A Baseball Card is Worth 1000 Words

I came across a Fox Sports Story about how the Topps Kids 1992 Baseball Card Set might have foreseen the steroid issue in baseball. That set featured MLB stars with cartoon like muscles (see above pictures). It's pretty funny how baseball used to be marketed in the 1990's. They wanted the game to seem larger than life and they thought the best way to show this to kids was by portraying their top athletes with gigantic caricatures of themselves. At the time, the game appeared to be relatively clean of performance enhancing drugs, but it's no wonder that in the late 90's, the biggest ballers in the game all became insanely huge in an effort to boost the popularity of the game by blasting more dingers. The ploy worked, but look at the cost today. Baseball's reputation has been sullied by the scores of cheaters that populated the game during the past decade. Who's fault is it really? The players had something to do with it, but would they have gone to such lengths to make themselves Andre the Giant-like if MLB wasn't pushing the image of "Bigger is Better". It's all thanks to Topps. Who knew the baseball cards we collected as kids would turn out to have Nostradamus powers?

In the spirit of this post, Here are the song lyrics to one of the greatest Simpsons episodes ever made about Monty Burns putting together the ultimate baseball team.

Well Mr. Burns had done it,
The power plant had won it,
With Roger Clemens clucking all the while,
Mike Scioscia's tragic illness made us smile,
While Wade Boggs lay unconscious on the barroom tile...

We're talkin' softball...
From Maine to San Diego.
Talkin' softball...
Mattingly and Canseco.
Ken Griffey's grotesquely swollen jaw.
Steve Sax and his run-in with the law.
We're talkin' Homer... Ozzie and the Straw.

We're talkin' softball...
From Maine to San Diego.
Talkin' softball...
Mattingly and Canseco.
Ken Griffey's grotesquely swollen jaw.
Steve Sax and his run-in with the law.
We're talkin' Homer... Ozzie and the Straw