Mets Card of the Week: 1969 Mets Team

1969 MILTON BRADLEY METS TEAM

Random passers-by on the street will often stop me and ask, “Card of the Week, what is the single most heinous Mets card of all time? Like, I’m talking no redeeming qualities whatsoever. A pox on humanity. Something designed and printed in the ninth circle of hell.”

“Well, random passer-by,” I’ll respond with a weary smile, “There are many contenders, but there can be only one true, um, winner.”

I might then spend a little time regaling them with tales of Turtleneck Taylor and His No Opposable Thumbs, or The Incredibly Strange White Sox Player Who Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-Up Metsie.

Or perhaps I’ll point out that the pose on his 1971 Topps card makes Art Shamsky look like a four-year old taking his first tentative swing in the slow-pitch cage. Aaaaggghhh– bally scary!

And you really have to hold one in your hand to truly appreciate the fuzzy horror that is a 1982 Fleer Randy Jones card. (Note: Gentle reader, do not under any circumstances hold a 1982 Fleer Randy Jones card in your hand, as prolonged exposure to this card has been shown to cause nausea, vertigo, strange dreams, and/or erectile dysfunction.)

But having run through some version of that impressive list, with my long grey beard and glittering eye I invariably tell each and every passer-by the same thing: “The 1969 Milton Bradley Mets team card.”

Milton Bradley produced a Strat-O-Matic style baseball board game in 1969, which came boxed with an assortment of player cards.

These player cards themselves are nothing to write home about, what with their airbrushed black-and-white photos. But the team cards, designed to help organize your player cards, are just transcendently pointless as collectibles.

These lazily sociopathic cards contain three lines of black block type, indicating team name, league, and division. That’s it.

If you ever see one for sale (particularly one like this that has been graded and slabbed for posterity), resist the urge to poke out your own eyes, and have a drink or two of the hard stuff to help forget that you ever laid eyes on the confounded thing…