Ralston Purina 1987 Collectors' Edition

     1987 saw a ramping up by a variety of companies using baseball cards as an enticement for purchasing their product.  Popcorn, breakfast cereal, iced tea and even the big mac & cheese lobby would get into the baseball card printing act.  Three years after their "First Annual" card set, the Ralston Purina Company produced a new set of 15 cards, in packs of three, buried in specially marked boxes of regular and vanilla Cookie-Crisp, and the less well known test run of Honey Graham Chex.

     Along with the cards was an instant win card for a "Win A Hero For A Day" contest.  There were apparently separate contest for Cookie Crisp and for Honey Graham Chex as the prize enumerations are different on each box.  From the Cookie Crisp rules, the grand prize being a visit from "a baseball hero" to your school or a Little League game.  Other prizes were 500 Rawlings gloves; 1,000 personalized Louisville Slugger bats; 10,000 Rawlings baseballs and 100,000  complete uncut sheets of the card set.  From the Honey Graham Chex rules, the grand prize being a visit from "a baseball hero" to your school or a Little League game (meaning there were actually two chances at this). The other prizes were 100 Rawlings gloves; 200 personalized Louisville Slugger bats; 500 Rawlings baseballs and 25,000 complete uncut sheets of the card set.

     As mentioned in an earlier post, lots of sets produced by Michael Schechter Associates (MSA) for various companies were also available in poster or sheet form as a mail-in offer.  If you weren't lucky enough to win one of the 125,000 posters, you could purchase one by sending in two non-winning game cards and $1 to Ralston Purina.  One has to wonder if the posters available for purchase came from the 125,000 instant win stash, or if there was a separate run of posters just for that.  I have to think it was all the same print run as I can't imagine Ralston Purina really thinking they would have to redeem 125,000 posters and still have people ordering more.

1987 Cookie Crisp Limited Edition Collectors' Sheet

1987 Honey Graham Chex Limited Edition Collectors' Sheet

     As with all of the previous MSA uncut sheets, a variation of the card set was introduced as collectors began to chop up the sheets into individual cards.  The actual cards were printed on gray cardstock, similar to that used for the cereal boxes.  The posters were printed on a lighter, beige cardstock and were missing the "1987 COLLECTORS' EDITION" wording on the left side of the crossed bats on front.  So, again, not a "RARE VARIATION", just a piece of a chopped-up poster.

     An interesting bit of text on the side of the box partially reveals the print run for this set.  The official rules for the promotion says of the prizes, "A total of 111,501 instant win prizes are available to be won in 3 million boxes of Cookie Crisp brand cereal."  It then goes on to list the prizes, totals and odds of winning.  As the cards were issued three per box, that means at least 9,000,000 cards were issued.  Assuming all cards were issued in equal numbers, that puts each card at a print run of no less than 600,000 cards.  The rules also mention that any unclaimed prizes would never be awarded, which invites the assumption that the unredeemed card sheets were eventually destroyed (assuming they didn't make it out the back door of the warehouse), so there are likely far fewer than the mentioned 100,000 sheets in circulation.  And that's just including the cards issued with Cookie Crisp.

[UPDATE - 25 May 2016]

     I finally found a Honey Graham Chex box and, as suspected, it had a smaller run than Cookie Crisp. The official rules for the promotion says of the prizes, "A total of 25,801  instant win prizes are available to be won in 1 million boxes of Honey Graham Chex brand cereal."  It then goes on to list the prizes, totals and odds of winning.  As the cards were issued three per box, that means at least 3,000,000 more cards were issued to cover the Chex production run.  Assuming all cards were issued in equal numbers, that puts each card at a print run of no less than 200,000 cards each.

    Combining the two products therefore gives us a total print run of actual cards as 800,000 per card and 125,000 posters.

     Both sets and uncut sheets are still readily available for cheap on eBay, usually under $10, though the Honey Graham Chex poster seems to be far less available than the Cookie Crisp, which stands to reason as only 1/4th as many were printed.  The checklist is as follows:

Card #	Player	Team
1	Nolan Ryan	Houston Astros
2	Steve Garvey	San Diego Padres
3	Wade Boggs	Boston Red Sox
4	Dave Winfield	New York Yankees
5	Don Mattingly	New York Yankees
6	Don Sutton	California Angels
7	Dave Parker	Cincinnati Reds
8	Eddie Murray	Baltimore Orioles
9	Gary Carter	New York Mets
10	Roger Clemens	Boston Red Sox
11	Fernando Valenzuela	Los Angeles Dodgers
12	Cal Ripken Jr.	Baltimore Orioles
13	Ozzie Smith	St. Louis Cardinals
14	Mike Schmidt	Philadelphia Phillies
15	Ryne Sandberg	Chicago Cubs

1986 Meadow Gold Dave Winfield

    One of the more frustrating aspects of being a player collector is chasing a card that, by all appearances, should be fairly easy to find yet ends up being one of the most elusive.  In 1986, Meadow Gold Dairy, a subsidiary of Beatrice Foods at the time, produced three series of baseball cards printed on the packaging of their various Double Play products.  The sets were produced in cooperation with MLBPA's main licensee, Michael Schecter Associates (MSA), so the logo-less photos are all familiar from other 1984-1986 MSA issues.  If you search eBay, you can usually find the boxes and wrappers for all of the 1986 Meadow Gold products.

