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).

2005 UD Mini Jersey Collection Replica Jersey

A card that's, well, it's not really a card.

This came in a pack of 2005 UD Mini Jersey Collection. These $7.00 packs had three cards and a mini-replica jersey.

The cards themselves were nothing special, but the mini jersey is pretty cool. And, in the only pack of this that I bought, I got Ken Griffey Jr.

The center part (not counting the sleeves) is about the size of a conventional card. The front
features little snaps. I suppose you could fit it on one of your G.I Joe action figures or something similar.

The question is, what do you do with something like this? It's not going to go into an album sleeve very easily. My solution was to mount it in a small frame and display it with my other non-baseball card baseball memorabilia.

As near as I can tell, Upper Deck only issued a baseball version of this set in 2005. But looking on eBay, it appears that Upper Deck is still publishing the hockey version. I looked through 5 pages of auctions and all the auctions were for hockey jerseys.

2000 Stadium Club Clear Shots Chrome

Transparent baseball cards.

Card companies have played around with different materials for many years. If you look around you can find baseball cards made of cloth, plastic, wood, tin, steel, and aluminum.

Clear acetate has been a popular medium. Think about Topps Tek and EX.

This card was an insert in 2000 Topps Stadium Club Chrome. There was a refractor version as well.

This is perhaps my favorite example of a clear card. Although it is hard to tell in the scan, the background of the card is transparent. The printed player photo and the black area with the player name at the bottom are printed on both sides, although they let the "Clear Shots" logo show through in reverse on the back.

What I really like is that the front of the card shows the front of Ken Griffey, Jr. and the back of the card shows his back.

There were 10 cards in the set. All have posed standing shots like this one. It takes a brave man to allow his butt to be plastered on a baseball card. I can think of some players who probably shouldn't appear on a card like this. Cecil Fielder comes to mind. Maybe Prince Fielder as well.

Someone recently posted another Griffey card where he was smiling. He's smiling here as well.

1994 Upper Deck Fun Pack

In the early 1990s there were several attempts to interest kids in collecting cards again. Topps had Topps Kids (1992), Donruss had Triple Play (1992-1994) and Upper Deck had Fun Pack (1993-1994).

These cards went in for cartoon images, popular players, trivia questions, pictures of players when they were kids, team mascots and bright colors. I think these cards are mostly forgotten now although I guess there are probably people in their early 20s who look back fondly on them. I look back fondly on them because I bought them even though I was far from being a kid in 1994.

This Ken Griffey, Jr. card was part of a subset in the 1994 Fun Pack set. The card background is a drab black color. But the coating is heat-activated. When you press your finger on it, the coating becomes clear and a cartoon stadium background appears. I suppose that this little piece of magic will only work so many times but my Griffey card still works after 14 years.

The back of the card explains that Ken is serious "when the game is on the line" but "is all fun beforehand". It appears that someone (Jay Bruner?) is throwing a pie ("one of the games oldest pranks") at Griffey. On the left side is a guy with a camera and another player busting a gut laughing.