Funny Cards: Mellie Hapsbeef

It's time for another funny card all-star.


I present to you the slightly unstable-looking Mellie Hapsbeef. Mellie plays "bug zapper" for Los Pogna Resa.

LPR have the best uniforms we've seen so far. They seem to combine elements of the 1980 and 1991 White Sox uniforms, and Mellie makes it look good.

The only other thing that we can determine from the front of this card is that games in this league are attended by large amounts of shrubbery.

To the back!


This sort of looks like a Fleer-inspired back, with the little picture in the upper left (in which Mellie looks a lot less nutso.) There's a star with the letter "s" (or is that a number 5?) in the upper right and a whole mess of stats that we'll try and analyze.

Aside from the first two years of his career spent with the "Brogs," Hapsbeef has played for a different team every year he's been in this league. Here's how that breaks down:

1987-88: Brogs
1989: Zino Piffy
1990: Sholde
1991: Running Cowards
1992: Twist Flintstone
1993: Lime Squeezers
1994: Bag Faces
1995: Make-A-Mask Promos
1996: Fresno (Playing for Fresno is kind of a running joke on these cards. Dropping that in the middle of all these oddly-monikered teams always made us laugh.)
1997: Ultraviolet Sox
1998: Wind Up Toy Dragons
1999: Park Ranger Hats
2000: Los Pogna Resa

As for the stats themselves, they're pretty straightforward. Home runs, runs batted in and then... zones? I think that tracks how many times he "zoned out" during a season, and man did this guy zone out a lot during his career.

I guess he had slightly above-average power, since he topped the ten home run mark five times and the twenty RBI mark also five times. Actually, if you're hitting fifteen home runs and end up with only eighteen RBI for the year, as was the case when he played for the Park Ranger Hats, something's not exactly right. Maybe he was the leadoff hitter. I don't know.

The bio reads: "Mellie was the best guy in the league who was not voted to the all-star game or the hair-flinging squadron."

Good for him.

Funny Cards: Brondug Ramsey-Stapler

For today's funny card we present Brondug Ramsey-Stapler.


Brondug held the position of wishing well cleaner for Denise's Tea in 2000. Aside from his mad scientist hairdo, this guy looks more like a baseball player than anyone we've featured so far. Clearly he's wearing a jersey and what appear to be baseball pants. He even has an outstretched arm waiting to catch a ball. His team sports a somewhat snazzy logo too.

Let's learn more about him, shall we? My scanner cut off some of the back of this card, but it's all text (a la' 1949 Bowman), so I will just re-type it here, word-for-word.

"Life Story

Born in 1927 and soon fixing acorn catapults, Brondug became a member of the New Brunswick farm team in 1940, only to be released three days later. In 1980, he was hired at Tim Horton's and was amazing at pie slicing. He fell off a log in 1982 and played the banjo for a year before walloping 32 home runs for the t-ball squad his son played on. Had a good year in 2000."

Funny Cards: Hector "Goodness Gracious" Wintub

Today's funny card spotlights one of the stranger players in whatever league these players are in.

Hector "Goodness Gracious" Wintub is apparently the catcher for the Choice Sirloin Sox. I say "apparently" because the front of this card is sending a ton of mixed signals.


As you can see, Hector is listed as a catcher (the card very helpfully tells us that "catchers catch the ball") and the card, from the "Roxaleenia Set," lists his team as the Choice Sirloin Sox in the header. He is clearly wearing a Sox jersey in the picture. However, the card also tells us that he was "traded to Bonbotomy" and that he is "now with Chinchillas." Hmm.

Wintub also seems to play in a league where the catcher stands in front of home plate while the batter (our cousin Steve Zola in this instance) stands next to the plate and faces the third base dugout.

Hector's uniform, as you can see, is made up of a relatively standard-looking baseball jersey, huge bell bottom pants and a catcher's mitt that looks like some sort of lobster claw.

Maybe the back will help explain this insanity.


Hmm... no such luck.

It seems that Hector, who has no nose, has had a very sporadic career, missing stretches of three to six years at a time on more than one occasion.

In 1988, he played for Ra-Limo, getting injured twice and being liked by only ten percent of fans. In 1989, he played for Mashatmo where his number of injuries increased by one and his like-ness percentage dropped by four tenths of a point. Apparently this was unacceptable because Wintub followed up that season by dropping out of baseball for six years.

