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2021 MLB Thread

LTtxfan

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Beau Vine
Beau Vine

Laughed until I cried...So how do I walk?  really got me.  

shadow_operative2.0
shadow_operative2.0

This throw deserves the MLB thread.   

Beau Vine
Beau Vine

So in 2009, my daughter and I were in Omaha at the CWS.  I got an email from her softball coach saying that they had a kid drop off the All-Star team and would she want to replace her?  But she'd have

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castolon

castolon 193

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Posted

I listen to Buster Olney on the baseball tonight podcast every day. I wouldn't say it's my favorite and Buster has gotten a little big for his britches but I generally like it. The man knows how to beat a dead horse, I'll give him that. I think ya'll have him generally marked as a Houston hater so that may be a no go. 

I found Big Time Baseball hosted by Jon Heyman and Tony Gwynn Jr the other day. I haven't listened to it yet but it looks like they get some good guests and I'm looking forward to working through some of the back catalogue. 

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Hank Chinaski

Hank Chinaski 6323

Posted
Posted (edited)
On 3/4/2021 at 8:22 PM, castolon said:

I think ya'll have him generally marked as a Houston hater so that may be a no go. 

I'm generally not one to get my panties in a wad over this stuff - and it is baseball, so not something of actual importance - but in Buster's case, it's actually true. Well, not Houston per se, but it is clear that he disliked the Crane/Lunhow era/approach from the jump. I think it was mostly the rebuild that turned him off.

He wrote seemingly daily (for years) about how bad for the game the Astros "tanking" was, often writing that they were "trying not to win," which I always thought was disingenuous (he knew that the most direct line to that club actually winning again was to do exactly what they did, but he seemingly preferred that teams take half-measures and make an effort to be perpetually mediocre). And it was hardly the first case of a pro team rebuilding by trading away expensive vets, focusing on the draft, etc. Anyway, he managed to take a jab in damn near every article he put out. 

And he added to that by using Springer's case as the central example every single time he bitched about the service time/rookie issue - when literally every team was doing the same thing for years. 

He clearly thought that the Lunhow hyper-analytic approach to the game was bad for baseball. I'm sure he didn't like how the team got rid of most of their in-person scouts. 

I don't hate Buster (I listen to the pod occasionally) and I'm not a fucking aggie so it's not like I take it personally or make a deliberate effort to avoid his material or anything...but he really did seem to make an effort to make the Astros the villain in a lot of his stories (pre sign-stealing shenanigans) and it got tiresome. 

I get why the Lunhow approach turned off some fans and baseball lifers like Buster; I just think it would have been a better course for him to write one grand piece about all the reasons why he thought the approach was bad for the game and then be done with it instead of interjecting passive-aggressive jabs in nearly every piece he put out for 5 years. 

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InkaUtexas

InkaUtexas 26188

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9 hours ago, Beau Vine said:
11 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:
Sure. Will trade ya. Got books on Paige, Charleston, Gibson. Working on a paper about Trujillo's Dragons. hard to find material about that year in Baseball! 
 

Charleston book is up next for me.

Will have it standing by. Have not read it yet, but looks great. 

 

 

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Guadaloopy

Guadaloopy 11027

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On 3/11/2021 at 2:15 PM, Vic Mackey said:

159613690_3631801926920644_2384369796933

I’m not at all a purist and actually like the idea of robot umps and modified extra inning rules, but I absolutely hate that they are seriously discussing, much less testing, anti-shift rules.  


Hit ‘em where they ain’t is the best anti-shift measure.   

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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^pos rep on some good stuff up above.

I know the game changes, we all gotta get over ourselves.  They wanna speed the game up, I get it.  

