Angler trading cards?

The first "full" set of fishing cards came out in 1990 when "Big League Bass" put out 60 cards covering most of the big-name pros of the day.

If you’re over the age of 40 and you grew up in the good ol’ US of A, odds are you accumulated a few baseball cards in your youth. And if your mom didn’t throw them out, you may still have them.

For more than a century, baseball cards have been an American rite of passage. You pled with your mom to buy some at the grocery store, you frantically opened them on the way home, then you carefully added them to the rest of your collection — either alphabetically, by card serial number or by major league team (if you’re an ultra-nerd, like me).

The next morning, you recklessly threw your school books together but carefully packed your baseball cards. Between classes, you met with friends to wheel and deal, swapping a solid player like Vada Pinson for a flash-in-the-pan like Ralph Garr. If you knew another collector was an Orioles fan, you talked up Paul Blair while angling to get Lou Brock. And if there were younger, less experienced collectors in the mix, well they’d just have to learn things the hard way.

All’s fair in love, war and baseball trading cards.

I shudder to think what might have become of my young brain without baseball cards. They’re how I learned math (batting average, slugging percentage, earned run average) and they honed my memory so I could tell you how many home runs almost any player hit in almost any season … as long as it was recorded on the back of a card.

Baseball cards taught me how to negotiate. They taught me about quality (avoid “butterfly” corners) and provenance (one kid tried to trade me a card allegedly signed by Boog Powell, but the ink was still wet and “Boog” was misspelled). And they taught me that not everyone values things the same way (still a good lesson).

When I was young and starting to get serious about fishing (about the time it became apparent that I wouldn’t be taking over for Ted Simmons behind the plate with the Cardinals), there were no angler trading cards. In fact, even today kids don’t collect fishing cards because there aren’t any to collect. There’s no market for them. The market for baseball cards isn’t so hot now, either.

Through the years, some sponsors have issued bass fishing trading cards to promote their pro staffers — mostly to give the anglers something to sign and give away at personal appearances. Chevrolet, Coleman, Kellogg’s, Mercury, Tracker and Yamaha are just a few of the companies that have used them, but few people treat the cards like collectibles and no kids trade them like we traded baseball cards.

The pro staffer sets are mostly small — maybe 10 or 20 cards — and have a very limited run. Each card on a Tracker Marine set from the mid ’90s says on the back that it’s “Limited to 22,000 sets.” If they actually printed more than a few hundred sets of these things, someone at Tracker should have lost his job. I’m pretty sure that the rest were burned or are sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting to be thrown away.

Of course I have a full set of the Tracker cards.

There was a three-year stretch in the early 1990s when a company tried to get something going in the bass trading card market, and it was a much bigger effort than just a single sponsor promoting its pro staff. Twenty years later, we know it didn’t catch on, but it was an interesting historical milestone nonetheless.

The first “full” set of fishing cards came out in 1990 when “Big League Bass” put out 60 cards covering most of the big-name pros of the day and a few guys you’ve probably never heard of … unless you grew up next door to them (and maybe not even then).

Card number 1 in that first set was Gary Klein, who has a look on his face that says, “I’m posing for a fishing card? Are you serious?” A dozen other current or former Elite Series anglers have cards in that series, too — Tommy Biffle, Denny Brauer, Rick Clunn, Ken Cook, Steve Daniel, Guy Eaker, Paul Elias, Shaw Grigsby, Jimmy Houston, John Murray, Zell Rowland and Joe Thomas.

A year later, Big League Bass changed its name to “Pro League Bass” and stepped things up a little. It wasn’t just the B.A.S.S. pros who were depicted in this 92-card set. Also included were six women from the Bass’n Gal tournament trail and a few special cards for notables like Tom Mann and Doug Hannon.

The 1992-93 series was the last for Pro League Bass, but they went out with a bang. That year’s set had 100 cards, including Kevin VanDam’s “rookie card.” (If I know anything at all about baseball cards, it’s that rookie cards are the most valuable.)

So fishing cards didn’t catch on, but if you take a hard look at the sets, you could have predicted that. They had some serious problems from the very beginning.

For one, none of the sets contain even one card for Ray Scott or Roland Martin. How could that happen? Scott founded B.A.S.S., which means that without him there would be no angler trading cards — successful or not — and Martin was easily one of the two greatest anglers in the history of the sport at that time (Rick Clunn was the other). How could the series include John Bedwell and Larry Hopper for all three years but not include Scott or Martin even once?

Of course, the answer is probably money. Perhaps Scott and Martin wanted more than Pro League Bass was willing to pay. Even so, you might want to reconsider your business plan if you can’t afford those two legends.

In the final year, the series didn’t include Clunn either. It’s pretty tough to gain traction when your card series doesn’t include B.A.S.S.’ founder or its two greatest anglers. Imagine a set of baseball cards from the late 1950s without Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays or Ted Williams. Who would buy that?

One thing the fishing cards seemed to have on their side was timing. The trading card and sports collectibles market was never better. The bubble burst, though, when Major League Baseball players went on strike in 1994 and the World Series was canceled. Twenty years later, the trading card market is still trying to recover.

Well, that’s true except for one card — the Holy Grail of sports and trading card collectibles, the T206 Honus Wagner. Cards from that series (1909-11) that are in even decent condition regularly bring more than $100,000 at auction, and one sold for $2.8 million in 2007, though its history has been surrounded in controversy.

As you might expect, fishing cards are not bringing those kinds of prices. In fact, if you do some checking on eBay, you can probably get any one of the bass fishing sets for less than $25, including shipping … if you can even find them.

And you probably won’t be surprised to learn that I have all three sets of the Big League/Pro League Bass cards that I keep carefully preserved in an acid-free, fitted plastic box. I may not have been a kid when they came out, but I’m still a sucker for the format, and my KVD rookie card is bound to go up in price sometime.

Shall we start the bidding at $1 million?