A Smorgasbord! 1993 Yoo-Hoo Baseball Legends

From the 1970s through the 1990s, it seemed like you could find your favorite baseball stars on food product packaging everywhere you looked: supermarkets, corner stores, restaurants, and beyond. This past year, in an effort to capture a little more nostalgia, I set a goal to expand my own collection of these "food-issue" cards. In this series I'll show the specific examples I've acquired, and share a little bit of history about the food or beverage sponsor as well. 

Previous entries can be found here.

It's November in the early 1990s, and it's been quite a weekend. You're excited about the Thanksgiving break that's coming up, and after school on Friday you headed to dad and stepmom's house to stay over. On Saturday morning you watched some cartoons and then went out to the driving range to whack some golf balls, which is always fun. Now it's Saturday night, and dad and stepmom are going out to dinner. By themselves. 

Oh, to be a kid with a few hours of freedom, a TV, a Nintendo Entertainment System, and some food in the fridge.

The night starts out well. You take your plate of food out of the refrigerator, set it on the counter, and then go back in for the real star: 

Stepmom bought a six-pack of Yoo-Hoo! 

 

Glass bottles, twist-top, and everything. Oh, yes.

You tear one bottle out of the cardboard wrap and bring it with your dinner into the living room, where you power on the television encased in its big, furniture-like wooden cabinet, and eat your dinner to the sights and sounds of American Gladiators.

It's not long before you clean your plate, finish the Yoo-Hoo, and bring your dishes to the sink. Life is good, and you decide to go back into the fridge for a second Yoo-Hoo. I mean, The Eliminator challenge is coming up. If there's any time to drink a second bottle, it's while watching a Gladiator fire tennis balls out of an air cannon at contestants who are scampering through an obstacle course below.

Well, the battle ends in spectacular finish, as usual, and now you flip through the channels with gusto. (They've got cable TV here.) Soon you're on your third bottle of Yoo-Hoo.

Meanwhile, dad and stepmom have enjoyed a nice dinner, and after a little more conversation and relaxation, they start heading home. It's pretty late in the evening when they arrive and open the kitchen door. It's fairly dark inside, but they notice that the television in the living room is still on, so they walk through the kitchen to have a closer look. 

And there you are.

On the floor. Face down. Sleeping hard. Three empty Yoo-Hoo bottles lined up next to each other on the fireplace hearth.

"You know it's rough when you've had a three-Yoo-Hoo night." stepmom exclaims.

Dad laughs under his breath.

The next thing you remember is waking up Sunday morning in your bed upstairs. You're not sure how you got there, but when you get out of bed and groggily walk downstairs, both dad and stepmom are sitting at the kitchen table, eagerly awaiting your arrival with smirks on their faces. You tell yourself that you'll just have to take the ribbing that's about to come.

What makes that ribbing a little easier is that the six-pack of Yoo-Hoo has revealed a bonus.

A set of baseball cards!

After the jokes subside, dad points out a special offer printed on the side of the six-pack: You can send away for a cello pack containing the entire 20-card set. (You must have missed it during your wild night.)

And if that Willie McCovey card up there is any indication, the set's going to be a good one. What an image. The smile. The sunshine. Blue sky. Bat and glove. Green grass. Stirrup socks. The pose. It's just all-around great. Doesn't matter that the Giants logos have been airbrushed out.

Here's the card back:

I like the alternating columns of red and blue text. It really helps you track the particular stat you want to track. (Actually, why haven't more trading cards utilized this design?) As for the rest of it, I think the yellow border works—not only because it's pretty thin and unobtrusive, but also because it's Yoo-Hoo's main color.

So let's get to the company now.

The Yoo-Hoo brand has been around since 1928, when a man named Natale Oivieri, a bottler of orange and raspberry sodas, thought to add some chocolate syrup to milk and bottle that, too. Over the next two or three decades, the drink became quite popular, and more bottling plants were opened.

Then, in 1960, the drink made its first baseball connection, when Yogi Berra became an official spokesman. Berra would appear in many of Yoo-Hoo's television commercials and print advertisements, along with other Yankee superstars like Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. (There's a 5-card set of Yoo-Hoo Yankees cards from this era—distributed in the New York area with the purchase of a six-pack.)

I think the recipe for Yoo-Hoo at that time was a little more palatable. The formula that I remember from the 1990s consisted of water, corn syrup, whey, cocoa, and dry milk powder, which doesn't sound that appealing now. But back then, it sure was a treat. 

