1998 Pro Baseball Season 25th Anniversary Card Set

It's the 25th anniversary of one of the most memorable season in baseball history, and we're turning back the clock to honor it--welcome back to 1998 with this special commemorative card set for History Maker Baseball Big League Baseball Game!

1998 was the year of a record-breaking home run race that captivated American sports fans from April to October and re-invigorated many who'd been soured by the baseball labor dispute a couple years earlier. As the '98 season began, St. Louis' Mark McGwire, San Diego's Greg Vaughan and Seattle's Ken Griffey, Jr. were all on pace to break Roger Maris' decades-old record of 61 home runs. They were joined in June by a new challenger, Chicago's Sammy Sosa, who smacked 20 homers that month, a new big league record. All four had 30 or more home runs by the all-star break, a big league first. In the end, both Sosa and McGwire bested Maris' record home run total, with McGwire collecting 70 and Sosa 66. Griffey wound up with 56, and Vaughn rang up an even 50, marking the first time in big league history that four players reached the 50 home run mark in the same season.

Of course, years later the word began to trickle out that the epic home run race was tainted by performance-enhancing drugs. There were admissions, denials, congressional hearings and much rhetoric. But in the moment, 1998 was a great year to be a baseball fan.

While everyone remembers '98 for the Great Home Run Race, there are other aspects of this remarkable season which make it worthy to revisit and commemorate it...

• 1998 was the first year for baseball's current line-up of clubs, as expansion to Phoenix, AZ and Tampa, FL increased the big leagues to 30 teams. In order to allow each league to get a new club but keep an even number of teams, Milwaukee's AL club agreed to shift to the NL.

• New York's "pinstripers" played .700 ball, racking up 114 wins--a new league record--with just 48 defeats. Including playoff wins, the club's 125 victories in the '98 season is still a big league record.

• Two NL clubs, Atlanta and Houston, finished with over 100 wins, but the league pennant went to San Diego, a surprise champion who'd finished in the division basement a year earlier.

• In addition to San Diego's "Worst to First" story, there was a matching "First to Worst" which unfolded in '98, with '97 champion Florida plummeting to a 54-108 record. It marked the first time ever that a big league club lost 100 games after winning the championship the year before.

• Yes, there were a lot of home runs hit in '98, but there was also some great pitching. Roger Clemens won his second consecutive Cy Young award with Toronto, finishing 20-6 with a 2.65 ERA. Atlanta had three starters flirt with 20-win seasons, Glavine (20-6), Maddux (18-9) and Smoltz (17-3). Kevin Brown (San Diego), Curt Schilling (Philadelphia) and Pedro Martinez (Boston) also turned in sterling pitching performances.

We envisioned this 25th Anniversary commemorative set to be used a couple of specific ways...

First, we wanted it to be a card set that would quickly, easily and colorfully capture the excitement of the '98 season. It's ideal for the "express" version of our game, but it's also awesome for one-off games with the full version of History Maker Baseball, or series match-ups between your favorite clubs. You can conduct your own round-robin tournament to get a taste of each club. Each team is represented by 24 players--it's top dozen batters and pitchers. We intentionally chose to limit the number of cards in this set to make it more accessible (and affordable), with sufficient depth to capture the essence of each of the 30 clubs.

We also see this set as a great card set for a single-team season play-through. The 24 cards base set will give you the nuts and bolts of any team, and with the HMB how-to guide as a help, you can fill out "your" team's roster with the remaining half-dozen or so role players who add to the season's story, while using the other club's base players as your opponents. The card set comes with a dozen or so blank player cards, which you can use for this purpose.

The cards include delta and sigma ratings for batters where appropriate--these weren't included in our original '98 release ten years ago. We've added the intangible SEMI-DYNAMIC quality to the AL pitcher cards, as the league-wide ERA was 4.65. (Expect a lot of runs to score!) Also, in the interest of less clutter, we've replaced the batting qualities from the pitcher cards with a numerical batting code and a set of pitcher batting cards included with your set. If you're not using the DH rule, you'll choose the card that corresponds to your pitcher's batting ability, and insert it in the batting order--easy!

Re-live the exciting home run chase of 1998 with this colorful new card set for HISTORY MAKER BASEBALL Big League Baseball Game!