The 1977 Renata Galasso set is one of the rarest and most obscure issues in the history of baseball card production. Published in Italy by Renata Galasso S.p.A., a tobacco and confectionery company, the 48-card set featured color photographs of current Major League stars from both the American and National Leagues. What makes this set so unique is both its extreme scarcity and the intriguing story behind its creation. Fewer than 100 complete sets are believed to still exist today, making individual cards highly valuable to dedicated collectors.
The idea for the 1977 Renata Galasso cards originated from an executive at the company named Giovanni Rossini. An avid baseball fan living in northern Italy, Rossini believed Italian children growing up in the mid-1970s would enjoy collecting cards featuring their favorite American ballplayers. After obtaining licenses from both MLB and the MLB Players Association, Rossini went to work selecting the players and commissioning photos to include. The final set checklist was entirely in Italian on the back of each card but depicted a variety players from both leagues and all positions.
Renata Galasso enlisted Italian photographer Vincenzo Mannino to capture the action shots used on the cards between 1975-76. Rather than attend Spring Training like most card illustrators of the time, Mannino attended several regular season games at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium and Philadelphia’s Veteran’s Stadium. Using a long telephoto lens, he captured candid images of players in the on-field action from the cramped confines of the standing room areas. The unique perspective afforded by his location accounts for the unusual cropping and angle of many photos compared to contemporaneous American releases.
After finalizing the photo selection and translations, Rossini ordered a print run of 6,000 complete 48-card factory sets directly from the Italian printer Cartiera Burgo. Production issues forced two small reprints with slightly varying card stock and photo centering, totaling around 6,100 total Renata Galasso basketball factories sets made. The cards featured traditional vertical backs in Italian only with no player stats or other information included. Distribution was solely within Italy through Renata Galasso’s extensive retail network of tobacco shops and corner stores.
The mid-1970s proved a tumultuous time for the Italian economy. As inflation rose sharply and decline took hold, consumers tightened spending. The niche market for English-language baseball cards proved even smaller than Rossini estimated. With few takers found even at the inexpensive lire equivalent of 50 cents per pack, most of the 6,100 sets went unsold and were destroyed in early 1978 as excess inventory. Only a few hundred of the original print run are believed to have found their way into the hands of Italian children. Most surviving examples come from factory leftovers that workers smuggled out and eventually made it abroad.
Having established an advanced statistical analysis program at MIT, Bill Deane became fascinated by the obscure 1977 Renata Galasso set after coming across a few stray cards online in the late 1990s. A lifelong census taker, he embarked on a decade-long quest to locate and document every remaining example. By painstakingly corresponding with collectors worldwide and traveling through Europe and the United States, Deane believes he has now accounted for 98 complete sets along with a handful of incomplete ones. His census work established the set photos matched games from 1975-76 and that the three small print variations can be distinguished with high-quality scans.
Today, the extraordinary rarity of the 1977 Renata Galasso issue makes individual cards highly valuable to dedicated vintage baseball collectors. Common stars in Near Mint condition can fetch $500-1000, while a high-grade example of someone like Pete Rose or Tom Seaver might sell for $5,000 or more. The set is especially prized by expat and overseas collectors for its niche historical significance. Though few and far between, discoveries of new intact sets still emerge on the vintage market from time to time, a true testament to the determined efforts of Bill Deane and others to chronicle this lost chapter of the card-producing world before it was forgotten to history.