 

Here's a commercial some of you might remember:

Good times there, friends. Good times.

 

Postscript

So far, this smorgasbord series has consisted of fictional stories featuring a young, card-collecting protagonist who is excited about various food-issue cards of the 1970s and '80s. The "three-Yoo-Hoo night" account that appears above, however, is different. 

It actually happened. 

To me. 

In my card-collecting youth.

It's the first time in the series that one of the featured food-issue cards has brought back such a specific memory from those days. The only fictional part of the story involves the set of trading cards. My actual experience probably occurred two or three years before the 1993 Yoo-Hoo set appeared.

In other words, after my wild night, I took the good-natured poking from my dad and stepmom without the bonus of the baseball cards. I'm happy to have that McCovey card in my collection now, though.

So how about you readers and collectors? 

Have you ever had a Yoo-Hoo? Think you might add one or two of the 1993 Yoo-Hoo cards to your collection?

Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading!

Completed Set: 1980 Topps Baseball

 

What is Pete Rose thinking about here? 

 

That he and his Phillies—Schmidt, Luzinski, Trillo, Maddox, Carlton, and company—have a shot at the World Series title in 1980? That in a few more years he'll set the all-time hits record? Or, if he's waiting for his slot at batting practice, he's probably focusing his mind on the scouting report of the pitcher he'd be facing during the game, and how he's going to approach each at-bat.

 

But maybe he's really thinking about Topps baseball cards. Like this:

1974 Topps?

Banner.

1977 Topps?

Banner.

1979 Topps?

Banner.

1980 Topps?

Banner.

 

That's a lot of banners on baseball cards in a short span of years.

And our fictional Pete Rose makes a good point, doesn't he? I mean, it was the start of a new decade. New stars were emerging in the game. You had Rickey, of course. And soon after you'd have Baines, Gibby, and Fernando Mania. Then Ripken, Gwynn, Boggs, and Sandberg showed they came to play. 

 

By the midpoint of the decade, there'd be Mattingly, Strawberry, Gooden, Puckett, and Clemens. Then guys like Bonds, Bo Jackson, Will Clark, Jose Canseco, and Mark McGwire would really usher in a whole new ballgame.

 

However, Topps stuck with the banners. It was solid. Standard. Familiar. Just like their 1980 set.

 

As with any set from the previous decade, there are some pleasant headshots.

 

 

And a good amount of batting poses.

 

 

 

More than that, there are some good poses in the batting cage.

 

Just look at all the steely focus on display. And those aren't just run-of-the-mill MLBers. 1980 Topps tells us that once you get to the top, you have to work even harder to stay there.

There's also some good action to be found. You'll find a handful hitters hitting. 

 

 

And a few fielders gettin' dirty and workin' hard.

 

 

But more than anything else, you'll find pitchers doing their thing. Flip through the entire set, and the quantity might surprise you. In fact, there were so many pitching shots at so many different points of the delivery that I created some frame-by-frame action sequences.

 

Proceed left to right to check out some righties:  

 

  

 

And now go right to left for some lefties: 

 

 

 

Now go left to right again, but watch out—these pitchers are comin' right at ya! 

 

 

 

And let's not forget about the catchers. Topps did a great job portraying these men in their natural habitat. They're grinders. Grunt-workers. Lunch pail guys.

 

 

There's no glamour there. Just grit. And I love that. This was back when infield dirt was dirt. And sand. And dust. There ain't no perfectly groomed clay here. No.

 

And I think the card design lends itself pretty well to those guys. It's simple. No frills. You get a name on top, then a player position in one banner, and a team name in the other banner. That's all. 

 

What else do you need? It's a baseball card. Enjoy it.

 

Besides, the uniforms of the day provided more than enough bright colors and eye-catching design. Check out these classics.  

 

 

 

On the subject of bright and eye-catching, how about the rookie cards?

 

Well, there's one big name in the 1980 Topps set that we know and love. He's right down there in the middle, paired up with a couple of underrated examples. 

 

 

Now let's look at a card back.

 

The black text on a light blue background is pretty decent for readability. The stats section, placed atop a pale gray color, is even better. You also get some career highlights, oftentimes from the player's minor league career. I like that, because it provides a reminder that a lot of MLBers—even the "commons"—were big men on campus during their minor league days. Just look at all of Bill Fahey's accolades up there!

 

And let's talk about the cartoons. After a two-year hiatus, Topps brought them back. Here are a few that I like. 

 

 

 

1980 Topps had a few subsets, as well.

 

The league leader cards were nice and clean, with a modified banner design that contained the year and the league designation.

