Mexican Baseball Cards and Stickers

     I'm sure the few of you that read my ramblings have noticed that my interests typically lean toward the less-than-mainstream.  In this particular instance, however, it is rather surprising just how far outside the mainstream this subject happens to be.  Mexico has consistently had professional baseball since 1925, when La Liga Mexicana de Beisbol (LMB) was organized. And since that time, it has had significant interactions with the sport north of the Rio Grande, at various times serving as a source for talent, an alternative to the Major Leagues, another venue for players of color to ply their trade during the days of racial segregation, a supplement to the minor league system, a place to play ball in winter (in La Liga Mexicana del Pacifico, LMP or the Mexican Pacific League) and a place for aging Latin stars (and in some cases, blackballed Americans) to finish up their careers.


     So with all that history, I was somewhat surprised to learn that there has never really been any tradition of baseball card collecting in Mexico, especially not to the extent found in Venezuela, Cuba or Puerto Rico, much less the United States.  What is even more unusual about the lack of an established baseball card hobby is that the country is buried in cards and stickers for futbol (soccer for us gringos) and all manner of non-sports subjects, and has been for decades.

     A bit of vocabulary is in order.  In Mexico, trading cards are usually called "tarjetas".  Stickers (regardless of the presence of adhesive) are usually referred to as stamps and called "estampas" or "estampitas".  Baseball is béisbol, just a transliteration into a spelling more palatable to Spanish speakers.  Ball is pelota.  Ballplayers are peloteros, or sometimes "béisbolistas".

    Before I go any further, let me just be clear that this post owes almost everything to the Mexican Super Collector, Arturo Arellano, whose collection of Mexican baseball cards and memorabilia was recogized by Beckett in their Super Collector Issue from September 2011 (with Josh Hamilton on the cover).  You can see the Beckett profile here.  It is from Arturo that most of this information and most of the images originate.

     While Mexican baseball cards may be a rarity, they do have a long history.  In recent years, a tremendous find was made of an album of Mexican baseball cards/stamps dating to 1945, and including several popular Negro League stars such as Ray Dandridge, Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson.  But despite the occasional sets, it seems there has never been any manner of widely distributed, LMB affiliated set that has lasted more than a single year.  Even Cuba consistently had cards and stamps issued from the early 1940s to late 1950s.  The hobby, such as it exists in Mexico, is plagued by sets issued by teams and available only at the stadiums, or promotions by national brands that are only available regionally and with little advertising.  If not for the Internet and message forums like forolm, sets such as I mention below would go largely unknown, even in their country of origin.

     As the information contained here is essentially ALL I know about Mexican baseball cards and the state of the hobby in Mexico, don't set your expectations too high.  And given that my collecting preferences tend toward modern cards, this will cover strictly sets issued after 1970.

     Similar to the sticker sets issued in Venezuela in the 1970s & 1980s, the 1978-79 Mexican Pacific League season was accompanied by a set of 242 stickers, and an album to keep them.  I learned about this set from one of Arturo's posts on a Mexican baseball message board where he and a few other collectors were discussing and posting scans of various bits of their collections.  From the more mainstream collector's perspective, it is littered with familiar names like Bump Wills, Alex Trevino,Willie Aikens, Mike Easler, Jeff Leonard, and even a few major stars, including the winner of the NPB Triple Crown, Randy Bass, Cy Young Award winner Dave Stewart and even an early appearance by Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson.  Unlike in Venezuela, there doesn't seem to have been another set like this for several years.  Or maybe we just haven't found it yet.

      A little further north, the primary producer of minor league baseball card sets in the U.S. in the 1980s, TCMA, issued a set in 1985 for the Tigres de Mexico or the Mexico City Tigers.  This set, using the standard design for all of TCMA's 1985 minor league sets, is still readily available on eBay for less than $10.  The lack of direct affiliation with MLB teams likely contributes to the lack of any follow-up Mexican League minor league sets.  But ask most American collectors if they know of any Mexican baseball cards, and this is probably the only set they will remember.

