MiLB Madness: Five baseball cards foodies & fans can devour

Minor league baseball cards from the past can include some weird stuff ... stuff you wouldn't imagine to be found on a baseball card and here are five example of some oddities in this latest MiLB Madness series item. 

BATTING LEAD-OFF ...
The Card: Double Balonironi Burger 2021 Choice West Virginia Power #30
The Buzz On This One: This edition of the series is all about food and this one is arguably a Rookie Card -- though MiLB cards don't really have RCs -- for a burger apparently a big enough deal that it made the team's annual card set. Why? Well, it's probably not tied to the set sponsor -- Thomas Health hospitals -- but this ballpark "belly buster" seems like it might be an All-Star down on the farm -- check out this video. (Oh, and note the typo on the card front ... an uncorrected error, I think.) I've seen my fair share of cardboard in my day but other than one insert set done at the MLB level a few years ago I'm not sure if I have seen specific food items get their own card before in a MiLB set where, as the point of this series goes, you can see a little bit of everything. Given how much ballpark emphasis there is about food, I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been more. The ingredients are on the back, the fact that it's two pounds is interesting and it's ironic they mask the calorie content. Perhaps the next card will have something to say about that.

Keep reading for four more examples of weird baseball cards you can (almost) only find in MiLB.

ANOTHER FIRST?
The Card: Lauren Poole 2019 Choice New Hampshire Fisher Cats #41
The Buzz On This One: The team's dietician gets a nod in this set -- also something I haven't seen before -- and if she's on card No. 41 that's a meaty team set. Coaches, managers, executives, trainers, grounds crew and others have shown up on cardboard but a dietician is a first for me ... and I bet there have not been many. She's in her second year with the team according to this one so it may not be her first card ... but it was so weird I had to have it for my MiLB Madness stash.

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LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!
The Card: Rusty & Sammy 2010 Grandstand Corpus Christi Hooks
The Buzz On This One: Sure, this is a mascot card -- there are boatloads of those -- and they are on what looks like a forklift (Why?) but that's not what gets this weird one here. It's the Whataburger plug here -- the team plays at Whataburger Field -- that got me to look and the regional chain's orange-and-white aesthetic has made for some pretty cool merch on specialty nights. Maybe it's all my past A1 Thick & Hearty Burgers talking here -- or the fact that I can't just go grab one now based on where I live -- but that makes this a funny foodie card.

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BUY ME SOME ...
The Card: Erik The Peanut Guy 2013 Grandstand Tri-city Dust Devils
The Buzz On This One: He's definitely not the first host or vendor to appear on a card -- and I know for sure he has others from Topps in recent years -- but this is the earliest one. His "Rookie Card" of sorts had to make this month's list ... not just because of his "killer high fives" or all those other accolades/attributes on his card. I also had to get this one in because of that product placement. (Cracker Jack has been on cards for more than a century ... but that's a whole other piece of its own.)

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FINISHING WITH THE BIG GUY
The Card: The Chef 2014 Grandstand Birmingham Barons
The Buzz On This One: Mascots aren't tough finds on MiLB cards -- and they do exist at the big-league level as well as in some other sports sets -- and, heck, this guy might have had cards in this series before, but mascot races of food ingredients and the chef had to get a nod this time. They're a long way from Milwaukee where the genre might have been made most famous -- let me know on Twitter if I'm wrong ... I'm not a mascot-race expert -- but this is a fun piece for pocket change. Apparently The Chef has beef with Homer The Hot Dog, but I'll save one of those cards for sometime later in this series.

The cool part about all of these cards? They won't cost you much at all -- pocket change -- and you can really build a big collection of something weird and fun on the absolute cheap ... as long as you're curious about what cardboard is out there from down on the farm.

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