Re-emerging in 1995 with the H. Ross Perots, he smacked nineteen homers, only had "a few" injuries and posted the highest like-ness percentage of his career.

Three years later he played for the Twins, walloping twenty five round-trippers, playing the whole season injury-free, and tying for the league lead in like-ness percentage... with a .09% likeness rating? I have to admit, I now have no idea what this category is supposed to track.

Another three years go by and the Bob Barker Nunheeb Tribe signs him up only to have him get injured ninety times that season. For crying out loud.

His bio reads:

"Wintub was traded from the Bob Barker Nunheeb Tribe to the Choice Sirloin Sox for manager Chup Scotlock and 2nd base coach Umpire McLewiston."

That seems like an unprecedented move, trading a catcher for a manager and a coach. I didn't even know baseball had second base coaches.

Finally, the "70's Corner" portion of the card offers up a "Baseball Majic Word Scramble"

TiNSAbA McPhoLALA

That's a head scratcher all right...

Oh, and we never did find out what "Bonbotomy" was or what "now with Chinchillas" meant.

Goodness gracious indeed.

Funny Cards: Forlona Gretzky

My brother and I were always interested in expanding out hobbies to encompass other hobbies we had. I'm sure we didn't do this with any conscious thought; it just seemed to happen all the time.

Along with collecting baseball cards, another of our big hobbies was drawing. Naturally, it took very little time to combine the two and start drawing our own cards.

We didn't draw real players. That was no fun to us. We liked to make stuff up whenever possible, so we used real major league teams and filled them out with our own cast of characters.

At first, the cards were really simple. Since the first baseball cards we collected (and therefore the only cards available for reference material) were '88 Topps, our cards looked a lot like '88 Topps cards. We had the little 45-degree angle banner in the bottom right with the player's name and the team name in big letters up top and that left us a lot of room on the index card to draw the players' picture.

The players we created in 1988 appeared on various cards over the years until 1995, which was the last year we made a serious effort to draw a new set. Every year we added new rookies. Maybe some players retired, maybe some players got traded. We tried to make sure the backs of the cards reflected this made up history accurately.

At first, the backs served only to provide the most basic info. We had the player's birthdate, which hand he threw with, if he batted lefty or righty, and a year by year breakdown of which teams he had played for. 1995 was the only year, however, that we included actual stats on the backs of the cards. Before that, a player's yearly output was represented by squiggly lines running horizontally across the card.

We drew in pen for some reason, and we were bound to make mistakes, so there were lots of half-finished cards floating around as a result.

Somewhere along the way we had the brilliant idea to "finish" these cards in the most insane way possible, filling them out with ridiculous statistical categories and turning these players into guys no one in their right mind would ever want on their team.

Eventually, this got to be more fun than drawing the "real" cards and as late as 2001 we were still drawing these completely off-the-wall misfits.

At my parents house this weekend, my brother and I spen an hour or so going through all these cards and laughing hysterically. I figured that baseball card fans might appreciate some of them, so I'll scan and post the more hilarious ones. And really, you do sort of have to be a baseball/baseball card fan to appreciate some of the humor.

First up on the hit list is Forlona Gretzky.


As you can see, Forlona is the mascot-slash-first baseman for the Pottsberg Pirates. He also appears to be some sort of actual pirate himself, sporting an eyepatch, hoop earring and a shiny (gold?) tooth.

The back of the card is where things really get hilarious.


Right off the bat, we have some fancy interpretation of his name, using two totally different typefaces for first and last.

His "Fun Facts" are that he is "... a father of many fathers!" and also "He spends money!"

The statistical categories on back are extremely specific, highlighting "Shots Heard 'Round The World," "Times Seen Cackling Like A Chicken, " and "Shortest Distance From Second Base On Attempted Steals." As ever, categories in which he led the league are denoted in italics, with a diamond added if he tied for the league lead in something.

At this point in his career, he had played five years for five different teams. In 1997, while playing for "L.A." he led the league with 128 times seen cackling like a chicken. He also fared well in that category in 1998, cackling 116 times for the "Lou Easy Undies" to tie for the league lead.

For the Pirates in 2000, he was only 9/16 of an inch away from stealing his first base ever, and the info at the bottom of the card reveals that Gretzky is "a well-travelled veteran" who "plans to steal one base before retirement."

I wonder if he ever did...