Sunday, July 20, 2008

1992 Confex Baseball Enquirer

Now that I've plowed through the loose packs (okay, so 'loose' is a poor description for packs that are fused to cardboard) of my repack box, we move on to the 100-card Mystery Box within the box. What lies within is a stack of cards and...two more packs! The first is this 10-card pack of The Baseball Enquirer. The cover boys are Wade Boggs, Tommy Lasorda, and Kirby Puckett. The humor on these cards is hit-or-miss, but some of them are cruelly funny. Poking at the personal shortcomings of athletes is an everyday occurrence in today's age of blogs, so if you think about it, this set was fifteen years ahead of its time. I'll be summarizing the "interviews" on the card backs for you, so let's rock and roll.

57 Rob Dibble - Essentially, Dibs is a hotheaded jerk who throws smoke at batters' heads and once hurled a ball indiscriminately into the stands. He hit a schoolteacher in the chest. Yes, really.

1 Bo Jackson - Lampooning the "Bo Knows" ad campaign and his legendary 1990 Score card, the interview suggests that Bo is switching to bowling and possibly golf.


29 Ozzie Smith - For the purposes of this card, the Wizard of Oz has broken his neck during one of his trademark backflips.

37 Lenny Dykstra - Oh man, this one is a low blow, using lots of thinly veiled metaphors to poke fun at Dykstra's drunken car crash following John Kruk's bachelor party.

21 Dave Stewart - Cheap shots at Stew's high-pitched voice never go out of style...as long as you don't have to step into the batters' box and face him. (I found another entertaining, highly inappropriate video that I will not post here. Search YouTube for "Dave Stewart Anaconda" if you must.)

45 Wade Boggs - Ho-hum. Something about his chicken-eating superstition.

13 Gregg Jefferies - Another pretty cruel one, lampooning the open letter than Jefferies wrote to Mets fans and teammates defending himself against their criticisms. The illustration is my favorite in this pack.


53 Danny Gladden - You might be hard-pressed to make Danny Gladden funny. The folks who put together this set sure were. They suggest that the loud atmosphere at the Metrodome during the 1991 World Series caused him to go deaf.

5 David Justice - Man, this one's lame as well. There's some back and forth about the racism of the Braves nickname, logo, and tomahawk chop. Then David suggests that a Japanese restaurant chain is buying the Braves and renaming them the Sushis. I can't even go on.

61 Albert Belle - Another guy who threw balls into the stands. They point out that he was demoted to the minors after the stunt (and as a result of not hustling), but recalled shortly thereafter because the offense had suffered without him. As time would show, this ham-handed attempt at discipline did little to set Albert straight.

3 comments:

capewood said...

These cards are everywhere. I've gotten some of them in just about every repack box I've bought since last December.

I hadn't seen the Bo Jackson card. Check out the Deion Sanders card here: http://thingsdonetocards.blogspot.com/2008/04/1992-national-enquirer.html

The card you identified as Jefferies I thought was Wally Joyner. I remember him crying when he left the Angels. I didn't know the Jefferies story. That is the problem with these cards. The humor may be lame but unless you know what was going on in baseball in 1992, you won't get the jokes, no matter how good they are.

Anonymous said...

Boggs' chicken eating superstition has made him a great target. Back in the '80s there were some radio DJ's who pulled this prank on Boggs. They found out where he liked to go out to eat, and the next time the Red Sox came to Milwaukee, they bought ALL of the chicken from that particular restaurant.

William said...

That Dave Stewart anaconda story is hilarious, he's now one of my heroes.