But yeah, as stated above, what the fuck with the outlaw of the shift?  That's insane.  It rarely happens (relatively speaking to the other shit) and the guys that the shift is called for to defend, still manage to produce offense (that's you know...why the fuck the shift is happening in the first place).  If it were some time-consuming effort, I'd understand.  But it's not...it's rare and it's quick to do.  First fucking shift you learn in little league is shitty nerd comes up to bat, you move the outfielders in.  13 year old with drinking problem and dip in whose supposed to be 11 comes up to bat, you send the outfielders back out.  Moving outfielders around in MLB, given the size of some of those parks, takes longer than a quick infield shift.  And nobody bitched about that for the last 120 years of baseball.  You don't like the shift, take the fucking body armor off, reposition your feet, and learn how to guide the ball.

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TonyTexas

TonyTexas 10535

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Posted (edited)
33 minutes ago, Lobo said:

^pos rep on some good stuff up above.

I know the game changes, we all gotta get over ourselves.  They wanna speed the game up, I get it.  

But yeah, as stated above, what the fuck with the outlaw of the shift?  That's insane.  It rarely happens (relatively speaking to the other shit) and the guys that the shift is called for to defend, still manage to produce offense (that's you know...why the fuck the shift is happening in the first place).  If it were some time-consuming effort, I'd understand.  But it's not...it's rare and it's quick to do.  First fucking shift you learn in little league is shitty nerd comes up to bat, you move the outfielders in.  13 year old with drinking problem and dip in whose supposed to be 11 comes up to bat, you send the outfielders back out.  Moving outfielders around in MLB, given the size of some of those parks, takes longer than a quick infield shift.  And nobody bitched about that for the last 120 years of baseball.  You don't like the shift, take the fucking body armor off, reposition your feet, and learn how to guide the ball.

The shift isn’t rare. It happens during 34% of PAs league wide. And the reasoning behind banning the shift has nothing to do with speeding  game up. It is to increase offense or at least reduce the strikeout or home run tendency that had taken over the game. With that being said, I do not like Manfred’s eagerness to change the baseball. As James Earl Jones said “ The one constant through all the years Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.“

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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10 minutes ago, TonyTexas said:

The shift isn’t rare. It happens during 34% of PAs league wide. And the reasoning behind banning the shift has nothing to do with speeding  game up. It is to increase offense or at least reduce the strikeout or home run tendency that had taken over the game. With that being said, I do not like Manfred’s eagerness to change the baseball. As James Earl Jones said “ The one constant through all the years Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.“

Pos rep for analysis and my favorite baseball monologue.  I shouldn’t have said ‘rare’, I knew better.  But after the Shaka/Horns win, I decided to get “blotto”

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Helobious

Helobious 9467

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2 hours ago, TonyTexas said:

The shift isn’t rare. It happens during 34% of PAs league wide. And the reasoning behind banning the shift has nothing to do with speeding  game up. It is to increase offense or at least reduce the strikeout or home run tendency that had taken over the game. With that being said, I do not like Manfred’s eagerness to change the baseball. As James Earl Jones said “ The one constant through all the years Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.“

Only 34% of PAs is shocking. I thought the number would be closer to 95%.

 

On 3/12/2021 at 4:38 PM, Guadaloopy said:

I’m not at all a purist and actually like the idea of robot umps and modified extra inning rules, but I absolutely hate that they are seriously discussing, much less testing, anti-shift rules.  


Hit ‘em where they ain’t is the best anti-shift measure.   

It’s well-proven that “hit em where they ain’t” is not the approach hitters take against the shift, and it never will be. Analytics says it’s better to strikeout 10 times and hit one homer than to change your approach and try to slap a single the other way. It makes for a dreadfully boring game to watch and baseball had to do something about it.

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shadow_operative

shadow_operative 15932

Posted
Posted (edited)
On 3/12/2021 at 4:38 PM, Guadaloopy said:

I’m not at all a purist and actually like the idea of robot umps and modified extra inning rules, but I absolutely hate that they are seriously discussing, much less testing, anti-shift rules.  


