Peel Here #109: In monster baseball you use grave markers as the bases…

Well, a bit delayed, but finally here is the 1988 Donruss/Leaf set of Baseballs’ Greatest Grossouts sticker cards that I teased a couple weeks ago…

This set is the second series and the sister set to the Awesome All*Stars stickers from 1988, and again features the artwork of B.K. Taylor. Like its predecessor, this set is huge and featured 88 stickers as well as a ginormous 36-cardback poster. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to procure the poster as these puzzle-backs were all on doubles of the main cards in the set. It was hard enough tracking down all these cards. Because of the size of this set and the fact that one needed a ton of doubles to get all the puzzle pieces it probably drove kids batty back in the day trying to collect them all. It’s probably also a factor which lead to the downfall of sets like these as both this and the Awesome All*Stars came out in the same year…

One of these things that I really dig about this second series is that Taylor took the monster designs a bit further into a more creepy/scary territory. There are a metric ton more sharp fangs and brutal-looking monsters which is pretty gnarly. There are also more direct baseball parodies with obvious nods to team mascots which is an improvement over the last series…

Even though Topps has been the king of cool painted sticker cards over the last 50 years, Leaf/Donruss sure did give them a run for their money, if not in quantity, then in quality with these two monster baseball themed sets as well as their Zero Heroes stickers. It sure beats the heck out of what Fleer had to offer with their Grossville High and Robot Wars sets…