It seems special trading card sets specifically produced for retailers have been around almost as long as the trading card industry itself. Sunoco first joined the fray in 1972 with an NFL Action Player Stamps set, and in 1994 they partnered with Fleer for a baseball card set. In 2001 they got back in the game with a 12 card baseball set produced by Diamond 141 Collectibles.
The Sunoco “Dream Team” set was a joint promotion with Coca-Cola. The three card packs could be picked up for .49 with the purchase of gas or a 12 pack of Coke at participating Sunoco gas stations.
Each card features two legends from the same team. Ten of the twelve cards utilize photographs of the players, but two cards use paintings for some reason. The majority of the shots utilize light airbrushing to remove full logos or team names, but interestingly, the Phillies card is one of two cards utilizing a painting and it pretty much fully displays the “P” on the hats and “Phillies” on the jerseys.
The baseball card backs place the card number, Sunoco, Coca-Cola, and MLBPA logs in the four corners. The majority of the back is made up of the players’ career stats and a brief paragraph highlighting the notable achievements that qualify them for a spot on the “dream team”.
I had never heard of Diamond 141 Collectibles, so I did a a quick Google search which returned 0.0 results outside of references to this card set. Are any of you familiar with any other products produced by this company? If so, let me know in the comments below!
The teams used in the set are pretty much all from the Northeast, and the Yankees, Phillies, and Red Sox all had two cards. That’s a pretty limited group of teams. Cincinnati is the westernmost city represented, and then you can pretty much go straight east to Baltimore to draw the southern border of this region. Today Sunoco operates in 30 states, but I don’t know what their footprint looked like in 2001. I’m assuming the regional focus of the set is why I had never seen these until recently. I know we didn’t have any Sunoco stations in Central Illinois in 2001, well at least there weren’t any near me.
If you like learning about oddball sets, check out my review of the 1983 Gardner’s Bakery Set or my Definitive Guide to the 7-Eleven Slurpee Discs!
Checklist
Pittsburgh - Willie Stargell / Bill Mazeroski
Philadelphia - Mike Schmidt / Steve Carlton
Cincinnati - Tony Perez / Joe Morgan
New York Yankees -Yogi Berra / Don Mattingly
Baltimore - Jim Palmer / Frank Robinson
Boston - Carlton Fisk / Luis Tiant
Boston - Fred Lynn / Jim Rice
Detroit - Sparky Anderson / Al Kaline
Philadelphia - Robin Roberts / Richie Ashburn
New York Mets - Tug McGraw / Gary Carter
Cleveland - Lou Boudreau / Bob Feller
New York Yankees - Roger Maris / Catfish Hunter
Here are the two “painted” images in the set. These have logos, but the photos in the other cards do not.