The 1994 Score Tombstone Pizza Baseball Cards are a particular set that have gained notoriety over the years among collectors for their unique sponsorship deal and unconventional design choices. Issued as a promotional item to go along with Tombstone Frozen Pizzas, the cards broke the mold of traditional card sets by featuring bright fluorescent backgrounds, funky fonts, and a mix of active players and vintage stars from baseball history.
Score Trading Card Company had secured the licensing deal with Tombstone to produce cards as a marketing tie-in with their pizza products. Looking to make the cards stand out on shelves next to other junk food promotions of the time, Score opted to go with an eye-catching aesthetic that wouldn’t be found on any ‘traditional’ baseball card release of the mid-1990s. The fluorescent paper stock gave off a glow in the dark appearance, with various shades of neon green, orange, pink and blue splashed across each card back.
Font styles were unconventionally stylized on both the front and back of each card, meant to give off a fun, playful vibe more in line with pizza than the stoic stats and informational style sheets of the flagship Topps and Fleer brands. Most notable was the “Tombstone Pizza” logo stretching across the top of each back in a large zig-zag arrangement of letters meant to resemble the logo seen on pizza boxes. Statistics were still included on the reverse, but in a more abbreviated format than the ledger-style layouts of other trading card issues.
The actual card subjects featured both recent MLB superstars as well as legendary players of baseball’s past in a mix that was unique for a ’94 release. Ken Griffey Jr, Larry Walker, and Frank Thomas represented the contemporary game in its national pastime peak of the early-90s. Meanwhile, legends like Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Hank Aaron received career salutes with archive images selected from their playing days. This blend of present and past was likely meant to broaden the appeal for both young and old pizza customers.
Special ‘all-time teams’ were also recognized with subsets highlighting the lineups of great franchises like the Yankees, Cardinals and Dodgers. Parallels and insert cards added to the chase with short printed variations like die-cuts, refractors and fluorescent photo variants. Numbering was kept basic with the front declaring the player position over photo and a white box on back simply stating the card number out of a 700+ card base set. Gum or other incentives were absent, as the promotional effort centered around distributing cards freely with pizza purchases.
Initial reception for Score’s unconventional Tombstone Pizza cards was mixed among the established baseball card collecting community. While acknowledged as a unique oddity, purists felt the design departed too severely from traditional specs. The neon colors and frivolous fonts were dismissed as ‘gimmicky’ compared to the staid templates that reigned during the junk wax era. Within a few years after release as values stabilized, appreciation grew for their novelty status as one of the strangest licensed sports card tie-ins ever produced.
As rarities, the inserts and parallels garnered premium pricing relative to the common base cards. The Babe Ruth and other historic star subjects stood out as particularly valuable for any pre-war players featured outside of their original issue decades. By the 2000s, the novelty factor had cemented the 1994 Score Tombstone Pizza Baseball Cards in the annals of oddball sets worthy of a space on niche collectors’ want lists and in box breaks highlighting strange and obscure issues.
In the ensuing years, appreciation has continued to rise for their singular status as the only known major sports trading card release fully sponsored by and designed around a frozen pizza product. Online chatter among today’s growing retro card community frequently highlights these Tombstones as a peculiar pop culture curiosity from the early ‘90s worthy of keeping an eye out for in dollar bins or bargain boxes. Condition sensitive due to the fiuorescent stock, higher grade samples in capsules have reached in excess of $100 USD when choice examples of the more coveted subjects surface.
Despite initial dismissal, the 1994 Score Tombstone Pizza Baseball Cards have proven to have staying power due to their unabashedly quirky nature. As one of the strangest licensed sports promotions ever conceived, their neon colors and wacky design continue to fascinate collectors. The unique player blend of contemporary stats along with archive shots of legends long passed also provides historical interest. While hardly considered a ‘flagship’ set, the Tombstones reside securely in the realm of unconventional oddball oddities that keep the hobby fun and ensure there will always be something curious left to discover, even among the excesses of the junk wax period. Their singular tie to frozen pizza has become part of their legacy, cementing a place in collections for years to come.