     The first set issued came in packages of BubbleGum Coolers and Assorted Jr. Pops (basically popsicles and fudgesicles). The cards from this 20-card set came two cards to a box on a perforated strip, two cards folded around an offer card. These were what became known in the hobby as the "1986 Meadow Gold Stat Backs" because they feature biographical and statistical information on the backs of the cards.  These are by far the most common of the 1986 Meadow Gold issues.  Dave Winfield was paired with Pete Rose, but I haven't decided whether or not to pick up the intact cards, yet.

  

    The second set issued came printed on one of the end flaps of half gallon boxes of Double Play ice cream.  As anyone who grew up in the 1970s-1990s can tell you, those old rectangular boxes of ice cream were a real pain to scoop from, and when doing so, you almost always ended up getting ice cream all over the back of your scooping hand and all down the handle of the scoop.  Needless to say, the end flaps would be thoroughly coated in sticky, half-melted ice cream.  As a result, it should come as no surprise that this series is a little more difficult to find.  This 16-card set became most commonly known as the "1986 Meadow Gold Blank Back" set.  Not really surprising, given that the back of the card was part of the inside of an ice cream box.

    According to the 2004 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards (I just don't feel like pulling a newer copy off the shelf at the moment), Willie McGee was reportedly the toughest player to find from the set, but it took me the better part of a decade to track down Winfield without having to purchase a complete set of boxes.  I was lucky enough to find two flat boxes, so I can cut the card off one, and keep the other intact.  Most of the cards in these two sets feature the same photos, but the Blank Back cards have the backgrounds replaced with an empty sky blue backdrop.  Most of the cards use the same photos for both sets, but the Winfield card uses the older image for the Stat Back (seen earliest on his 1983 Topps Glossy Send-In card) and the Blank Back uses a newer image (seen first on the 1985 General Mills MSA issue, and later on his All-Star card, #717 from the 1986 Topps base set).  This card effectively completes 1986 for my Dave Winfield collection.

    Winfield wasn't part of the third Meadow Gold set of 1986. It was printed as line art versions of the player photos from the other two sets, and was printed on the backs of milk cartons.  This set was limited to 11 cards and was less popular than the other two sets, being both messy and ugly.

Winfield in the Round with Corners (Part 4)

     When perusing the offerings on eBay while hunting for these various circular issues, one will encounter any number of "uncut", "proof" or just plain "square" versions of almost every MSA-produced disc.  In most cases these are not, in fact, proofs, they are simply pieces cut from a larger poster.  From about 1985-1990, a great many of these MSA discs were accompanied by a mail-in offer to order the complete set as a poster.  The posters were intended to exist as just that, a poster.  They were almost always without borders or perforations and not intended to be chopped into pieces anymore than was the cover of a Red Foley's Best Baseball Book Ever was intended to be hacked to to bits and sold as "cuts".

Winfield in the Round (Part 3)

1989 Cadaco Ellis

     This is one of those issues I used to see in the big price guides and had no idea what it was.  Then I happened across a copy of the Cadaco Ellis All-Star Baseball game in a Walden Books in the mall (yes, this was years ago).  Sadly, I was an extremely brainwashed mainstream soul in those days, so concept of playing a board game that wasn't produced by Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley was somehow foreign to me and I didn't give this game a second thought.  For most of the years the game was produced, these were just blank discs with players names on them and no pictures like this one:

     But by 1989, everyone was getting a license from MLBPA, so Cadaco Ellis added player photos to the discs, courtesy of Mike Schechter & Associates.  Here is a good website that explains the game, and apparently still creates new discs for players, even though the actual game is no longer produced.  I imagine it has a following similar to the various statistics based games like APBA.

Winfield in the Round (Part 2) - More MSA Madness

    All throughout the mid 1980s, Mike Schechter & Associates continued to churn out promotional tie-ins for the MLBPA.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on the item), Dave Winfield figured into most of them.

1985 MSA Thom McAn / JOX

Community Project: Help validate the 1985 MSA Subway Discs checklist

     I began this project on the Freedom Cardboard and Net54Baseball forums, but thought I should also post it here in hope of attracting a wider audience as I know there are many collectors who do not frequent the hobby message boards.  This post will be updated and re-published as new information is uncovered.

     1985 saw the release of two nearly identical sets of MSA discs (which unfortunately looked almost exactly like most of the previous years MSA discs sets). There was the Thom McAn/JOX set, issued as a promotion for Thom McAn's JOX tennis shoes, and the completely anonymous Subway set, that looked exactly the same, but was blank on the back.