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Minor league baseball cards from the past can include some weird stuff ... sometimes stuff you wouldn't imagine to be found on a baseball card. Here are some some new fun cards and oddities in this latest edition of MiLB Madness. 

98 DEGREES ON THE DIAMOND?
The Card: Nick Lachey 2009 TRISTAR Obak T212 Minis
The Buzz On This: His musical genre isn't on my radar, nor are the reality shows ... but the baseball card? Now we're talking. The pop star was among the ownership group of the Tacoma Rainiers baseball franchise (a Mariners farm team as you can see on the card) for about five years and that got him an appearance in this MiLB-celebrating oddity of a card set from TRISTAR. His 10 baseball cards in this release (this is one of the parallels) are all there are for him when it comes to sports cards ... unless the team snuck him into a set and nobody noticed. Obak is a fun one full of weird stuff and I've trotted some of them out in this series a few times ... and there will be more.

Keep reading for more examples of some weird or fun baseball cards (and other stuff) you can find in and around MiLB.

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Minor league baseball cards from the past can include some weird stuff ... stuff you wouldn't imagine to be found on a baseball card. Here are some some new oddities in this latest edition of MiLB Madness. 

HIS FIRST FIRST
The Card: Justin Turner 2006 Grandstand Billings Mustangs
The Buzz On This: This MLB veteran, All-Star and World Series winner has played for four teams in 15 years but it all started off with a different franchise as he was a seventh-round pick of the Cincinnati Reds in 2006 -- and other than the basic bio stuff that's about all this first card even says. I had this one bouncing around in my small stash of MiLB sets for some time as the Mustangs were about the only team I knew about as a kid in the real world -- in the reel world the Durham Bulls, of course, were big in the early 1990s after Bull Durham. I recently flipped back through some of my old sets and was surprised that I knew this name and it was him. Turner never actually played for the Reds in an MLB game and he's well-known for that big crazy beard but that's not here. His first Bowman Chrome card came two years later -- his only Reds card (I think) -- and his RCs are in 2010 releases when he was a Met. This one is an easy first ... and I'm not even sure he has much more MiLB cardboard. Turner is perhaps not as high-profile on cards as he was as a Dodger, but this card being a first makes it a lot more interesting to me than even his RCs. It's also so clean I might even slab it at some point, too.

Keep reading for more examples of some weird or fun baseball cards you can find in MiLB.

Continue reading →