A SIDEWAYS GLANCE : NOW, MAYBE IF THESE WERE SCRATCH 'N' SNIFF . . .The thought was if the California Lottery issued a scratcher game featuring baseball players, it could turn out to be a nice little investment for those in the collectibles business. Apparently no one told the folks in Sacramento that the baseball-card market has pretty much bottomed out. When the '97 baseball season started last April, the Lottery came out with its ``California Baseball Legends'' series. For $5, the small-time small·time or small-time adj. Informal Insignificant or unimportant; minor: a smalltime actor. small gambler could get the five-player set of Don Drysdale He was born to a Panamanian mother on a train in the town of Gatun, which at that time was in the Panama Canal (Angels), Willie McCovey (Giants), Rollie Fingers (A's) and Gaylord Perry (Padres). Remember, it's just California guys. No tributes to Pete Rose or the 1919 Black Sox scandal Black Sox scandal, episode in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox, the American League champions, were banned from baseball in 1921 for having conspired with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. . It isn't as if no one has bought these cards - it has generated $10.9 million in sales - but lottery spokeswoman Norma Minas would only call them ``above average'' among lottery scratcher sellers and ``on par'' with other sports-related games the lottery has done in the past. ``We've been pleased with their performance,'' said Minas, ``but sports are usually a smaller seller anyway. The top sellers are games that have money themes.'' The Illinois state lottery The Illinois Lottery is run by the midwestern state of Illinois. It began in the 1970s, when US lotteries were confined to the Northeast and the Midwest. Its games include the multi-state Mega Millions, Illinois Lotto (pick-6), Little Lotto (pick-5), and numerous scratch did a similar ``sports great'' series that had some success. Again, that was before collectibles were worth collecting. A random sampling of baseball card stores around the area not only seem to show there's no real interest in the game from card hobbyist, but because the photographs of the players on many of the tickets are so out-of-register - the Drysdale piece in particular looks like some generic bad oil painting - a real collector would find nothing aesthetically pleasing about them unless he had a particularly strong player fetish fetish (fĕt`ĭsh), inanimate object believed to possess some magical power. The fetish may be a natural thing, such as a stone, a feather, a shell, or the claw of an animal, or it may be artificial, such as carvings in wood. . Aside from that, the team hat logos are airbrushed out to protect the MLB MLB Major League Baseball MLB Minor League Baseball MLB Middle Linebacker (football) MLB Motor Life Boat MLB Matt Leblanc (actor) MLB Mother Love Bone (band) copyright and its participation in such gambling activity. A few million tickets are left, Minas reports, so the ``California Baseball Legends'' game will continue until supplies last, which should be by the end of the World Series. Or as long as players of the lottery keep scratching. CAPTION(S): Photo Photo: no caption (California Baseball Legends Lottery Ticket) |
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