LJN Corporation “Topps Sports Talk Player”
The Braun TP1 is a masterpiece. Versions of it are displayed in museums around the world. If you can find one at auction, it will set you back $1,000 — and much more if it’s in working condition. The phono-radio is considered by many to be a high water mark of twentieth century product design — its functionalism a complete validation of Dieter Rams’ “as little design as possible” ethos.
Though it’s less than seven inches wide and less than ten inches tall, the TP1 is both a record player and a transistor radio. The phonograph’s needle resides below the surface of the machine and plays forty-fives from below, as if by magic. And the buttons — of which there are graciously few — are so elegant and intuitive as to have inspired most Apple products to this day, seven decades later.
In spite of its unassailable genius (or because of it) very few people have tried to emulate the TP1. Steve Jobs and Jony Ive borrowed liberally from many Braun products, but not so much the TP1. Portable radios eventually became commonplace. Portable TVs eventually, if briefly, followed. There have been many portable “suitcase” record players over the years. But, for decades, nobody has made a serious pass at the tiny, simple, portable phonograph. To even try would have required remarkable hubris.
But then, in 1989, came the LJN Corporation, a division of MCA Entertainment. LJN was the brainchild of Jack Friedman, a toy and game enthusiast from Queens, New York, who dared to dream big, fast and cheap. During the 1980s, LJN ascended through a series savvy licensing agreements with the film industry (ET, Gremlins & Indiana Jones), pop stars (Michael Jackson, Brooke Shields) and pro sports leagues (MLB, NFL and WWF). LJN’s success was primarily attributed to their trend savvy and business acumen rather than their product design or innovation. But, for nearly a decade, that savvy and acumen generated huge profits.
As they expanded, LJN copied and pasted their licensing strategy onto the burgeoning console gaming market. LJN did not design the games they released — they simply scooped up the IP of hot entertainment brands and ushered them towards the Nintendo console. Many have suggested that LJN didn’t really care who designed their games or how they functioned, for that matter. In their version of Major League Baseball, for instance, base hits would routinely get lost in the outfield wall, allowing for an endless carousel of runs. In their NFL game, plays were selected at random and passes traveled at one tenth the speed of runs. Among gaming historians, LJN games have the reputation as the glitchiest and shoddiest of their day.
Digital glitches and cheap plastic aside, however, LJN rode the wave of licensed toys and video games to big business, allowing Jack Friedman to sell his company in 1985 for nearly seventy million dollars. And four years later, while the gravy train was still running, Friedman, his crack team at LJN, and a small coterie of visionaries from Topps dared to dream the impossible dream. They asked themselves, “What if baseball cards could talk?” And more radically, “What if you could play your baseball cards on a miniature, portable phonograph?”
Everything else was simply a matter of details. When the dream is so big and brilliant and the product benefits so obvious, you don’t get caught up in minutiae like pricing and manufacturing and marketing. You just go, go, go.
Go they did. In the Spring of 1989, LJN and Topps introduced the Sports Talk player and Baseball Talk cards. I was fifteen at the time — too old to be messing around with regular sixty-nine cent packs of cards and bubblegum, but too young to be making a go at the collectibles market. Just three years earlier, I’d gotten into hot water in middle school for a semi-legal baseball card lottery that had netted me a couple thousand dollars and only cost me some worn out Pete Rose and Johnny Bench rookies. But that was way back in ‘86. By ‘89 I was far more likely to be at Tower Records than at Tom’s Trading Card Depot. Which meant that I was the absolute perfect customer for Sports Talk.
The Baseball Talk set consisted of one hundred and sixty four cards, each measuring three and a quarter by five and a quarter inches. The set featured about a hundred and twenty current players, thirty retired legends and a bunch of others that highlighted famous games from the annals of baseball history. In most ways, the cards looked like any other baseball card, just larger and with one, game-changing difference: a tiny, clear vinyl record, featuring the ballplayer in conversation with either Joe Torre, Don Drysdale or Mel Allen, was pressed onto the back of every card.
Though novel, the cards were not even the main attraction. At least not in terms of design and innovation. No — the market disruptor was the Sports Talk player itself, a blue and red plastic contraption with a transparent protective cover, a single button to open, close and play, and a rope strap to carry the device around. Like Dieter Rams’ TP1, the needle on this Sports Talk player sat beneath the records (cards). Like the TP1, the Sports Talk player was a feat of minimalist design and engineering. And like the TP1, the Sports Talk player was small, lightweight and unlike anything else on the market.
But unlike the TP1, the Sports Talk player was a piece of crap. Cheaply made. Easily damaged. Fragile even in a surgeon’s hands. Poor sound quality. Hideous colors. Hard to explain and harder to understand. Kids couldn’t figure it out. Serious collectors largely ignored it. And despite the fact that LJN teased future editions for football and basketball, and despite them taking out TV ads, and despite them flooding Toys”R”Us with product, the Sports Talk player was basically dead on arrival. It lasted exactly one season, never expanded into other sports and left behind mountains of unsold inventory and a cautionary tale in the vein of New Coke and “Ishtar.”
