1995 Comic Images The National Pastime Baseball

Hopefully someone can help me out with this unusual set.

Packs of baseball cards are rare in the UK, let alone boxes. So when a box of 'Phil Rizzuto Baseball' cards with 36 packs and 7 cards per pack came up for auction on e-bay, I jumped and won. Nobody else bid, so they must have known something I didn't.

Phil Rizzuto Yankee Legend. Check.

Comic Images? Right..

ALL CHROMIUM ! OK.

It should work, shouldn't it? But I'm not sure it does.

The box offers the possibility of:

• 6 Phil Rizutto MagnaChrome cards,
• 1000 Phil Rizutto Autograph cards,
• 'Diamond covers' 3- card subset,
• Limited Edition Medallion Card.

Here's one of the 36 (actually 30ish now-I gave some away)packs.

Judge for yourself.

47 Japanese Poster.

A 1950's poster advertised a game in the Japanese major leagues' Pacific Division.

40 Patsy Dougherty

A 1910 tobacco card featuring a well-known outfielder for the Chicago White Stockings.

33 Lorillard Chicago BBC

Lorrillard a tobacco company issued four trade cards in 1885. Each card featured a different team; this one is of the Chicago Base Ball Club, otherwise know as the White Stockings.

58 Scorecard Artwork

A 1940's illustration of a postcard issued by the St.Louis area tourism board.

25 Cincinnati American Association

An 1882 team photo. The card goes onto explain that uniforms were not worn by teams but that each position had a specific uniform. As a result, every catcher in the league could be identified by his uniform as could every left fielder, pitcher, second base, etc. Apparently it was a short lived practice.

64 Casey at the Bat

The art of the weekly children's magazine 'St Nicholas'. The message of the cartoon encouraged children to follow their dreams just like Casey.

48 Safe Hit Vegetable Crate Label

Baseball was all the rage in the 1930's and its images were popping up all over. This is label for fruit and vegetable crates.

Sorry there it is no MagnaChrome, autographs or Diamond studded subsets in this pack.

Plenty of plain old CHROME though and factoids about baseball.

Help me out!!

1988 Topps American Baseball

Long ago in 1987 there was an attempt (albeit a very short one) to introduce the world of card collecting to the English masses. In 1987 and 1988 Topps Ireland produced two sets of American Sports Picture cards. In 1987 it was American Football and in 1988 it was American Baseball.

There was 88 cards to collect in the whole set. Cards came 5 per pack and enclosed in a sealed see through cellophane plastic wrapper.
There is a seller on eBay UK selling an empty display box of these for £4.99.(not inc postage/packaging) It clearly says on the front that the packs cost 15p each in 1988, however you can also see a 'special price' sticker where they were trying to offload them for a princely 3p each.

I think I know why they weren't popular!

Look at this bubble gum.

That is not the pink, lovely looking, flavoursome, delicious gum they serve in the US of A. No! This is a greyish, beige looking stuff you might mistake for another card.

We want the American Gum! Just like in the War.

The cards are small too. Here is the comparison with the Topps US edition in 1988.

The one on the left is obviously the more inferior UK card. About the same size as the album stickers being produced at the same time.

The cards in the pack were:

16 Vince Coleman Cardinals

70 Larry Sheets Orioles

79 Alan Trammell Tigers

88 Checklist

51 Lloyd Moseby Blue JaysI think the most enjoyable part of these cards is the back and the section called 'TALKIN' BASEBALL. A short definition, a dummies guide to baseball for those unknowing Brits.

On the back of Vince it's Stolen Base,
Alan is Dead Ball,
Larry is a Save -

"In order to earn SAVE, a pitcher must finish game won by team, not earn Win and (optional) enter game leading by 3 or less runs and pitch one inning. (See#69and #71 for other save conditions)"

I need to see those other cards!

But my favourite is on the back of the Lloyd Moseby card - Throw.

"A Throw is the act of propelling the ball with hand and arm to a given objective. A throw is to be distinguished from and not to be confused with a pitch.(See #52 for PITCH definition)"

Hope you enjoyed.

2004 Fleer America's National Pastime

Remember way back here when I thought I had ripped the 2004 version of a crappy product, but I ripped the 2005 version instead? Well I found a pack of the 2004 version and bought it so I could rip it here. That's right, I paid money for a pack of cards I hate just so I could complain about it on the internet. That's just the kind of guy I am. An idiot. Let's open this sucker as long as I got it.


16 Mike Piazza
49 Kerry Wood
26 of 30 HM Jose Reyes History in the Making
13 Alex Rodriguez
20 Richard Hidalgo

Yeah, an insert! I'm old-school enough so I'm still impressed by such things. It's a little busy, but I dig the baseball morphing into a stadium thing going on. I'm a fan of Jose Reyes even though he's a Met. I like Reyes because he's kicked ass for me on fantasy teams before and because he seems to piss off a certain percentage of the Met nation for some reason. You have one little slump during a collapse of epic proportions and fans get tetchy I guess. This is the easiest insert to pull at 1:4. There's also an American Made insert at 1:12 packs and National Treasures numbered to 500 at 1:240 packs. Game used fall at 1:24 while numbered rookies are 1:48 packs. Once again jersey cards are easier to pull than one third of the set. That's right, the base set is 60 cards with 30 numbered rookies. So, if my math is correct, if you rip 48 packs and get your one rookie card, you'll also have 3 and 2/3rds base sets, 12 History in the Making, 4 American Made and two gamer cards. Now you only have 29 more rookies to go!

Ok, enough about the crappy checklisting, now onto the crappy base cards. The design is full of the normal excesses, spot UV coating, silver ink, too much stuff going on in the background. I'm a sucker for black borders though and the baseball diamond and freakishly large home plate doesn't look too bad. This wouldn't be that terrible a set had Fleer just not decided to have the players embossed on all the cards. The only two sets where embossing worked at all are Action Packed and maybe Ovation and both of those sets are dead and gone. Here it's just excessive and makes the cards that much clunkier. I got an A-Rod though and one of probably a thousand Piazza cards in my collection. If I had a nickel for every Piazza card I've pulled, I'd probably make out better than if I tried to sell 'em all on eBay. So there's the short, sad run of National Pastime. One of the most useless card sets on the planet. And I just bought a pack of both of 'em in the past couple of months. I am an eeeediot.

2005 Fleer America's National Pastime

The cold has turned nasty to the tune of four prescriptions so once again I'll be brief. I think this set sucks, but it was in a box I got so I may as well point and laugh at it on the internet. Why does this set suck, you ask? It's an 80 card set where 30 of the cards are short printed to 699 each. When it is almost five times easier to pull a game used card (1:24) than a short printed base card (1:110) from a pack, your set is officially broken. The wrapper looks nice though.

48 Mike Piazza
10 Jason Schmidt
34 B.J. Upton
Fleer Collectibles ad
8 Adam Dunn
46 Greg Maddux

Not a terrible group of cards, but I'd be pissed if I dropped three bucks on the pack. The design is attractive but unremarkable. It's the same ol' stuff you always got from these mid-00's Fleer five card pack oddball sets. It's like listening to a new Linkin Park song. Sure it's new, but let's face it, you've heard it all before. I think I increased my Greg Maddux Collection by one though, so I got that going for me. Which is nice.