Hit ‘em where they ain’t is the best anti-shift measure.   

the shift as it currently exists is definitely a motivating factor for this "launch angle revolution." nowadays "hitting it where they ain't" means hitting it over the fence, which ultimately means a more boring game to watch. most, if not all of these experimental rule changes are designed to get the game back in the infield so to speak. or at least to get more of the action back into the infield. more players trying to hit for average, more ground balls getting through, more first-to third-plays, more stolen bases, etc. not every idea is going to be a good one, but i am in favor of experimenting with rules that could potentially usher us out of the "three true outcomes" era. 

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54471

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58 minutes ago, WBT said:

The shift doesn't have much to do with the 3 true outcomes trend imo.  The first things I would do to reverse it are to deaden the ball back to normal and to move the fences out.

Yeah, I don't know how you do it, but I'd love to see fences moved out around the league.   The Giants' and Rockies' stadiums are fun because the outfield is so big and there are so many more triples, and runners going 1->3 on a single or scoring from 1st on a double.

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WBT

WBT 20676

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Brisbee on Mothers Cookies cards.  I got an Astros set sometime in the late 80s/early 90s.

Spoiler

 

The nostalgia, beauty and fun of Mother’s Cookies baseball cards

Grant Brisbee Mar 22, 2021comment-icon@2x.png 47 save-icon@2x.png

In 1983, the Giants’ promotional slogan was “Hang in There!” The full slogan was “The Giants Hang in There!” but it was usually shortened for commercials and advertisements, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. The season before, the Giants were surprisingly competitive, battling the Dodgers and Braves down to the final week. They hung in there.

At some point during that ’83 season, though, the slogan felt like an admission that the baseball wasn’t good. The spirit was willing, but the talent was weak. It was a bad baseball team, and now it was the fans who were expected to hang in there. On Aug. 7, 1983, Nolan Ryan came into town with the Astros and shut the Giants down with a complete-game three-hitter, which is about right.

Before that game, though, the first 20,000 fans who filed into Candlestick Park were handed a small cardboard box filled with baseball cards. The hobby was making something of a comeback, and the market was growing, but they weren’t quite a fad yet. There was still some novelty in the promotion.

It’s too reductive to suggest this was a seminal moment in the history of baseball cards. Most of the country was unaware of Mother’s Cookies cards back then. Most of the country is still unaware of them today.

The kids who left the stadium that day, though, became devotees of one of the more unlikely baseball-card success stories of the ’80s. Over the next few years, six other teams would introduce the promotion to their fans, and almost 30 years later, people of a certain vintage still remember Mother’s Cookies cards fondly.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably nodding your head. If you know, you know. Here’s what made Mother’s Cookies cards some of the best sets the hobby has ever produced.

Reason No. 1 for the ineffable coolness of Mother’s Cookies: Perfect timing

When Wayne Bebb moved from Southern California to the Bay Area to start his new role as Director of Advertising and Sales Promotions with Oakland-based Mother’s Cookies, his job was simple: He needed to get grocers excited about the danged cookies. The stretch goal was to get permission from a store to plonk down a display at the end of an aisle, which would allow his salespeople to collect commissions.

But the competition was daunting. The first day Bebb was there, the president of Mother’s Cookies handed him a budget for the year, then came back two hours later.

“That budget looks pretty big compared to your household budget, doesn’t it?” the president of the company said.

Sure did.

“We haven’t exactly had one of you before, but I want you to know that somewhere right now at Nabisco headquarters, there are probably 20 or 30 people sitting down to do the same job. And their budget for tomorrow is bigger than your budget for the year.”

Got it.

That was the challenge for a smaller, regional company like Mother’s Cookies. They had to trade body blows with titans of the industry, like Nabisco, Keebler and Pepperidge Farm. It didn’t matter if the store was in Oakland, five blocks from the factory, or if it was a distant convenience store in the suburbs of Houston. The goal was the same: Get people to grab the pack of cookies that said Mother’s on it.

