Dawgfan1995

1989 Bimbo Cookies Super Stars Discs

I have an affinity for oddballs. Even here at the SABR Blog, my two contributions have focused on Brewers Police cards and the Milwaukee Braves Spic-n-Span offerings from the 1950s.

My affinity for oddballs stems both from them being “odd” and in finding out about the companies that issued them. I started writing my own blog about 1980s Oddballs last year, and I thought that I would share one of the posts from that blog. This post is about a very small, weird set: the Bimbo Cookies Super Star Discs set from 1989.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SET
Bimbo Bakeries is a Mexico City-based multinational bakery known as Grupo Bimbo that is said to be the world’s largest bakery. The company was started in 1945 in Mexico City, perhaps coming about as the result of a name change from “Super Pan” (that’s super bread in Spanish) and grew quickly to become a huge corporation.

The name “Bimbo” — despite its less savory connotations here in the US — has an etymology that is checkered at best. Wikipedia says that the most likely hypothesis is that it is a mashup of the word bingo and Bambi, though it may also mean baby in Italian and it might sound like the word that means bread in China.

Bimbo entered the US market in 1986 with the purchase of Pacific Pride Bakeries in San Diego. Since 1986, Grupo Bimbo has purchased Mrs. Baird’s Bakeries in Texas and, later, the rights to brands such as Oroweat, Entenmann’s, Thomas’s (the English Muffins), and Boboli. That established Bimbo in the western US, and its purchase of Weston Foods in 2008 made it the largest bakery company in the United States.

These days, Bimbo is known for all of the brands above and for owning Sara Lee. In addition, Bimbo sponsors the Philadelphia Union in MLS, Rochester Rhinos in the USL, Chivas de Guadalajara, Club América, and C.F. Monterrey in the Mexican soccer league, and C.D. Saprissa in Costa Rica.

When this disc set was issued in 1989, Bimbo was attempting to get its name recognized more. Now, the 2011 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards notes that this disc set was distributed “in Puerto Rico in boxes of cookies.” I do not know what Bimbo’s history in Puerto Rico is, but focusing on baseball was not a bad idea.

EXEMPLARS

With only 12 discs in a set issued only for one year, my choices are limited.

(Front and back images courtesy of The Trading Card Database)

DETAILS
As mentioned above, this set contains a total of 12 players. While the Standard Catalog says that the set contains a “dozen Hispanic players,” a little bit of research online reveals that the set actually includes a dozen Puerto Rican players. The discs are 2-3/4″ in diameter and are licensed only by the Major League Baseball Players Association.

Michael Schechter Associates printed and licensed these discs. As is typical for MSA discs starting in 1975 and ending when MSA stopped getting licensed by MLBPA, these cards do not include logos. Interestingly, this must have been before MLB started protecting its trademarks in team names since the discs include the team names in full on each.

The Bimbo bear appears at the top center of the disc. This bear is apparently the most well-known trademark for Bimbo, and Bimbo markets plush stuffed animals of the bear as a collectible for kids as well. Indeed, there are a ton more Bimbo bears on eBay than there are Bimbo discs.

Stats on these discs are lacking, as is also typical of MSA. You can see that you get the very basics — at bats, hits, homers, RBI, and average for the most recent year (1988) and for the player’s career.

With this being a small set, I’ll give you the checklist:
1 Carmelo Martinez
2 Candy Maldonado
3 Benito Santiago
4 Rey Quinones
5 Jose Oquendo
6 Ruben Sierra
7 Jose Lind
8 Juan Beniquez
9 Willie Hernandez
10 Juan Nieves
11 Jose Guzman
12 Roberto Alomar

HALL OF FAMERS
The only Hall of Famer out of the twelve is Roberto Alomar.

ERRORS/VARIATIONS
Trading Card Database does not list any errors or variations. But, as frequent SABR Blog contributor Jeff Katz noted to me on Twitter, the Roberto Alomar disc actually is a photo of his brother Sandy Alomar. I’ve sent a note to the folks at the Trading Card Database, but that is definitely an uncorrected error.

What are your thoughts on this set? Do you like discs? Do you like Oddballs?

1950s/1960s Oddballs: Spic and Span Milwaukee Braves

When the Milwaukee Braves moved to the midwest from Boston for the 1953 season, the local populace was ecstatic. From 1947 through 1952, thanks to the Milwaukee Brewers serving as the Triple-A affiliate for the Braves, the locals had already had the opportunity to learn the names of many of the Braves prior to their promotion to Boston. The move was an immediate financial success for the club — attendance went from 281,278 in Boston in 1952 to 1,826,397 in Milwaukee in 1953. It didn’t hurt that the Braves went from doormat to a second place finish.

As that attendance jump shows, the Braves captured the hearts of Milwaukee immediately that initial season. As detailed in the September 16, 1953 issue of The Sporting News, the players themselves received outpourings of monetary support from the fans. Wisconsin native Andy Pafko, for example, was quoted saying:

We never knew a player could have it so good. You know, the only thing we have to buy in the way of food is meat. The rest we get free–milk, cheese, butter, eggs, frozen vegetables, cookies and even bread.

These people just can’t do enough for you. The other day the fellow at the parking lot where I leave my car overnight came over and said: ‘I understand you’re Andy Pafko of the Braves. Park here any time you want to and it won’t cost you anything. I’m sorry I didn’t know who you were sooner.

