A Smorgasbord! 1989 Topps Nabisco Don Mattingly

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.

 

If you were a popular Major League Baseball player at any point during the 1980s, it's likely that you found your way into at least a few food-issue sets of the time. If you were a perennial all-star or the top player on your team, you were guaranteed to be in almost all of them.

 

But if you wanted a food-issue set all to yourself? 

1989 Nabisco Ritz Don Mattingly, card '88

Well in that case, you really had to be somebody.

 

And the guy you see on the card above was definitely somebody. So in 1989, Nabisco gave him his own 8-card set. (I'm trying not to add a bad pun here about how this set of cards is pretty ritzy. And I failed. I'm sorry.)

From his first full season in 1984 through the 1989 season, when these cards were released, Mr. Mattingly was hard to beat. Six all-star games, five gold gloves, three silver sluggers, and an MVP award. On top of that, he led the A.L. in hits twice, and the entire majors in doubles three times (consecutively). Across those six seasons he averaged 203 hits, 43 doubles, 27 home runs, 114 RBI, and a slash line of .327/.372/.530.

Monster.

I'm sure the guy was enjoying the finer things in life back then, including the occasional Ritz cracker or two.

 

Interestingly, the cards in this set were not available in specially marked boxes of Ritz crackers, nor were they printed on the back of the box. Instead, they were available through a mail-in offer that required collectors to cut out and send two proofs of purchase from Ritz cracker products.

Nabisco would then send you an uncut sheet in the mail that included the 8 different cards, plus one larger-size photo portrait of Mr. Mattingly smiling with baseball bats in hand. I don't have this sheet, but here's what it looks like, courtesy of the internet:

 

 

 

The cards were "numbered" by year—each card representing a season of Donnie Baseball's career to that point. (There was also an '81 card documenting his minor league life, and a '72 card documenting his Little League days.)

The card you see at the top of this post is the '88 version, and that's the one I've added to my collection. Here's the card back.

 

I like the grayish-blue borders and red trim. Solid three-paragraph write-up, too. And there's the classic Ritz logo at bottom right.

 

As for Nabisco (The NAtional BIScuit COmpany), they've been around since 1898. If you're a snacker of any kind, you might thank them for creating products such as Chips Ahoy!, Lorna Doone, Nutter Butters, Oreos, Ritz Crackers, Saltines, Shredded Wheat, Teddy Grahams, Triscuit, and Wheat Thins to name just a few.

 

Interestingly, the company's first foray into baseball was in 1969, when they released a set of cards printed on the back of specially marked boxes of Nabisco Team Flakes cereal. The checklist was 24 players deep, and included big stars of the day like Aaron, Brock, Clemente, Gibson, Kaline, Mays, and Rose.

 

Any of those guys were worthy of receiving their own 8-card set back then, that's for sure. (And Nabisco had enough products to do it!) But only Don Mattingly gets that honor this time.

 

Do you have a favorite Nabisco snack?

Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading!