1998 ProTalk Griffey

Baseball cards that talk!

Well, maybe it doesn't exactly talk but it does play a recording when you press the button on the front. The recording is an announcer making the call of a Ken Griffey Jr. home run. The recording runs about 45 seconds. The quality is about what you get from one of those singing birthday cards. There is no information about the recording, like when the home run was hit, where, who's making the call, or anything.

The card is the size of a regular baseball card but considerably thicker. It comes in a plastic case which has a space for the 4 button batteries it takes to play the recording. The case also has a little plastic tool to get the batteries into and out of the card.

I got this in 2005, so it was already 7 years old. It came as a bonus in a box of repackaged cards. The batteries were starting to corrode but I cleaned them up and the darn thing worked.

The card and its case were packaged in a blister pack with a Griffey stand up figure which is about 6 and a half inches tall. The stand up comes with a base which attaches to the stand up with a piece of double-sided tape. I could never get the base to stick on properly, so the thing is always falling over on my other non-baseball card stuff.

The ProTalk Griffey set had 4 Griffey cards. There was also a ProTalk set with 12 cards featuring other players. You can get the McGuire card right now on eBay. That will give you an idea of what the packaging looked like. There are also some NASCAR cards available on eBay as well.

The card was produced by Telestar Interactive Corporation. This company is apparently still in business making Point-of-Purchase advertising displays and doing $4.1 million in business in 2007. They're headquarterd in Cincinnati. I found references to them on sites which give business information but they apparently don't have their own web site (or at least Google couldnt find it).