I don’t know if I have ever come across a licensed Jose Canseco card that I didn’t know of.  That is what makes this so exciting to me.  A few years back, a Mark McGwire collector reached out to me on Twitter asking if I heard of the 1988 Mercury News Mark McGwire.  It was completely new to me, so I asked more about it, and he said the 1988 San Jose Mercury News apparently ran a full page on the inside of the sports section of their news paper one day in 1988.  To his knowledge, he said he would assume a Canseco would exist as well.

During this time, I was selling out of my Canseco supercollection and didn’t have much interest in researching them.  To help the guy out though, I did send out a tweet on his behalf asking.  One person did reach out stating he had a few, but pasted them on the back of cardboard and handwrote statistics.  That was the closest I ever got to these.  Until last week.

A collector posted a picture of the newspaper …

I was thrilled!  Canseco was indeed in the set!  Read what the bottom says, though …

It may be small, but basically said a souvenir poster of this could be obtained by sending them $3.50.  This offer was only good for a month or so, and to my knowledge, this page only ran for one day.  The collector posted a second picture as well … the poster of cards!

Perhaps one of the more exciting parts of this is that it is licensed …

This is an extremely rare find … I don’t think I have ever come across anything like this to where I just hadn’t heard about it.  Obviously, sheets aren’t my thing, so I had to cut the Canseco cards out.  Here they are!  The “paper pulled” version and the redemption.  How cool is that? It doesn’t get much rarer than this!