MANNY RAMIREZ 2000 INVINCIBLE CORKED BAT CARD

 YOU ARE VIEWING A MANNY RAMIREZ 2000 PACIFIC CORKED BAT CARD. I PULLED THIS CARD IN 2000 AND THE FOLLOWING WAS A WRITE UP IN BECKETT ON THIS CARD.

The bat/cork card came to light when Mickey Swain, co-owner of Above The Rim Sports Cards in Memphis, Tenn., contacted beckett.com about the card. He said he pulled the card  from a box of Invincible, and after looking at it for a few seconds, “could tell it was cork.” Meanwhile, another collector, Terry Brown of St. Louis, had posted a message on an AOL collecting site asking for any information on a similar card he pulled from a box of Invincible.



Swain’s card is about 80 percent cork, while Brown says his card contains more wood than cork.



But Pacific says no cork should have been on the cards in the first place.



According to Pacific PR director Mike Monson, the vendor that cuts up the pieces of memorabilia to place on cards called the company during the cutting process and informed them there was cork in the bat that allegedly belonged to Ramirez. “Of course, we were shocked,” Monson says. “We made it clear not to use any of that. We told them to just use the wood.”



After Pacific received the finished cards from the vendor, they were immediately packed out at the company’s Lynnwood, Wash. facility. The bat pieces with cork were not observed, Monson says, because “the cards come in bulk and in trays. Because of the amount of cards that come packed at one time, we just look for obvious damage on the corners or edges. We don’t look at each and every card.”



Monson says Pacific purchased the bat purported to be Ramirez’s from Mill Creek Sportscards in Seattle, and that the bat came with a certificate of authenticity. He says Pacific has no reason to believe the bat is anything but authentic. Scott Mahlum, owner of Mill Creek Sportscards, says he bought the bat along with four or five others from a collector at the 1999 National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago.



“That was the only Ramirez model in the bunch,” Mahlum says. “It showed a ton of use, and a ton of handle wear. It’s definitely a bat that had been used, whether it was in a game, batting practice, winter league, whatever.”