The company needed a viral marketing campaign, but this was before social media existed. They needed a campaign that was regionally based, but nationally recognized.

Baseball cards were a way to do this. One of the secrets to the success of the Mother’s Cookies promotion was that the baseball-card industry was just starting to take off again after several decades of consumer disinterest. The industry wasn’t fully formed in 1983. There weren’t conventions in every county, and there weren’t many dedicated baseball card shops at all. But cards were definitely getting harder to find between the spokes of a kid’s bicycle. In 1981, the monopoly of Topps was broken, which allowed Fleer and Donruss to enter the market. In 1984, Dr. James Beckett founded Beckett Publications.

Baseball cards were about to become a thing. It was getting easier to find boxes at Price Club. Drug stores suddenly carried displays of cellophane tri-packs. Collectors began to speculate. And if a company could get their name associated with the hobby, it could allow them to punch above their weight class.

The company sponsored a team poster the year before, but that promotion didn’t have enough juice to get the name Mother’s Cookies stuck in everyone’s head.

If you could get your name in some of those newfangled baseball-card magazines …

“All of a sudden, Mother’s Cookies was a household word nationwide because of the trading cards. It was about building the image size for the company,” Bebb said.

Riiiiiiight at the beginning of this boom, the Giants handed a box full of cards to the first 25,000 people who walked into Candlestick Park. The paid attendance for the first promotion was 21,599, so it’s likely there were several thousand boxes left over.

The indifference wouldn’t last long.

Weekend games at Candlestick in the summer were day games, which meant you could feel your toes, and when the Giants entered the Will Clark Era, the fans flocked to the stadium. There were always a lot of Dodgers games scheduled for the weekend, and those could draw 50,000 fans. So there were seasons when Mother’s Cookies Day wasn’t the number-one hottest ticket of the summer.

DATE DAY OF WEEK ATTENDANCE ON PROMOTION ATTENDANCE WEEK BEFORE ATTENDANCE WEEK AFTER
8/7/83
Sunday
21,599
53,178
12,020
7/8/84
Sunday
22,223
15,731
14,262
6/30/85
Sunday
18,274
24,104
22,073
7/13/86
Sunday
36,877
40,473
28,587
6/27/87
Saturday
34,290
19,499
26,504
7/30/88
Saturday
36,289
34,666
26,818
8/6/89
Sunday
52,292
44,781
53,821
7/29/90
Sunday
55,792
45,669
49,005
7/28/91
Sunday
36,268
22,568
53,759
8/23/92
Sunday
32,129
36,302
21,633
8/22/93
Sunday
44,217
41,086
41,778
8/21/94
🙁
🙁
🙁
🙁
7/30/95
Sunday
32,154
22,677
38,678
6/30/96
Sunday
26,373
27,624
36,345
7/27/97
Sunday
38,866
28,252
28,759
7/26/98
Sunday
34,638
40,111
43,957
Average
 
30,722
29,219
29,294

But it was always one of the hottest tickets of the summer, especially during the baseball-card boom. When they were giving away the free baseball cards, the Giants drew about 1,500 more fans on average than the typical weekend game in July or August. The crowds were already bigger on Sundays; Mother’s Cookies made them bigger, especially after baseball cards became a full-blown fad. All those extra people got the name “Mother’s Cookies” burned into their brains.

This wasn’t the first baseball card giveaway. It wasn’t even the first card giveaway sponsored by a Bay Area company: Granny Goose chips got there a season before with an A’s-based promotion, and I’d like to imagine “Anchorman”-style brawls between the two companies in the parking lot. Sugar vs. salt, pick your fighter.

It wasn’t even the first version of Mother’s Cookies cards. Those were included in packages of cookies in 1952, and they featured Pacific Coast League players. You can buy one of future Hollywood star and former Los Angeles Angel Chuck Connors for a few hundred dollars if you’re in the mood. In 1955, the company included automobile cards with the cookies, and they’re still a hot collector’s item today.