Sports Talk’s commercial failure is not up for debate. Its enduring greatness, however, is a matter of opinion. I, for one, did not hate New Coke. Also, I found “Ishtar” to be pretty funny. As for my Sports Talk player and collection? I freakin’ love it. I treasure it. I almost never use it, but it makes me so goddamn happy to know that a functioning player and multiple copies of all one hundred and sixty four cards are organized and safe in my bedroom closet.
Since 1985, I have owned three Sports Talk players and probably four copies of the card set. I got my first player as a birthday gift in 1989 and spent weeks listening to the cards. Though it took a lot of trial and error, I eventually figured out how to gently fiddle with the them so that they’d lock in and play without damaging the vinyl and the needle. It was with that player and set that I heard Rickey Henderson speak about his base stealing tips in the third person and George Brett recounting the pine tar home run and Eddie Murray — who almost never spoke publicly — explain that the hardest part of winning the World Series in 1983 was having to wait all winter long for the ring ceremony. I got to hear Hank Aaron admit that he eventually tired of being second fiddle to Willie, Mickey, Babe and everyone else. I memorized approximately six hours of Baseball Talk — two minutes plus, per card, multiplied by one hundred and sixty-four cards. Sports Talk was great company for fifteen year old me, in between avoiding homework, making mix tapes and building up the guts to call that girl.
My first Sports Talk player and card set cost me a little less than two hundred dollars — a small fortune for a teen in 1989. I purchased my second Sports Talk off of eBay in 2018 for fifty dollars, including the player, the original box and the entire set of unopened packs. That purchase was a holiday gift for my (then) four and a half year old son, who — so far and in spite of the fact that he now actually collects baseball cards — has completely ignored that magical player and vinyl card set to this day. Needless to say, I am playing the long game. I suspect that in about five years, when he’s fourteen, he’ll walk into my room with the player and cards in hand, hug me and say, “I get it now, Dad. I’m ready.”
And then there’s the third player, which I purchased very recently, because it was unused and just sitting there on eBay and because what happens if my first and second player breaks? That last one rests in a box inside of a box that reads “Daddy’s Fragile Sports Talk Player Do Not Touch.”
All of which goes a long way towards explaining why Sports Talk failed so spectacularly. It’s not a product for children. It’s simply too hard to operate and maintain. But also, it’s not really a product for adults — it’s cheaply made and not particularly valuable and doesn’t do what a Tesla or an iPhone or a Peloton does. Ultimately, it’s a product for men mourning their lost boyhoods. And specifically, for men mourning their lost boyhoods who collect baseball cards and vinyl records and who are curious about twentieth century product design.
Obviously, Sports Talk’s downfall was not simply matters of product quality or market misfires. There were also purely economic factors. LJN and Topps recorded thirty minutes interviews for most cards, meaning that they had to edit down roughly eighty hours of tape featuring not inexpensive talent before they could then pay not inexpensive sound engineers to cut the audio and then pay record plants to press vinyl onto the back of cards. Similarly, the packs of four cards generally cost about five bucks — roughly six to seven times more than a normal Topps pack (which included fifteen cards). In other words, the Baseball Talk cards were twenty to thirty times more expensive than a regular Topps card but, according to the Beckett Baseball Card Guide, also much less valuable. In the early Nineties, when LJN was sued for making highly realistic water-guns that set off a rash of police shootings gone wrong and bank robberies gone right, the LJN brand was retired and I lost all hope of a Sports Talk sequel.
Look — I’m not gonna lie. LJN made some mistakes. There was the light racism of the Pedro Guerrero Baseball Talk card, which implies that the Dominican Republic is ostensibly a “shortstop farm” for American baseball. And there was also the extreme racism of Mike Flanagan’s card in which the former Cy Young winner recounts the time that a Japanese baseball glove company representative said, “Mr Franagan, we’re very grad you use our grub.” There was the indecipherable instruction manual, that would stymie most parents. There was the fact the cards almost never sat right on the platter. Frankly, there are dozens of perfectly good reasons why the Sports Talk player failed and has been left, dead and buried.
But I don’t want to hear those reasons. I don’t want to read the complaints. Or the Monday morning quarterbacking (which I would have happily listened to on my Sports Talk player and Football Talk cards had the product survived just one more season). I don’t want to hear any of it — and it’s not because the racism isn’t awful and the product isn’t defective. I don’t want to hear any of it — at least not at this moment — because I cannot not exalt the men and women who were daring enough to believe that they could take Dieter Rams’ TP1 and bring it to the world of sports collectibles. Who saw the obvious connection between record collecting and sports card collecting. Who understood that we all dream of really getting to know our favorite athletes. And who was far-sighted enough to know that, while Dieter Rams’ masterpiece might reside in museum collections, none of them really work any more. And that they weren’t super useful to begin with.
I’d be hard pressed right now to go listen to “My Generation” on a Braun TP1. But, in three minutes, I can get out my trusty Sports Talk player and hear Benito Santiago talk about gunning down runners at second from his knees. And if the player’s not working for some reason, I can just go to my back-up player. Or borrow my son’s player. Or log onto eBay and buy ten more.