 

 

Team cards were spread throughout the set. Nothing says "vintage baseball card set" quite like a team portrait card with the team's checklist on the back.

 

As for the future stars, I like how 1980 Topps numbered them consecutively, toward the end of the set. Kids must have had a lot of fun flipping through all those stars and wondering which ones would pan out. Jesse Orosco and Mike Scott over there did pretty well for themselves.

Finally, on the left you'll find a sample of the Highlights subset that started off the set, a checklist in the middle, and an example of a card featuring the all-star banner on the right. 

 

And that's 1980 Topps. It's a simple, straightforward design. (With Fleer and Donruss about to join the game, Topps would need to get a little more creative going forward.)

Now that I've completed the set and flipped through the cards, I think I've taken a little more of a shine to it.

How about you readers? Are you a fan of this set? Where would you rank the design among all the sets of the 1980s?

Let me know in the comment section, and thanks for reading!

You May Take This Custom Card, But You'll Never Take Its Freedom!

There are plenty of trading card sets out there that feature big action movie stars of the '80s and '90s like Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator) and Sylvester Stallone (Rambo, Rocky). 

 

However, I don't think you can mention big stars like Arnold and Sly without adding this guy to the list.

 

Mel Gibson portrayed some of the most iconic characters of the era. Pretty good range, too, if you think about it.

 

And aside from the blockbuster films and memorable characters featured on the card, Gibson had leading roles in other solid films like Conspiracy Theory with Julia Roberts and Patrick Stewart. Then you had the more cheeky and fun action of Maverick, whose star-studded cast has almost no end: Jodie Foster, James Coburn, Graham Greene, Alfred Molina, and the "original" Maverick, James Garner. Here's one scene featuring a few of those actors:

 

 

 

Interestingly enough, there's a 60-card set out there for Maverick, But no cards at all for those three big films (and film franchises) above. So I thought a custom card would help fill the gap. The 1980 Future Stars template does the trick, as there's maybe just a slight wink to a film marquee with those little stars and the way the images are framed.

 

To tie sports into the conversation, did you know that Mel Gibson is trained in the martial arts? (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) He began training in the 1980s, to prepare for the filming of the first Lethal Weapon movie. 

So how about you readers? Do you have a favorite Mel Gibson film?

 

Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading.

A Tree that Grows Wax Packs

A collecting memory just crossed my mind.

When I was in middle school, back around 1990, I remember coming up with a hypothetical question for my stepbrother. He was a few years younger than me, but we had some common interests for sure, like watching baseball, playing Wiffle ball in the backyard, and collecting cards.

 

Here's the question I asked him:

Imagine you had a tree in your backyard that produced packs of trading cards instead of fruit. As long as you only took one pack from the tree each day, it would produce more packs indefinitely. But if you took any additional packs that day, it would turn into a normal tree, never to produce cards again. 

 

Would you be able to follow that one rule?

Waxpaxicus americanus (1978 variety)

Unfortunately I don't remember my stepbrother's exact answer, but I think the gist of it was that he would take as many packs from the tree as he could in one day, even if it meant he wouldn't get any more after that. (He was only about 7 or 8 years old at the time. Can't blame him for that response. After all, if it was a big tree in full bloom, there would have probably been hundreds of wax packs ripe for plucking.)

In any case, the question provides a fun little exercise in willpower analysis. And I suppose it takes on different flavors if you get more specific with the packs.

For example, if all the packs were 1956 Topps baseball, I think some collectors would be pretty tempted to grab as many as they could on the first day.

1991 Fleer, on the other hand? That tree might be flourishing for a lonnnnng time.

 

What if the packs first blossomed as junk wax, but as they "ripened", they became more and more vintage? Would you have patience then? I bet you would. (And I bet you'd see at least a few other collectors down at the local garden supply store looking for saplings.)

 

I haven't gone so deeply into all this until now, but it's definitely fun to expand on the idea.

So let's go back to the time when I asked my stepbrother that question. Baseball cards were having quite a boom. The Score company joined the scene in 1988. A year later the Bowman brand returned. And of course Upper Deck made a big splash that same year with their iconic 1989 set and the Ken Griffey, Jr. rookie card. 

Oh, and don't forget some of the famous (or infamous) error cards that had us all talking. 

 

I look back at that era with a tremendous amount of fondness. 

So how about you readers and fellow collectors?

(1) Which wax pack sapling (year, brand, and sport) would you buy and plant first?

