Spotting sports in Spanish

Welcome to May! Time for a trip to the ocean!

Card Number 662: Pacific Crown Collection Hometown of the Players, 1996; #HP3

A slightly odd subject for an insert series as there are no pictures on the card of Long Beach or San Diego, both the places named on the cardback.

I suspect this insert series was mainly done to use up the excess amounts of gold foil that Pacific had lying around. 

The cardback is in English and Spanish, which was Pacific's USP at the time. O-Pee-Chee had French on their cards. Pacific had Spanish. One day I would like to find a Tony Gwynn card in another language again.

My Spanish isn't great. In fact it's bordering on nonexistent. But I spotted a mistake here in the Spanish text, unless "en futbol americano" was Spanish for basketball. A quick check confirmed it's a different sport entirely - can you guess what it is? (I was the first boring nerd who reads cardbacks to report this on Trading Card Database where it's now listed as an error!)

Card Number 663, Pacific Aurora Pennant Fever, 2000; #16

"Pennant fever" gives me an earworm of this song from The Muppet Treasure Island.

The Padres were nowhere near a pennant in 2000. Two years after reaching the World Series they finished 5th in the National League West with a losing average of .469 and 21 games behind the Giants who won the division with an 11 game margin.

In terms of winning games, that 5th place average was actually an improvement on 1999's performance when the Padres' final average was .457 and they were 26 games behind the winning team, the Diamondbacks. The Padres finished fourth in 1999 because the Rockies were monumentally poor and managed to be even worse than them. 

The cardback doesn't give any indication why Tony would have pennant fever and qualify as part of this insert set. My conclusion is that Pacific liked including cards of Tony Gwynn in all their sets and insert series whether the theme was relevant or not. Tony had links with the company and did some promotional work for them so they weren't going to leave him out.

Total: 663 cards