It should come as no surprise, then, that multiple local companies sought to capitalize on the good feelings engendered by the team. One of those companies was Spic and Span Dry Cleaners. As checklisted in the 2011 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, edited by the late Bob Lemke, Spic and Span issued multiple sets of photos and cards featuring the hometown Braves beginning in 1953 and ending in 1960. Included in this cavalcade of items were cards, photos, and postcards of various sizes and shapes. Here is a list of those issues:

1953 to about 1955: 3-1/4″ x 5-1/2″ cards, 29 total issued

53-spic-and-span — 1953 Eddie Mathews, Courtesy of Bob Lemke’s Blog dated May 5, 2011

1953 to 1957: 7″ x 10″ black and white photos, 14 total issued

1954: 5-1/2″ x 8-1/2″ set of 13 cards

1954 to 1956: 4″ x 6″ postcards, 18 issued

1955: 7-1/2″ x 7″ die cut standups (the rarest set) of 18 total players

88620e_lg — 1955 Die Cut Lew Burdette, from an auction on the Mears Auction Website, where a complete set sold in 2015 for $7,243

1957: 4 ” x 5″ cards with a total of 20 cards issued

1957spic_2_lg — 1957 Hank Aaron, from an auction in 2015 on the Greg Bussineau Sports & Rarities Website

1960: 2-3/4″ x 3-1/8″with a total of 26 cards issued

In addition to these cards, Spic and Span also used Braves players on other ephemera around their business. Specifically, in 2013, a paper dry cleaning bag came up for auction at Mears Auctions, and it sold for $92.

mears-auction

As the Braves started their decline in the 1960s before they bolted for Atlanta, Spic and Span and other local retailers lost their taste for being involved with the team. Though Milwaukee spent just four seasons without a major league team of its own — really two years if you count the games in 1968 and 1969 that the Chicago White Sox (with help from eventual Brewers owner and Commissioner Bud Selig) played in Milwaukee — Spic and Span was pretty much done with the baseball endorsement business.

As a postscript, despite being a national dry cleaning chain into the 1970s, Spic and Span barely exists with that name today. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cracked down on the dry cleaning industry because of its pollution of groundwater. The solvents that dry cleaners used were loaded with trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene — known, potent carcinogens that dry cleaners often just dumped out the back door. Today, Spic and Span is nearly gone, but its legacy lives on both in baseball memorabilia and far less exemplary areas.

80s Oddballs: Milwaukee Brewers Police Cards

The decade of the 1980s in baseball card collecting was one of explosive growth. Fleer and Donruss rumbled onto the scene in 1981 after being victorious in a legal battle to break Topps’s monopoly for issuing a fully licensed, nationally available baseball card set. By the end of the decade, Score and Upper Deck joined the fray and the overproduction/”junk-wax” era was off and running.

The 1980s was also the decade when seemingly every product imaginable started using baseball players and baseball cards as a way to induce consumers to part with their hard-earned money. Certainly this was nothing new — using baseball cards to bolster product sales was the very reason that baseball cards were invented. But the 1980s in this regard was different. Likely because of the escalating interest in baseball cards as an “investment,” everyone from General Mills and Burger King to Mother’s Cookies, Tetley Tea, and Rite-Aid pharmacies issued small sets of baseball cards.

Not only were national retailers and food companies jumping on the baseball-card bandwagon, but local police and sheriff’s departments across the country did as well. Just as was the case with product-based baseball cards, having police officers hand out baseball cards was nothing new. A search on Beckett.com for “Police” provides the answer that the 1967 Philadelphia Phillies had a thirteen-card set issued. The Washington Senators followed in 1970 and 1971 with ten-card sets. But after 1971, police-issued cards went away.

Police cards did not become more regularly issued until the late 1970s, when NBA teams such as the Portland Trail Blazers (1977-78) and the Seattle Supersonics (1978-79) used the idea. In 1979, ten different sets were issued including two from the baseball world — the San Francisco Giants Police and the Iowa Oaks Police.

I grew up in the Milwaukee area. Police cards came to the Milwaukee Brewers in 1982, and they came with a splash: the first ever Baseball Card Day at Milwaukee County Stadium. In a rare show of transparency, the Brewers and the Milwaukee Police Department told kids (and collectors) everything they needed to know through a press release published in the Brewers’ mouthpiece magazine, What’s Brewing?:

The cards featured a simple design — a photo of the player takes up about two-thirds of the front with the player’s name, uniform number, and position immediately underneath. Below that information, the issuing department’s name and any local sponsors are said to be “saluting” or “presenting” a particular year’s Milwaukee Brewers team.

As was the case with other police department cards, the Brewers cards always featured safety tips or life advice ostensibly written by the player in question. For Paul Molitor in 1982, he advised kids that they should not steal anything.

4-molitor-back

The Milwaukee Brewers cards proliferated in ways unlike any other team. Police and sheriff’s departments across the State of Wisconsin worked with the team and the card sets’ printers to issue their own sets. This got so out of hand that by 1993, the Oshkosh Police Department is listed on The Trading Card Database as issuing four sets with four different sponsors — McDonald’s of Oshkosh, OshKosh B’Gosh, Inc., the Oshkosh Noon Kiwanis, and the Copps Food Center of Oshkosh.

As a Brewers collector, these police sets are both fun and frustrating. They are tremendous fun to try to find, track, and purchase. Most of the time, the sets are not that expensive. Call it the first instances of parallel burnout, but the number of departments issuing sets got so high that people pretty much stopped trying to collect all the variations. That caused demand for all of the sets to decline.

That is also what makes them frustrating. EBay sellers just call them “Milwaukee Brewers Police cards.” While that is true, most of us who are Brewers collectors really are not looking for their fifth set of the Milwaukee Police Department’s 1986 set — we are looking for the cards from Verona, Medford, Hartford, Winneconne, Viroqua, and Mequon. When sellers are vague about what department issued them, it makes it more difficult to determine what a buyer is actually going to get.

In the end, though, they are a boon for me as a player collector in particular. It gives me dozens of variations of cards of Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Cecil Cooper, Dan Plesac, and others to chase and add to my player collections.

They also have led to a lifelong love for 80s oddballs.