Mother’s Cookies Were Cool

When I was in grade school in the mid 1980s, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sunnyvale, California to be precise. Back then, the Silicon Valley moniker was still in its infancy and really wasn’t all that well known outside of California. Before Apple, its claim to fame was the place Matthew Broderick tried to pirate video games from in the movie WarGames. Besides computers though, another hot craze in the area was baseball cards. That was driven by two real good teams, the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants, and young rookie stars on each team to root for. If you were a Giant fan, Will Clark and Robby Thompson were at the top of your list. If you were a fan of the green and gold, those were the days it was cool to love Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. But for many kid fans in the area, the rookie cards weren’t in the Topps, Fleer or Donruss sets. The “true rookies” were the Mother’s Cookies cards. Almost an equivalent to the rookie cards in the “Topps Traded” sets, Mother’s Cookies cards were available before the major companies main sets had been distributed.

The cards had a unique look to them. They had a glossy, sleek finish at a time before Upper Deck existed. They also had distinctive rounded corners which, to a kid’s imagination, made them even more cool. They also were thinner than normal baseball card stock, which gave it that extra amount of “I have to be careful with this, so it must be valuable” vibe.

The backs of each card, curiously, didn’t have baseball statistics on them. However, underneath the miniature biography of each player, there was a line marked “Autograph”. We thought that was a neat way to provide player space to sign without messing up that nice glossy finish.

Not only did those cards look great and were truer “rookie” cards, but they were all the more epic because us kids weren’t quite sure how to get them. I mean, you didn’t just go to the local 7-Eleven and buy a pack. They weren’t even listed in baseball card guides like Beckett’s. Though rumors of their release would start early in the season, there was an air of mystery on if they actually existed, what they would look like once they came out, and who would be in the set.

I traded for two cards, the Will Clark and Robby Thompson rookie cards from the 1986 set. Before and after games, there was a lot of baseball card trading as we waited for autographs.

And then, I got them autographed.

These days, because of the internet, there are blogs such as cardjunk to help clear up some of the mystery. There’s even a Wikipedia page that lets us glean a few more facts about them. The first two sets had been produced in 1952 and 1953, featuring only Pacific Coast League Players. That was it until the 1983 Mother’s Cookies Giants set came out. Other teams were added over the next decade until sets were being produced for the A’s, Angels, Astros, Dodgers, Giants, Mariners, Rangers and Padres. They also ran some commemorative sets for Nolan Ryan. They were distributed as occasional inserts in Mother’s Cookies or as giveaways at baseball games. The last baseball card set was in 1998 and apparently, Mother’s Cookies went out of business in 2008.

It’s ironic looking it up online decades after the cards were released. Even with modern technology, there are people still struggling to complete their sets. Nonetheless, though they’re still hard to find, they’re still as cool as they were when I was young.

Author: Richard Bergstrom

Originally from Chicago and after an extensive tour of most of the western United States, this is my second stint in Denver. I've lived here since 2004 and go to quite a few Rockies games, especially Rockies fireworks games! When I'm not writing about baseball, I enjoy karaoke downtown, a bit of poker and a bit too much of my iPad. View all posts by Richard Bergstrom