 

     1992 saw the introduction of another set of Mexican League cards.  This one was 150 cards and was possibly the first conventionally released, pack-based set to be issued in Mexico.  The cards were issued in boxes of 36 packs of 10 cards each. Interestingly, despite being proper baseball cards, the pack still proclaimed them as "Estampas de Fotos" rather than tarjetas. Photos can be found in this earlier post when I first learned of the set.  I'm hoping to have more of these in the not-too-distant future, to expand on the known checklist.

     Washington-based Pacific Trading Cards took a stab at the Spanish-speaking market in 1993, issuing a set of Spanish language cards of Major Leaguers.  However, despite their target market, I've not been able to find any evidence of popularity in Mexico, assuming they were even available there.  I do remember seeing them at the flea market outside the gate at Ft. Campbell, KY, when I was living there.  They didn't sell all that well there, either.  Basically using the exact same design as all of their 1992 sets (NFL, Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver), but with the text in Spanish, they weren't bad, but they clearly missed their intended audience.

     In 1994, Topps would give it a go, issuing a parallel of their 1994 base series with Spanish language backs.  Donruss would eventually make the effort as well, issuing Spanish language cards of Major League players from 2002-2005.  It's just a pity that none of these American companies bothered to try a set of Mexican players from Mexican leagues to sell to baseball fans IN Mexico.

     To commemorate their 60th anniversary in 1999, the Diablos Rojos del Mexico issued a 36-card set.  Arturo is a big fan of the autograph , and it shows in his collection.  Another locally produced, and thus locally available, team-issued set came from the Naranjeros de Hermosillo for the 2001-2002 season.  Every card was issued in both a horizontal and vertical format, including two cards of Fernando Valenzuela on the back end of his career.  The Naranjeros set can be seen here (the Photobucket has since gone dead).  If you check the back of the Dereck Bryant card, you'll see that Arturo actually helped assemble the statistics for this set.  He was 12 years old at the time.  I guess it's all about being in the right place at the right time!

      The Hermosillo-based newspaper El Imparcial issued a stamp album in a November 2002 issue of the paper. Every day thereafter, during the LMP season, each issue of the paper included printed "stamps" of three players each day, to be cut out of the newspaper and affixed into the album.  The album was arranged by team, and the set totaled 136 different stamps.

     The set includes yet another international stop for Tim Raines, Jr.  Vinny Castilla, Benny Agbayani and Nick Punto are the only other names that really stand out (at least to me).


     In 2005, LMB welcomed a new president and a new marketing partner.  Part of that marketing push was a brand new set of baseball cards, issued in foil packs.  Unfortunately, these cards are unnumbered (set-wise anyway, they all display the players uniform numbers), making them difficult to checklist.  This was probably only the second, traditional, multi-team set of baseball cards to be issued in Mexico.  Examples of the cards and pack wrappers can be found here. 

     In 2009, Marinela, a subsidiary of the ever expanding Mexican food conglomerate, Bimbo, partnered with LMB to produce a set of stickers, called Un Clasicos del Diamante ("Classics of the Diamond" or "Diamond Classics") to be distributed with various snack cakes and cookies.  From this press release on the LMB website, it seems the promotion only lasted about a month, or until supplies ran out. The album cover can be seen at the very top of this post.

    And this year, a limited release set was produced in Saltillo, Coahuila, sponsored by Tyson, to commemorate the 2011 LMB All-Star Game, which was held there.  Arturo, who told me about this set, naturally has already had most of the set autographed. And just today, I found that the Acereros de Monclova have issued their own stamp album covering their history from 1974-2011 and are advertising it on their Facebook page.

    With all of those seemingly random efforts in the baseball arena, it is absolutely astonishing that Panini has never produced a set of baseball stickers in Mexico (though perhaps the 1998 Panini sticker set was issued in Mexico, and not just Venezuela as previously suspected).  That one company could virtually launch the entire baseball card hobby in Mexico, as they are the only company that seems to have a truly national reach and the well established brand to carry it out.  Perhaps an email campaign to both the league offices and to Panini by Mexican collectors and baseball fans could reveal an interest and a market that has thus far been almost completely unexploited.

    To the extent that I have been able, I have added the checklists for all of the sets mentioned in this post to the Inventory Manager system at SportsCardForum.com and TradingCardDB.com.  Any additional information about these sets, or any other sets not mentioned here, would be welcome!