There’s a reason the Beckett card is not on the checklist of the 1992 Topps Stadium of Stars set distributed only in uncut form by Topps at the National that year, in Atlanta: it’s because there are two different 1992 Topps Stadium of Stars sets using the same design as the basic shared ’92 Topps baseball, basketball, football, and hockey series. One was the dozen-card sheet Topps dished out at the ’92 show, which got no closer to actual baseball players than Ray Knight’s wife Nancy Lopez, Orioles’ investor Larry King, Bob Costas, and (to the rage of a few of us, Nick Charles, who did baseball highlights on CNN’s old nightly sportscast).
Beckett is part of the other Stadium of Stars set, the photographs for all but about ten of which were taken at the same Atlanta National, a few yards away from where Topps was giving out the already-printed “Stadium of Stars” sheets with John Wooden and Bruce Jenner. There are 66 cards in the ‘other’ SOS series, and they really are connected to each other only loosely and only by theme and the fact all the cards were printed on the same sheet. Since they were not sold, and not distributed together in packs, you could even insist they are actually66 different sets, each consisting of one card. They were printed to be given solely to the people depicted for their personal use, as the kind of vanity perk that peaked in the hobby in the early ‘90s. All the manufacturers of the time took photos of NBA broadcasters and made them into cards in ’93 (you want a Charlie Slowes from the then-Washington Bullets? Which brand? Topps? Skybox? NBA Hoops?) and you can chase them forever if you want.
But in 1992 Topps took this one step further. It invited what amounted to the hobby ‘media’ at the 1992 National to don Atlanta Braves caps and uniform tops and pose for a photo. Just weeks later a box would show up at your door with a large supply of cards of, well, you. The late Frank Barning, a truly good man and good journalist who founded and published Baseball Hobby News nearly half a century ago, blogged in 2011 about the memory the process:
In the spring of 1992, the public relations man at Topps, Norman Liss, called to invite me to appear on a card using the format of that year’s issue. Other people who had some influence in the hobby, Jim Beckett of price-guide fame among them, were also to be included…Photos would be taken at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Atlanta that summer and each of us would be given something like 100 copies of the card…
In Atlanta, we were ushered into a room which was set up for a professional photo shoot, bright lights and all. There was a table with uniform shirts and caps of various sizes, all Atlanta Braves. There was no team choice, it was explained, because we were in Atlanta.
Participants were asked to provide information for the back of the cards. There were seven questions, including your favorite Topps card. Mine is the 1954 Gil Hodges. About a month later, the cards arrived at Baseball Hobby News. They were nicely done, great color and on Topps stock. Here was my fantasy realized, finally.
Rich Klein, one of the other 65 participants in this pretty brilliant Topps self-promotion wrote that the supply was 500 of your card, and of course there’s no way to check who was right. There was also the complication that since there was no checklist there was no way for even the subjects of the set to merely know who else was in the set! Good luck collecting an unnumbered series of hobby figures without having any idea who the others are. Rich wrote that one day he received an uncut sheet of the second Stadium of Stars 1992 set, from Mike Jaspersen when he ran Topps Vault, and it was his first clue as to who else was in his series (I got one of the sheets last year).
The Topps-obsessed among us (ok, me and maybe others, I dunno) trying to collect this set will learn several things quickly. Becketts turn up from time to time on eBay and there were some of Rich Klein’s cards, but that’s about it. That’s largely because there are lots of people in this set who barely qualified – if they qualified at all – as ‘hobby media.’ There probably weren’t 66 people in the ‘hobby media’ even in the boon times of 1992. There are some bona fide names: Beckett, Barning, Klein, Allan Kaye from Sports Card News, some of the people who used to make Krause Publications and Sports Collectors Digest tick (Hugh McAloon and Tom Mortensen), and Kevin Barnes, who has been the stats man for the Mets’ telecasts whenever they visit Atlanta, and was a stringer for UPI’s radio network back when I broke in there in 1979! On the other hand there are a lot of family members (the Boyle twins, Matthew and Michael, are about eight and shown in Twins unis) and it’s clear Topps needed to stretch the definition of ‘Hobby Media’ just to use all 66 spots on the sheet.
Intriguingly, however, there are several people for whom this was not their only Topps card. The Tosers, Mark and Roxanne, were legends in non-sports and Philadelphia show promotion. Roxanne Toser has been such a star in the field that last year they made a special set of four customized Garbage Pail Kids cards as a tribute to her. Topps would reprise the idea of the special vanity promo card at most large shows and other hobby events for years, and John Buscaglia reappears in the 2007 Topps Allen & Ginter Hawaii Show set. But for my money the best card in the set is of writer/editor Norm Cohen. He’s shown in this Stadium Club of Stars set in a White Sox jacket and cap. Two years later, he appears in another of these You-Get-Your-Own-Card cards made by Skybox and is shown holding his 1992 Topps Card (it looks like Skybox may have shadowed their rivals’ product just a little bit).
