Baseball Talk: History and Key Facts

Baseball Talk was a set of 164 "talking" baseball cards that were released by Topps and the LJN Corporation during the spring of 1989. Each card featured a plastic disk affixed to the back of an oversized baseball card. When placed in the SportsTalk player the cards would play two to three minutes of recorded audio. The player retailed for $24.99 and was labeled for ages six and up. It required four AA alkaline batteries to operate.

The cards featured most of the better known players in baseball in 1988 and were sold in toy stores throughout the United States and Canada during 1989 Major League Baseball season. LJN and Topps planned to debut talking NFL and NBA cards (it stated in print advertising "Coming Soon – NFL Football and NBA Basketball Talking Cards"), but those plans, along with follow-up MLB editions, were canceled as the card players often broke or played with poor audio quality. Stores were flooded with returned boxes of Baseball Talk and by the fall of 1989 many of the cards and players could be found in discount bins at places like Toys R Us and Target. At one point, packs of cards that had been priced at $4 a piece were selling for as low as 50 cents by stores that were eager to move a failed product.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Baseball Talk by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.