nose wrong is like Clint Eastwood complaining that they missed a wrinkle.

And it’s not like Gardiner missed Strawberry’s nose by much. Maybe he was thinking Darryl “Sausage Nose” Hamilton and painting Darryl Strawberry, but it’s close. And, hey, whatever happened to artist’s license?

Still, Saranac Glove would rather pull a perfectly good card off of the market than pay millions to a large-nosed, baseball-playing space alien. So the Saranac Glove card was history. Gardiner got a few, and the company ostensibly kept some, and the rest were destroyed.

Twenty years ago this would have been the perfect collectible storm: Hot player, legitimately scarce card, national distribution, not too ugly, interesting story. But between then and now Strawberry’s career came up short of Cooperstown, which in the card market meant he had the baseball career of a raisin. And no one pays extra for a picture on cardboard of a raisin, no matter how scarce.

So if you were looking for the quintessential worthless rarity, here's your answer. Though a Fleer Flair Terry Puhl sure looks like it qualifies from here.

Collect This? Read What?

People who were in the card business never got there through traditional, legitimate means. There was never any sort of internship-leading-to-post-graduate-study-leading-to-entry-level-job path all neatly laid out and codified in the employee handbook. It was hard to do in a business where the location of the restroom changed daily.

Instead, you had Harvard MBAs cheek-by-jowl with old journalists, venture capitalists, card-store owners, starry-eyed printers, diaper-division product managers, teenaged paper millionaires, and a sprinkling of paroled felons, for texture.

And the best part was, no one knew what the hell they were doing.

Soon enough, though, a couple of centers of activity emerged. There was the Philly-New York axis, home of the old money, such as it was – Fleer and Topps – plus newcomers like Classic and Major League Marketing. The area was also home to the infamous Renata Galasso shows, which were a sort of Woodstock for hairspray-fueled invective, and the iconic Cherry Hill show, held in a venue that made you exclaim, “Wow! I didn’t know Best Western did medium-security prisons!”

There was Chicago, home to puffy-card-maker Action Packed and the bought-up and relocated Leaf-Donruss. Leaf-Donruss was owned by the Finnish conglomerate Huhtamaki Oi, which is coincidentally what the Finns said when they saw Donruss’ balance sheet.

There was California, home to Upper Deck, and that was enough. If any more card makers had tried to settle out there Richard McWilliam would have pushed them into the sea.

There was Dallas, home to Pro Set and Pinnacle Brands and their bankruptcy lawyers.

And then there was Raleigh-Durham, home to Impel Marketing and SkyBox International, and later Maxx Racing, Inkworks, and the Racing Champions conglomerate.

The reason the card business stuck in Raleigh is pretty simple. Drive to downtown Durham, go past the gated community known as Duke University, park your car, whisper in its ear that you’ll see it in Heaven, and then sniff the air. It smells like an unsmoked cigarette.

The tobacco industry had spent millions building a distribution network aimed at having a pack of cancer sticks at the ready any time the impulse struck. It was no trick to pour a similarly addictive product through the same pipeline.

The first products through the pipe were NBA Hoops cards, which were tremendously innovative on several fronts. They were the first card set produced with the active involvement of a licensor – the NBA, obviously – which meant they were also the first card set produced with the active involvement of a midget. In that regard the David Stern set paved the way for … nothing, really, until the arrival of Zany Cards several years later. (Watch for the full Zany Cards story in a future installment.)

NBA Hoops were a seasonal item, but the nicotine taps were as wide-open and flowing as BP’s hole in the bottom of the sea. As a result, the NBA Hoops people – who were Impel Marketing at that time – needed more products to plug the pipeline.

Hence, Collect-A-Books.

If you weren’t a collector in 1990 this may not make sense. If you were a collector back then you have no business reading this, because one of the defining characteristics of collectors in the day was that they couldn’t read.

That’s not quite true, because I edited a card-collecting magazine that 100,000 people at a crack claimed to have read, though based on the letters I received, 79,000 just looked at the picture of the fat guy with the cards stuck to him. It was more that when it came to cards they didn’t care whether they read.

Companies like Pro Set spent vast sums compiling detailed player dossiers for their card backs, justifying the continued existence of Erik Affholter, only to find out that collectors liked a big ol’ glob of foil better. And Emmitt Smith on the front, if you please.

Collect-A-Books were the guy with the canoe, paddling against the current of this particular stream. While they didn’t bother to glorify Erik Affholter, they did carry far more reading material in their eight card-sized pages than most collectors deemed safe.

If you count words you'll discover that these cards were not exactly a pocket-sized War and Peace, delving into the crevasses of Ozzie Smith’s id. They carried as many words as your average Pro Set card (which incidentally was all out of go once it had one sentence down on Erik Affholter).

And lest collectors get too uneasy, Collect-A-Books also carried a whopping six pictures, including a snazzy caricature on the back cover.

Collect-A-Books were as well done as a trading-card sized player booklet could be, except no one bothered to ask beforehand whether anyone wanted a trading-card-sized player booklet.

Not to go all marketing on you, but that is a somewhat large question. I mean, there's always the possibility that it might be a bad idea, and that someone doesn't want a 30.06 that doubles as an mp3 player.

In the case of anyone wanting Collect-A-Books, the answer was no. A Hardee's Thickburger of a no. And it wouldn’t have mattered if the message had been delivered with the sensitivity of Sharon Osbourne showing the door to a prepubescent Taylor Swift impersonator on America’s Got Talent. The answer was still no.

You know, Topps, for all its what-the-hell approach to marketing, had this figured out years previous. It made insert sets and test issues of small paper comic books of top baseball and hockey players. They were very cool, even if they did drip a little cheddar. And card buyers said “ehh.” Give us a good rub-off (or rub-on or scratch-off or peel-‘n’-stick or something we can mutilate) any day.

If collectors weren’t going to clutch stone-free mini-comic-books of Reggie Jackson to their bosoms, they certainly weren’t going to nuzzle up to a pricey (approaching two bucks a pop, if memory serves) instruction manual on Ozzie Smith.

While Collect-A-Books were ostensibly created by a company called CMC they were run through the Impel pipeline, where they promptly clogged up the works and delayed the release of the latest paper-wrapped-death flavor for at least 10 minutes.

In the end, Collect-A-Books didn't put an eye out or explode when you ran over them or contribute to global warming, but you don't have to be Pol Pot to be despicable. What made Collect-A-Books nasty was that they were dumped on collectors by companies that frankly didn’t care whether they were unloading this stuff on George Plimpton and His Pals or a flock of seagulls. (The birds, not the band.)

Since this is a somewhat adolescent affair and adolescents always have to blame somebody, we'll blame Collect-A-Books on the diaper-division manager. But only because the teenaged paper millionaire was in a photo shoot with Russell Maryland and Brien Taylor.