There was a history there, then. Mother’s Cookies was around for the start of the first baseball card boom — 1952 is a magical year in the hobby — and it made sense that they would be on the crest of the next one.

The timing couldn’t have been better, and the promotion was a smashing success. Anecdotally speaking, I favored Oreos before Mother’s Cookies cards. After the cards, I demanded the Taffy and English Tea sandwich cookies, making occasional room for iced oatmeal cookies and those nubby pink wildebeests. The marketing got its hooks into my developing brain, and I have no regrets. Salespeople didn’t have to fight the grocers anymore to put up the end-aisle displays.

Bebb’s superiors weren’t quite as impressed. They saw the card promotion as something superfluous, a hobby that he could take care of on the weekends so it wouldn’t interfere with his actual job, and he had to fight to keep the promotion in the budget every year.

But if Mother’s Cookies was looking for bottled lightning, they found it with baseball cards. Soon their product was known across the country, even though the cookies were mostly sold west of the Mississippi. They didn’t have the budget of the bigger companies, but they had impeccable timing.

Reason No. 2 for the ineffable coolness of Mother’s Cookies: Good gravy, these things were beautiful

There were other, more practical considerations when it came to the promotion, too. The company could have slapped its name on a souvenir baseball or a little baseball bat, but those things cost money. “Baseball cards are simply paper. So there’s an economy to that giveaway,” Bebb said.

That didn’t mean the cards were going to be cheap, flimsy pieces of cardboard, though. Part of the reason the cards have such lasting power is because of how they felt and how they looked. Baseball cards were the cheapest option. But premium baseball cards were also the cheapest option, in a way. They cost more than the lowest quality cards, but they sure cost a lot less than a miniature baseball bat.

Consider what baseball cards were like in the early ’80s. The cardboard was matte and dull, yes, but the pictures were often afterthoughts, at best. Look through the 1982 Fleer set, and you’ll find a horribly cropped Jack Morris, a blurry Sal Butera about to put his mask on and … look, buddy, I can’t imagine this was the most flattering picture they could have taken of Phil Niekro. Photographers would shoot roll after roll of film, but they wouldn’t have them developed and choose the best shots. They would just mail the undeveloped rolls back to Topps. Someone at headquarters would get a hold of them, they would pass them to someone else and, yada yada yada, baseball cards happened.

Mother’s Cookies cards were art, by comparison, and the artistry had everything to do with photographer and set producer Barry Colla, who was relatively new to the industry. When his cousin, Tigers infielder Stan Papi, came to Oakland in 1981, Colla took pictures of him with his dad’s relatives. The pictures impressed Papi and some of the other Tigers, and after a few dominoes fell, Colla had a new and distinct career path.

Two years later, Colla was producing all of the Mother’s Cookies sets. Several years later, he had a coveted license from Major League Baseball, which allowed him to produce his own sets and postcards. His Don Mattingly sets still draw a lot of collector attention, as do his Will Clark and Nolan Ryan sets. Like a lot of us back then, he also became quickly enamored of Kevin Maas.

The inspiration for this article came from a 1983 Mother’s Cookies Atlee Hammaker card.

atleehammaker-722x1024.jpg

At the risk of admitting to sacrilege, this was the card I was using as a bookmark when I actually looked at it for the first time. Hammaker is showing off a four-seam fastball grip, with Candlestick Park looming majestically in the background, which isn’t the adverb one usually used for that stadium. The colors give the card a stereoscopic quality, pushing the player out at you.

Bebb and Colla weren’t as excited about those ’83 cards, though. They wanted something more. They drew inspiration from the original Mother’s Cookies cards from the ’50s, which had rounded corners, and they decided the new Mother’s Cookies cards needed that same distinct look. It wasn’t going to be easy — the cards required a totally different production process, which required them to be die-cut instead of simply split — but this was a part of the strategy. It wasn’t that hard to put out a better product than what you could find at the grocery store, and it would make the cards stand out.

