Baseball Cards Hit Home Run

-- Graphic Arts Online, 4/11/2008 10:10:00 AM

Topps adds fun to the segment and drives baseball card printing, issuing giveaway card packs for National Baseball Card Day Mar. 29, which coincided with the first week of baseball season. The special sets of cards, given away nationally at Toys R Us, featured some of today's brightest stars including Ken Griffey, Jr., Derek Jeter, David Ortiz, Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez, as well as a number of other current standouts and rising stars. Topps also printed a fake card for April 1, featuring phantom baseball prodigy Kazuo Uzuki

Did printed baseball cards foretell the steroid saga 16 years ago? An MSN bloggist suggests that the 1992 Topps Kids card series morphing players' heads on heavily muscled caricatures of bulked-up bodies (shown) are both humorous and eerily ironic.

When the cards were issued, children, Topps teamed with artist David Coulson to produce a set of inexpensive, colorful trading cards based on the 1938 Goudey "Heads Up" set. Roughly a quarter of the 132 Topps Kids cards featured players with giant cartoon bodies. Included in the muscle-beach bunch were Bonds, Clemens, Rafael Palmiero and Ken Caminiti, all of whom 15 years later were named in baseball's Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drugs.