2006 Ba-ZOO-ka Baseball

Old packs of Bazooka are fun, but they never have any players I like in them. Based on this indisputable fact, and because each pack comes with a piece of gum that looks as if it were manufactured and packaged by Springbok, we're going to go through this pack and make a comparison between each player/card and a popular brand of chewing gum.

Let's tear in. (Get your jaws ready.)

Top to Bottom:
125 Jorge Posada Blue Parallel (Black Jack. Jorge has proudly worn the black and white of the Bronx Bombers since 1995.)

66 Curt Schilling Gold Parallel (Trident. Not from a fresh pack, mind you, but an eight-year-old piece that your mom finds in the bottom of her purse that has hairs and bits of Kleenex stuck to it. Even this card is creased right down the middle.)

16 of 24 Texas Rangers Cartoon (Bazooka, naturally.)

2 of 12 Checklist featuring Nick Johnson, Paul Konerko, Raul Ibanez, and Todd Helton (Gum from a machine propping open a barber shop door, the profits from which go to the American Foundation for the Blind. Just 'cause you get a whole handful of 'em, don't mean they taste any good. Good luck not swallowing your fillings after their forced removal.)

89 Chris Carpenter (PAL. Those little pieces of PAL gum are the workhorses of the gum industry, just like Carpenter was in 2005. Thirteen straight decisions and a 21-5 record earns him the distinction.)

18 Wily Mo Pena (Chiclets. Just because, señor.)

108 Carl Crawford (Bubble Tape. Emerging star on a new-ish team with flashy, cool logos. Carl Crawford and his 6'2" frame is six feet of Bubble Tape personified.)

14 Mike Sweeney (Extra. Sweeney has only played for the Royals over his 17-year career, except for last year when he was with Oakland. Perhaps that knocks him down to one of the derivative flavors, like Cool Watermelon. Rejoining the Royals to end his career might put him back atop that Peppermint pedestal.)

Make it a point today to gave a good chew.

1981 Fleer Baseball

For a stick of 26-year-old gum, this piece looks to be in pretty good shape. A thin film of gum dust covers the surface, enough so that for the half hour following the pack's opening, my fingers glistened with a white powdery substance, making it look as if I were A) Working as a crust tosser in a pizzeria; or B) Slinging rock on the side (Well...at least more rock that I usually sling.)

I've never opened a pack of cards older than I am. This still holds true, but I'm cutting it closer than ever before. These cards turned out to be in beautiful shape. The backs of the cards are crystal clear and provide a lot of great minor league stats. The whole prominent batting average and ERA thing is a bit annoying and unnecessary, but is still a valiant attempt in a debut set. Now that their only competition wasn't PAL, Charms, and Swell anymore, Fleer really did a nice job.

Let's tear in.

Top to Bottom:
445 Al Holland
64 Alan Ashby
294 Bruce Sutter (Posing with a bat. Lovely.)

165 Charlie Lea
450 Johnnie LeMaster
66 Denny Walling
299 Dick Tidrow
363 Willie Stargell

255 Doyle Alexander

638 Carl Yastrzemski -- "400 Home Run Club"
259 Charlie Spikes
125 Rick Sutcliffe
324 Mike Jorgensen
4 Bob Boone
482 Dan Schatzeder

Grade: A
Without giving too much away, this pack was full of real characters, enough for a mini-tournament on my personal blog, which will probably start to run later this week. Three Hall of Famers and a lot of great poses made for a pretty cool pack that didn't disappoint me in the least.

I'd also like to give a shout out to Chris Harris, whose comments on the Pac-Man posting on Thorzul Will Rule prompted me to re-watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas tonight. The shennanagins of Hunter S. Thompson and his associate Dr. Gonzo and their philosophy of willfully-ingest-anything-and-everything inspired me to ignore all of the earlier advice, not to mention my better judgment, and attempt to chew this piece of gum.

Verdict: This can no longer be considered gum. The speed with which it crumbled in my mouth was simply staggering. If you don't happen to have a pack of 1981 Topps available, you too can still manage to duplicate this incredible feat.
Step 1: Acquire a piece of chalk.
Step 2: Insert into mouth.
Step 3: Chew.
Step 4: Run to bathroom sink and clear entire contents of mouth into said sink.

"Is this not a reasonable place to blog?" --Hunter S. Thorzul

DONT CHEW THE GUM

Fellow blogger Scott saw the awesome contents of my '87 Topps Football pack and was so inspired that he stated he might chew the gum in his own pack. I thought it was a joke until he stated it again in his '89 Bowman pack review. I just want to state for the record, DON'T DO IT. Those things aren't Twinkies, those chalky sticks of gum were never meant to be consumed after a certain period of time has elapsed. The time it takes for the factory to seal the wrapper and place the packs in the box is about the shelf life on that stuff. If you don't believe me, here's visual proof:

Does that look chewable to you? Go ahead and click on it to get the full visual impact. After a certain period of time the molecular structure begins to change and it transforms into something not of this world. Kind of like Melvin Junko in The Toxic Avenger after he takes a dive into the vats of Toxic Waste. (warning: link is skeery and gory in case your work don't like that stuff) Yeah Melvin is a hero, but do you really want to chew on him? If that doesn't convince you take a gander at what it did to the card:

That's not gum damage, that's a whole new lifeform devouring that card like the kids on the raft in Creepshow 2. You want that in your mouth? Even the new gum in Heritage packs goes south rather quick, look at this stuff from a box of Heritage I opened a couple years ago:

That gum is hermetically sealed in plastic, and it's still turning all sorts of funky colors. If you're still not convinced that such an innocent little pink stick of gum could be so evil, here's one more bit of evidence: a 1988 pack of O-Pee-Chee.

120 Kirby Puckett
149 Ken Howell
175 Kevin Bass
181 Mariano Duncan
189 Bob Dernier
87 Casey Candaele rookie cup
82 Dion James

That thing is stuck tight to Kirby like the critter on John Hurt's face in Alien. It's even turned the color of The Blob. No, not the good version with Steve McQueen, the cheezy 80's remake version. Look at that mess! THE GUM HAS BONDED MOLECULARLY TO KIRBY. Nope, it couldn't decide to eat Casey Candaele, it had to go after the only good card in the pack. Let's do our best to try to save Kirby.

Well, it looks like Kirby will live and he didn't even lose a limb, but he will have the scars from this terrifying encounter forever. He got off easy, one of the other cards in this group of O-Pee-Chee packs I bought a while back was completely devoured by the monster gum. I'd post a scan, but it turned sentient and escaped. Heed my warning, and DON'T CHEW THE GUM!