“It upset the major card companies at the time,” Bebb said, “the quality of our cards, plus the fact that our cards were given out free to the public. There were three or four national trading card magazines, and they used to feature our cards. One of them touted the quality of them as the ‘Cadillac of the trading card industry,’ whereas Topps was ‘only the Plymouth.’”

How did the standard bearers take that kind of press?

“That got Topps really upset,” Bebb laughed.

Bebb and Colla wanted the cards to look like portraits instead of action shots. To do that, they couldn’t just slap a picture on dinky slats of cardboard. “In the early years, the cards were printed on what was called Kromekote paper,” Colla told me. “It was really glossy on one side, real quality paper. And (the baseball cards) were printed at one of the major postcard companies at the time. They had to put a high gloss on them afterward, which gave even more of a quality look to it.”

The players started to notice the quality of the cards. They would look forward to the shoots, even, which resulted in unique cards that were hard to duplicate.

When it came to getting the players’ cooperation, though, it didn’t hurt to have a secret weapon.

“It used to really frustrate all of (the other baseball card) photographers that I could run up in the clubhouse and get three or four players to put on their dress whites and come down with gloves to pose for their pictures,” Bebb said. “These other photographers would say to Barry, ‘What has he got on them? Why do they come down for him?’

“Barry would say, ‘He gives them cookies.’”

Reason No. 3 for the ineffable coolness of Mother’s Cookies: They were fun

The cards were fun because the players bought into the whole idea. Yes, a river of cookies flowed through the clubhouse, but it was more than that. The Friday before every promotion, every player got a box. Inside were 10 boxes of cookies, two full sets of cards, 250 of the player’s individual card to hand out to family, friends or fans and an uncut sheet of cards in a custom lucite wraparound wall frame.

giantscardssheet-1024x784.jpg
 
(This card sheet is hanging in my garage right now. Did I get it by engineering an elaborate heist that involved belong lowered by a rope through the skylight of someone on the 1989 Giants? Not telling.)

The thank-you gift was popular. When Mike McCormick’s son left for college, he took the uncut sheet that his dad was given for participating in the 1984 set filled with Giants All-Stars, past and present. The first thing McCormick did was ring up Bebb to get a new one. The approval of the players and their fondness for the cards would eventually become a part of the promotion’s success, with Colla sometimes sneaking down into the dugout during a game (shhhh, don’t tell Peter Ueberroth) to get pictures of the notoriously tricky Kirk Gibson during games.

It also helped everyone have fun with the shoots. Bebb recalled a shoot with Mark McGwire in 1989, in which the slugger posed for three or four quick shots. Before he left the field, he yelled, “Wayne, you guys are really asleep today.”

“Mark, do you really think I didn’t notice you were holding your bat like that?” Bebb yelled back.

McGwire laughed and went back out to take three more shots, this time holding the bat like he would in a game. Before he left the field for real, he turned around to shout one more thing.

“Wait, you wouldn’t use that first pose, would you?”

Of course they wouldn’t. Don’t worry about it.

markmcgwire-754x1024.jpg

These were Easter eggs that grabbed the hobby’s attention. The cards started with traditional portraits, most with players awkwardly pretending to play baseball, and that was part of the charm at first. They were more personal than the typical baseball card, which could feature a blurry, distant shot of someone warming up before an inning.

Some of the cards would include touches that were even more unusual. Instead of photos, the entire 1986 Astros set featured paintings by artist Richard Wallich. Scott Garrelts, owner of a career .323 OPS, posed with his bat more than once. Teammate Greg Minton had a career .416 OPS, so he got to pose with five bats. Mariners first baseman Pat Putnam posed at first with a catcher’s mitt, only to be one-upped by his teammate, pitcher Jim Beattie, who took his shot in full catcher’s gear, leading to the rare “P    C” as his listed position on the back. Pitcher Charlie Kerfeld jammed his right-handed glove onto his right hand and posed as a southpaw, but Mike Moore actually took the time to source a left-handed glove.