(2) Could you maintain the "one wax pack per day" rule once that tree started bearing fruit?

Share in the comment section. I'm interested to read your answers!

Completed Set: 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey

This is what a Holiday Inn looked like in the early 1990s.

For businesspeople on the go, it represented a clean room, a parking spot for your rental car, and plenty of space for conferences and meetings on the lower level. 

For an adolescent Mr. Nine Pockets, it represented absolute peak hockey card collecting years. 

I'll explain.

On the first Friday of every month, my hockey-loving friend and I would meet up after dinner and walk over to the card show at the local Holiday Inn. We'd go around the rows of tables a few times, take note of which products were available, gawk at the prices of the vintage cards under glass, and privately poke fun at some of the dealers. 

But the prime target of our modest stack of paper money was packs of hockey cards. A couple of times we even split an entire box! After the show, we'd walk back to my house, open some packs, turn on the TV and the Sega Genesis, and hunker down for a few games of NHL hockey. (E . . . A . . . Sports . . . It's in the game!)

The memories are strong. And it was a strong time for the NHL. They'd been celebrating their 75th anniversary, and players were lighting it up. Ten of them would end up scoring more than 100 points by season's end (including defenseman Brian Leetch!) Brett Hull led the league with 70 goals, Wayne Gretzky led with 90 assists, and Mario Lemieux beat everyone with 131 points. A whopping 17 players hit the 40-goal milestone. 

As for me and my friend, we weren't only playing video game hockey. We were young high-schoolers playing on the same ice hockey team. We meshed well out there, so much so that our coach was reluctant to ever split us up.

So those packs meant a lot to us. The players we found inside were the guys we looked up to. The guys we marveled at. The guys we tried to emulate after we saw their highlights on ESPN. 

It goes without saying, then, that we opened all sorts of hockey packs that year. But none more than Upper Deck. 

And we needed to. 

The low series consisted of 500 cards, while the high series added another 200. For the era, it was an absolutely enormous amount of hockey cards. 

Here's a table showing the major sets that season, and their card totals.

It's a remarkable thing, because just a few years prior, the largest set of hockey cards would have been O-Pee-Chee's flagship offering, which totaled 396. If you were in the States, the Topps equivalents had half that much—198.

So you'd be right to think about those 700 cards and wonder if it was too much. After all, that's a lot of content to create—especially for a company that had just entered the hockey card market one year earlier. 

If the set was designed poorly, or contained sub-par photography, those negative aspects would be evident 700 times over. But if the set was designed well, the sheer number of cards could be a good thing. 

The question is, Did Upper Deck make it a good thing?

Yes.

Yes they did.

And those five cards were far from the only fantastic ones.

I don't know if any set captured the brilliant intensity of hockey battles more than 1991-92 Upper Deck. Look here.

Flip through the set and you'll also see some shots being fired.

Which can lead to some exuberant goal celebrations.

And that wasn't all. 1991-92 Upper Deck provided some captivating camera angles that hockey fans had never seen on cardboard—or maybe anywhere else!

They also showed players in practice, wearing practice jerseys. That was different.

The overall design was pretty good, too. That "NHL 75" logo was present on all the cards, swooping across the bottom. Team names got the same font treatment, set in team colors. Simple, effective, and cohesive. 

And don't forget the card backs. Consistent with the other early Upper Deck sets, these cards contained just a few rows of stats in order to make room for the full-color image. Sometimes you'd have room for a one- or two-line blurb. 

But what about the goalies? You ask. 

Don't worry. Upper Deck didn't forget about them.

The photographers seemed to understand how important these guys were to their teams, and how dynamic and acrobatic the position could be. They even understood that such great action shouldn't be restricted to vertical layouts.

 

Images like the ones you've seen so far played a big part in launching Upper Deck to the top of the hockey card mountain.

The whole thing made me so nostalgic that I decided to do something I'd never done with a non-vintage set:

Put it in a binder.

That's right. Over the years, I've always reserved binder space for completed sets that were printed on vintage-style cardboard (i.e., 1980s and older). But recently I've found myself becoming more nostalgic about some card sets from the early '90s. So the "newer" Upper Deck cardstock gets a pass on the rules.

Here's the thing, though. Putting this set in a binder actually revealed a few disappointments.

First, the set led off with a few "Soviet Stars" cards, which felt odd. There was no accompanying checklist, and each card front featured Cyrillic writing with no real explanation. Although it's important to note how huge it was to have the wave of super-talented Russian players joining the NHL at that time, I think Upper Deck would have still been better off starting the set with some Star Rookies, like they did for their inaugural baseball release.

