If you’re a card collector or a Peanuts fan, good chance you remember this July 28, 1963, strip in which Lucy offers up a humorous but largely reasonable requirement for greatness. (For what it’s worth, Beethoven indeed never appeared on a bubble gum card. Other cards, yes, as far back as 1893 and as recent as 2026, but none came with gum.)
Something I think about quite a bit, perhaps motivated by this comic, is who the greatest baseball people are to have never made it onto a card, bubble gum or otherwise. For the most part, players tend to be well covered, whether during their careers or since. And even the great Rachel Robinson finally got her due this year thanks to a set from Historic Autographs. (She also set what I assume is a record for a living person by earning her rookie card at the age of 103.)
As team-issued sets often include management, I was a bit surprised to learn the other day that baseball lifer Roland Hemond never had a card of his own, or at least not one I’m aware of. Still, in what I’ll regard as a happy accident, his signature makes it onto a 1994 Collectors Choice card of Jeffrey Hammonds!
Another person high on the list of the card-less, at least until very recently, was Los Angeles Dodgers EVP and renowned ballpark designer Janet Marie Smith, with whom I had the good fortune to work on a gigantic glitter card of Rennie Stennett that now hangs at PNC Park in Pittsburgh. About the closest stand-in to a Janet Marie Smith card had long been the 1992 Donruss Triple Play card of Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
When the Baseball Reliquary announced this past June that Smith had been elected to the organization’s Shrine of the Eternals, I got in touch with her to see if some cards might be in order. The result is a three-card set reflecting her work with the Orioles, Red Sox, and Dodgers. (Follow the link to Trading Card Database to view card backs as well.)
My thanks to Janet for her kindness and enthusiasm in supporting this endeavor, and my thanks as well to her friends who graciously allowed their wonderful photographs to be used on the cards. I hope Janet’s many fans at the Reliquary ceremony and beyond enjoy the cards as much as I enjoyed working on them.