I have a personal soft spot for Giants manager Roger Craig’s 1988 card, in which he’s pulling off the rare Double Al Bundy. Heck, they even got Orel Hershiser to pose in a Giants uniform, even if we can all agree that he never, ever played for them, and whatever evidence you provide to the contrary is doctored.

But no player had more fun with the company than Rangers closer Jeff Russell, whose first card featured an unflattering picture that made it look like he’d just swallowed a bug. He chided Bebb and Colla and decided that future cards would be more interesting. After seeing a Nolan Ryan card in which he was holding four baseballs to celebrate his (then) four no-hitters, Russell decided to top it and hold seven. He glued them together on his own time, of course, but we didn’t know that. Thousands of baseballs were dropped on childhood floors in an attempt to mimic the shot.

Another shoot involved Russell holding a lit book of matches behind a baseball, giving it an appearance of a fastball on fire. Manager Bobby Valentine walked into the clubhouse and screamed at Colla and Bebb, giving them an earnest, heartfelt, from-the-gut “WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” before they pointed out that the right-handed pitcher was holding the ball in his left hand.

“Most of the other card companies wouldn’t let us do much. Put your glove up, that sort of thing,” Russell told me in a recent phone interview. “But Mother’s Cookies, they just said, ‘Do what you want to do.’”

A personal favorite of everyone’s from the entire history of Mother’s Cookies, though, was an improvised shot of Russell in the clubhouse during a rainout. Bebb received permission from the Commissioner’s Office to shoot there, but only after making sure that every locker was free of tobacco, alcohol and, er, “magazines.” This gave Russell time to source a broken fungo bat, which led to an iconic pose.

IMG_9193-1-scaled.jpg

More closers should have baseball cards like this.

Reason No. 4 for the ineffable coolness of Mother’s Cookies: The cards were yours

As in, these cards belonged to the place you lived. The first promotion was for the 1983 Giants, but in subsequent years, the promotion expanded to several teams west of the Mississippi, with the Astros, A’s, Mariners, Dodgers, Padres, Rangers and Angels eventually getting their own sets.

In 2021, you can pull up eBay on your phone and get a set in mint condition. I recently bought a complete set for $7.95 from a seller who specializes in ballpark-giveaway memorabilia. It was ordered from my couch, and it arrived in five days. But in the early ’80s, Mother’s Cookies sets were handed out to the first 25,000 fans, and 30,000 sets were produced. They were limited runs handed out for free at a specific location. Good luck being a Rangers fan in California or a Dodgers fan in Texas. To the rest of the country, they were either rumors or strange archeological artifacts.

Maybe you lived near one of the best memorabilia shops in the country, or maybe you saw the right classified ad in the back of a niche magazine. But at first, it was far more likely that you didn’t have a set. Only the people who went to the game had a set. If you had one, it was yours, and you weren’t trading.

Well, maybe you were trading a little bit.

“It’s one thing getting a tote bag, you know, or a cap or something,” Mario Alioto, the San Francisco Giants executive vice president of business operations said in a phone interview. “This event, it felt like it was current every year. Because it was your trading card set, but it wasn’t a national thing. It was the Bay Area’s thing, and that was a big part of it.”

As the promotion and hobby got more popular, though, collectors and dealers around the country wanted a piece. Some would show up with 500 tickets — upper deck tickets at Candlestick could be as low as $5, and the general admission tickets were even cheaper — and send an army of children through the turnstiles and back out to drop off the cards. Then they would take a new ticket and repeat the process over and over at different gates.

In response, Mother’s Cookies played around with the format. Instead of giving away a full set, many of the giveaways in the ’80s had fans redeem a voucher for the missing cards. Two of the cards were only available through this process, usually some coaches or trainers and a checklist. This wouldn’t eliminate the speculation entirely, but it would throttle the collectors enough for them to consider whether it was worth the effort. For most, it was too many envelopes to lick.

In 1993, though, the promotion entered its final form: Every person’s set included eight duplicate cards of one player, which forced people looking for a complete set to trade with strangers. Throughout the stands, adults and kids scrambled around, screaming things like, “I GOT STEVE SCARSONE, I GOT STEVE SCARSONE,” frantically holding cards in the air. It was like a fictional portrayal of Wall Street at its most manic, a game of Pit that became deadly serious. Most people loved it.

Some of the ultra-shy kids — specifically, me — left with eight Steve Scarsone cards. I still have them somewhere. Maybe I can make up for lost time.

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(Ed. note: Anyone need a 1996 Don Wengert? She still has seven.)

The trading was one of the purest parts of the baseball-card boom. While there were certainly grown-ups who wanted as many complete sets as they could stuff into a backpack so they could sell them, the trade market was stuffed mostly with kids who just wanted a complete set. Cards were passed from grubby paw to grubby paw without consideration of how that would affect their PSA grading.

These were cards that were collected before collecting was cool. And when collecting was cool, they still had the scarcity that other cards would have to artificially create in the future. They were never exactly easy to come by.

Unless you happened to go to your local ballpark, that is. If you did that, they were all. yours. Which brings us to one of the most important reasons the cards were popular.

Reason No. 5 for the ineffable coolness of Mother’s Cookies: They just gave ’em to you

They were free.

Here, just take ’em.

When Mother’s Cookies cards were first given away that Sunday in 1983, the temperature at Candlestick Park was 80 degrees, with just a little wind. The weather was perfect.

However, the second law of thermodynamics tells us that anything perfect will eventually become imperfect and disorderly. The fog eventually rolled in. It doesn’t matter if it happened in the seventh inning or three days later, the fog was always going to roll in. And the baseball card boom would become a baseball card crash, and the promotion stopped being the automatic draw that it once was.

Mother’s Cookies began in 1914 when N.M. Wheatley ate homemade vanilla cookies that were sold door-to-door by an elderly couple. He bought the recipe, and he moved from a 3-sq. foot oven to a larger plant in 1922, and in 1949, the company moved to the Oakland factory that was their home for the next six decades.

Company control shifted to Archway Cookies to Artal NV to Specialty Foods Corp. to Parmalat Bakery. The last one was a division of an Italian company that became Europe’s version of Enron, which led to Chapter 11 proceedings and private equity companies coming in to lay off hundreds of employees and strip-mine Mother’s Cookies for parts, then selling it to different private equity companies, who would repeat the process. Kellogg’s eventually scooped the company up, which means you can still buy those nubby pink wildebeests today. They taste the same.

As an example of how entropy rules us all, the story of Mother’s Cookies will do. The promotion went on uninterrupted for a while, with Keebler’s taking over as the sponsor. Bebb and Colla continued to work on those sets, but the boom had disintegrated. The kids didn’t care about baseball cards like they used to. Eventually Keebler’s would cut the promotion, and Topps stepped in to give team sets away at different ballparks. The cards were glossy and shiny, with an occasional foil imprint, sturdy stock and high sheen. They were a noisier Mother’s Cookies card, in other words, reflecting the influence of the promotion that came before.

Nostalgia comes easy for people who seek it out, but there has always been a transcendent romance with these cards. For almost two decades, Mother’s Cookies cards existed in a sweet spot of the hobby’s industry. They were local. They were quality. They were fun. They were free.

It was a combination that sure worked at the time. It was a combination that still has some magic left today.

 

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54471

Posted
Posted (edited)

I still have a bunch of those somewhere in the house.  IIRC, you could also get cards of out-of-market players by buying bags of cookies.  Mother's iced oatmeal cookies were the bomb, so my mom would bring home a bag of them every week from the store.  

Edited by Beau Vine
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