1988 Starting Lineup Talking Baseball #16

Card Review: 2.8  I have very mixed opinions about this card.  I was extremely excited when it arrived after ordering it from a seller on the Beckett website.  Twice before I add ordered it from sellers, and both times my money was refunded along with a claim that the card didn't exist.  The majority of the online checklist/databases also concur that this card isn't real.  So I was a little leery when I ordered it a 3rd time.  I didn't even have this on my "need list" because I was fairly certain it didn't exists.  So when it showed up in an envelope, I was pretty stoked.

But in the interest of being objective, it's really a pretty crummy card.  The colors are ugly, the likeness is terrible, there are no team logos, the back is bland, and worst of all is that the dimensions are weird.  It's slightly too big to fit in a nine page sleeve.  I keep one example of each Wallach card I own in a three ring binder sorted by year.  This would be a nice addition to the last page of the 88's.  Instead it has to be relegated to the back along with other over-sized odd-ball cards in four sleeve pages.

As for what this set is, I really had no idea.  I'm painfully aware of the fact that Starting Line-Up figures came with cards, and that the Expos and Blue Jays were treated as second class teams by Parker Brothers and only given one player each.  Wallach was never the Expo.  Per Wikipedia:

Kenner debuted the Starting Lineup figures in 1988 by releasing a 124 player set. Each team had at least four players in the set except for the Canadian teams of Montreal and Toronto that had only one player because Kenner believed that there was an insufficient number of retail outlets in Canada to warrant a full team set, (Tim Raines and George Bell, respectively.) The New York Mets had the most players in the set with seven. Kenner tended to distribute the players to stores by geographical region, so it was very difficult to complete the collection or find players from out of market.

Some quick research confirmed my suspicions that this card came as part of a board game.  The pictures look vaguely familiar but I certainly don't remember anyone of my friends actually owning the thing as kids.

Number of this card in my collection: 1
2015 update: n/a
2016 update: 2