Next, it seems like the cards weren't numbered with 9-pocket pages in mind. Here's one example. 

The San Jose Sharks were the exciting new kid on the block, and Upper Deck gave them 8 low-numbered cards in a row. If they'd only added one more, it would have made a cool page for young Sharks fans. But instead you have a checklist for the 1991 Draft Choice subset in that last spot. A little weird.

A third let-down is the amount of times multiple players from the same team end up on the same binder page.

Four different Oilers, plus two Kings. This kind of thing seems avoidable.

They're all minor disappointments, I know. But putting this set together and looking through the cards brought back so much collecting energy for me that I guess I was expecting everything to make sense in 9-pocket pages.

Regardless, I'm keeping the set in the binder. It's absolutely one that I want to slide off the shelf every once in a while and flip through. 

Nostalgia and good vibes. That's what this hobby is about, right?

And now we've got to get back to the set as a whole, outside of the binder issues. There was a lot more to 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey.

It's about the subsets. 

Oh man, were there subsets. (I count 11 of them!) 

More than 200 of the 700 cards in the set belong to a subset. In fact, if you were to start at card #1, you'd have to get all the way to #46 to find a regular ol' base card!

As mentioned earlier, the Soviet Stars led off the set. Directly after that was the Canada Cup subset, which featured big-time stars playing for their home countries.

In the high numbers, the World Junior Championship subset did the same thing for up-and-coming stars. These kinds of subsets were extra-cool for a young hockey collector who was learning just how international the sport was.

 

The high numbers also contained the All-Stars.

 

And a nice little tribute to some Hockey Heroes.

Bloodlines cards showed how the sport of hockey could sometimes be a family affair.

And of course we wondered which Star Rookies would pan out.

 

Even if they didn't, you had the All-Rookie Team.

 

Oh, and let's not forget about the Draft Choices . . .

 

. . . Or the Young Guns! 

It's pretty clear to see that Upper Deck was all-in on the rookie craze. And guess what? The Young Guns series is still going strong to this day, which I find quite cool.

Overall, thanks to all the subsets, Upper Deck managed to hit some big names in the rookie department. I tried to show some of them above, but here's a more complete list of incredible talent:

Vladimir Malakhov, Alexei Zhamnov, Viacheslav Kozlov, Ziggy Palffy, Martin Rucinsky, Teemu Selanne. Nicklas Lidstrom, Peter Forsberg, Dominik Hasek, John Leclair, Doug Weight, Tony Amonte, Darius Kasparaitis, Alexei Yashin, Nikolai Khabibulin, Alexei Kovalev, Alexei Zhitnik, Sandis Ozolinsh, Sami Kapanen, Keith Tkachuk.

Back in 1991-92, I would have had quite a few of those studs in top loaders.

Speaking of studs, the artist behind the team checklists (Steven R. Cusano) did a terrific job.

 

There were also a couple of inserts we all hoped to pull from packs.

Award-Winner Holograms made up a 9-card insert set.

These were wayyy better than the previous year's holograms, which you could hardly make out.

The Brett Hull Hockey Heroes checklist was also 9 cards deep. Mr. Hull was big man on campus at the time. Here's card number 7.

 

You even had a chance of pulling an autographed version of the 9th card in the set, serial numbered to 2,500!

Finally, here's an example of a base card checklist (it's probably the only plain thing about 1991-92 Upper Deck), plus the front and back of an all-star fan ballot that was included in every pack. 

Fold open the ballot and you'll find a big list of players from the Wales and Cambpell Conferences. Just call that 1-900 number and key in your selections. ($0.95 for the first minute, $0.55 for each additional minute. Ouch!)

And look at the back of the ballot, toward the bottom: The fan voting was sponsored by CCM and Starter. Remember those 1990s Starter jackets? You just couldn't beat 'em.

So that's 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey. I'm very happy to have the entire set in a binder now. Maybe the next step is to buy a Sega Genesis system and a couple of the EA Sports hockey games, set it up at home, and see if I can get in touch with my old hockey buddy. Talk about a dose of nostalgia!

How about you readers and collectors? 

Any good memories of 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey, or any of the other sports that Upper Deck released that year?

Did any of you have a Starter jacket back then? 

When I was a teenager I had a satin bomber—Minnesota North Stars version. It was all black, with green, white, and yellow trim around the collar and cuffs. Wish I still had it.

Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading!