Stouffers – SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee

I read the post about Stouffer’s pop-up cards with a lot of interest because it’s always fun to find out about new sets and I love gimmicky things like pop-ups. However the assertion that those were the “best engineered baseball cards that have been issued to date” made me pause.

I have no argument with the best-engineered part since the pop-up mechanism is super nifty. It was the to-date that got me thinking. Why? Because there were a lot of similar pop-up cards in the mid-1990s.

Quickly referencing my collection and googling for images that show some of the different mechanisms in action turned up at least four other sets. There’s the 1994 Oscar Mayer Superstar Discs,* and each year from 1993 to 1995 Kraft issued a set of pop-up cards as well.

*A full write-up of these is over at Angels in Order.

Unlike the 5-card Stouffers checklist, all four sets here involve 30-card checklists. Oscar Mayer is cool in that it includes one player per team. Kraft on the other hand is a more generic top-30 players approach. I much prefer the one-per-team checklists. Yes some big names end up missing but there’s so much more to a season than just the names. Plus as a team collector it’s always a downer when a cool-looking set doesn’t offer a logical entry point for my collection.

Anyway, the most-interesting thing for me to find out is that these sets all appear to use slightly different mechanisms for either the pop-up effect or the card manufacturing. Some are folded and glued from one sheet of cardboard. Others look like multiple sheets. The Discs are obviously more complicated than that. The 1995 Kraft set pops up from the end of the card rather than the middle.

Something was obviously going on so I wandered over to the patent library and did a quick search. There are a lot of patents for pop-up cards in the late 80s and early 90s. So many that I can’t figure out which ones correspond to what cards.

A quick sample. US patents 5259133, 5450680, and 5746689 all look superficially the same as the Stouffers, Oscar Mayer, and 1993 Kraft cards (I’ve been unable to find one that looks like the 1995 Kraft cards). They’re mainly just assembled differently. I wish the cards or packaging had a patent number listed.

What’s amazing to me is that many of the patents are explicitly for baseball cards. In two of the images I’ve chosen here the illustration clearly features a baseball player.

Patents are usually written somewhat broadly so that they can apply to multiple applications beyond the original intent of the application. But in the artwork here the inventor’s inspiration comes through. The mid-90s explosion of card-related technologies* resulted in multiple patents about baseball cards and in this case multiple patents to achieve the same effect.

*Other patents are in my previous patent dive post but relics, foil stamping, holograms, die cuts, chrome, dufex, etc. all exploded that decade.

My vote for the best baseball cards that came with a food product are the Stouffer’s cards from the overlooked Legends of Baseball set from 1995.

When my kids were in grade school in the 1990’s we tried every frozen pizza product available before settling on the Stouffer’s offering as the best of the bunch.

In 1995 we increased our consumption Stouffer’s pizza due to the inclusion of one of 5 different baseball cards in each package. It is worth noting that every card is a hall of famer. The checklist is as follows:

1) Yogi Berra

2) Gary Carter

3) Don Drysdale

4) Bob Feller

5) Willie Stargell

These cleverly designed and well manufactured cards were just about the same size as a standard card, but with much thicker cardboard. Just about every surface of these cards contains either a photo and / or information about the ball player.

The front of the card has an action photo of the player. The caps and the uniforms have been airbrushed so the team logos and names are not visible.

The back contains a head shot with biographical information and airbrushed caps.

By slightly bending the card to loosen up the die cut of the player and then pulling the tab the front image of the player pops up and also revels the players career major league stats and a Legendary Moments write up.

There have been other cards with unique designs such as the 1955 Topps Double Headers and the 1964 Topps Stand-Ups, but the 1995 Stouffer’s cards with multiple moving parts are the best engineered baseball cards that have been issued to date.

The most amazing thing about this set was that by sending in a number of proof-of-purchase seals (can’t remember how many) from the box packaging you could get an autographed card of one of the hall of famers in the set.

When I sent in my proof-of-purchase seals, Stouffer’s sent me back an autographed Yogi Berra card along with a Certificate of Authenticity.