The checklist:
BARNES, Kevin
BARNING, Frank
BECKER, Joel
BECKETT, Jim III
BIGGS, Brad
BOYLE, Mathew
BOYLE, Michael
BOYLE, Timmothy
BUSBY, Buzz
BUSCAGLIA, John
CARNEY, Michael
COHEN, Norm
DAVIS, O.K.
EPSTEIN, Andy
FORMAN, Russ
FORWERCK, Gregg
FULP, John II
FULP, Vic
GEYER, Jeff
GORDON, Carl
GORDON, Doris
GRIMES JR., Chuck
HUTCHINSON, Toussaint
IBACH, Bob
JOHNSON, Derrick
JOHNSON, Don
KALE, Doug
KAYE, Allan
KELEN, Keven
KELSSEL, Nelson
KLEBANE, Tim
KLEIN, Richard
LAYBERGER, Thomas
LEPTICH, John
MAIHE, Allen
McALOON, Hugh
McCOMB, Gregory
MEYERS, Mary Ann
MORTENSEN, Tom
NIXON, Nick
PAIGE, Ron
PARASKEVAS, Cindy
PESKY, Gregory
PRICE, Bert
PRICE, Pat
PRICE, Renae
REID, Alvin
SANDGROUND, Grant
SELUM, Rick
SIMON, Rand
SMITH, Jim
SMITH, Tucker
TALIR, Mike
TAYLOR, Ian
TEMPAS, Robin
THOMAS, Judith
TOSER, Haris
TOSER, Marlin (Mark)
TOSER, Roxanne
VASSALLO, George
VIGEANT, Billy
WEISLER, Cory
WEISLER, Ilana
WEST, Daniel
WILLIAMS, Pete
WOODS, George
As I mentioned earlier, this might have been the largest card vanity/publicity/oddball Topps series and maybe the high point of the genre (although there was a mysterious early ‘90s Upper Deck basketball series filled with announcers and card people and executives and there is conflicting evidence suggesting there were a couple of dozen cards in it – or maybe 200 different).
Regardless, 1992 Stadium of Stars Atlanta National cards were neither the beginning nor the end of the process. Topps certainly drew and may have actually printed a cartoon version of a card of New York Times sportswriter John Drebinger in the style of the 1962 baseball set. It once produced a card for a candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania. It made cards of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn solely for distribution at the New York Baseball Writers’ Dinner, and a 1973-style Joe Garagiola business card that was reprinted and updated off and on until at least 1990. In 1984, though they didn’t print it, they let producers of the film “The Slugger’s Wife” make a card in the exact style of the ’84 set, numbered 801 and complete with copyright and sheet code, depicting “Darryl Palmer,” the fictional Atlanta Braves’ outfielder and the Slugger in the title (it’s actor Michael O’Keefe, and he has one of what is supposedly just 100 copies of the card. Card and sports video ace Doak Ewing got them into the hobby late in ’84). In 1992 they made a card of Mets’ executive Frank Cashen as “The New York City Sports Commission Sportsman of the Year” and those appear frequently in auctions. The list is endless and there may always be another specially printed card of somebody in sports or on its fringes, waiting to be discovered.
As Topps has gradually expanded the number of non-sports and non-player crossovers within its various brands, the idea of sportscaster cards or actor cards or general manager cards or whatever cards has pretty much lost its surprise. Occasionally one of us civilians will sneak into an actual baseball brand. There are autograph cards of me in 2003 Bowman Heritage (Topps didn’t know that 1956 Bowmans had been designed before Topps bought the company out, and they thought their retro line had gone extinct with their 1955 style set the year before until I asked “what about the ‘56s?”; the card was their way of saying thanks). I’m in a couple of other sets too, and imagine the disappointment of the collector opening a pack and getting one of those. But Topps has also made cards of me that – like the 1992 Stadium of Stars cards – only I got. Not only is there a 2008 Topps Heritage of me, numbered 127, complete with ludicrous stats they let me make up, but it was printed on the same sheet as the very rare and actually issued “Jon Smoltz” variation.
But creating a full set just of people who weren’t athletes probably began with a May, 1989 24-card set of Wall Street types from the Alex. Brown & Sons company who were involved in the secondary offering of Topps stock. Everybody is dressed in actual MLB livery (Mets or Yankees) and divided into two teams (Blowouts and Green Shoes). A few of the uncut sheets made their way out a decade ago as uncut sheets in an auction about a decade ago. The sheets have a pretty ornate heading (appropriately enough “Topps Secondary Offering May 1989”), clearly indicating they were not meant to be cut into cards. I’ve never seen any of them sold individually, or any on eBay. This set looks almost like a rehearsal for the larger 1992 Atlanta National set. The real shame is that they only made the 24 stock market guys and lawyers and accountants and didn’t include any Topps executives. A set of cards of the people who make Topps cards would be a winner… oh, wait, they did do that, in 1970, as part of a corporate push for better teamwork. I managed to talk them into including an updated set as boxloaders for 2019 Heritage.
But that’s another story.
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