As we mark the 25th anniversary of the demise of Pinnacle, I have been thinking a lot about the company, the incredible people, the great products, the high quality of work, and some of the things that happened behind the scenes of one of the most impactful companies in the history of the hobby.
I don’t think of the negative things, like the bankruptcy. Too many people got hurt.
But there were a lot of positive, fun and wonderful memories I will always have from working there.
I have always loved chatting with collectors at shows, mainly because I am a lifelong collector. When someone wants to tell me about a great pull from a box of our product, or ask a question about a product that I may have even developed, then they have my full attention.
But every now and then collectors at shows would ask some unusual questions.
The one I will never forget was from the 1998 National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago. I was wearing Pinnacle swag and still worked for them, but I was there on my own. I was hanging around the Beckett booth chatting with some acquaintances there.
A collector politely interrupted us, desperately wanting to get in on the conversation and ask about Pinnacle. He was kind of tall and nerdy, like one of Farmer Ted’s friends from Sixteen Candles, only 10 or 15 years later. He took a deep breath, and then asked the question that I still consider the best Pinnacle question I have ever been asked at a show.
“Did you get to meet Christie Brinkley?”
“Sorry, I didn’t get to.”
“Aww too bad, That would have been awesome!”
If I’ve lost you, let me back it up a couple years. In 1996, Pinnacle Baseball Series II featured an insert set called the Christie Brinkley Collection. There were no autographs or game-used swatches. It was just a one per box insert set. What made it special was that Pinnacle had hired the internationally known supermodel to take photos for the set at spring training with members of the previous year’s World Series teams: the Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians (now Guardians). They promoted the insert set on the cover of the Series II box.
Brinkley was an accomplished photographer and had some of her boxing photos printed in Ring Magazine.
The publicity Pinnacle got for this insert set at the time of release was off the chains.
In 1996, I had already been doing some contract work for Pinnacle, but I had not yet moved to Dallas. I was still the editor of Canadian Sportscard Collector magazine, so I was very plugged in to what Pinnacle was doing, and how they were presenting it to the hobby and mainstream media.
Though I had nothing to do with the Christie Brinkley Collection, I did get an explanation of how it came together. It was a project that everyone in the building was proud of because of the quality of the set, and also the amount of mainstream media hits it got in big dailies, USA Today, magazines, hobby radio shows and TV.
The set was a couple years in the making. As it was explained, John Lucas, who managed Pinnacle’s design and photography team, was the one who came up with the idea. After being told by photo director Don Heiny at Pinnacle that players opened up and were more cooperative with female photographers, Lucas thought of Brinkley. He knew she had a background as a photographer.
Lucas contacted Pinnace CEO Michael Cleary with the idea. The next step was to contact Brinkley to see if she was interested, and then negotiate a fee. Brinkley, I was told, is a big baseball fan and was very excited about the project. I never found out how much Pinnacle paid her, but I am guessing it was a lot of money. Pinnacle loved to spend money.
The Christie Brinkley photo shoot was the perfect example of how Pinnacle would take an idea, execute it beautifully, and then let the brilliance of VP Communications Laurie Goldberg turn it into watercooler talk across America.
The shoot was originally supposed to include six players from both eh Braves and Indians. Somehow between the time the media releases and sales sheets went out and the set went to production, it became eight players from each team. That alone created buzz in the hobby as everyone tried to speculate on why the change was made. Was it some kind of surprise change to increase sales? Was it 16 all along and Pinnacle promoted it as 12 so that collectors would be more excited when it came out? Was Christie Brinkley’s contract restructured?
It wasn’t anything like that. It was more like there were extra spots available on the form when the set went to print, so why not add four more players.
The creativity in the set made it one of the most memorable the company produced in the 1990s. Heiny and Lucas were also 100 per cent accurate about how the players would react to Brinkley. They opened up and had fun. Brinkley wanted to bring their personalities out in the photos and did an incredible job.
The big challenge, she was told, was to make Albert Belle smile. He had a reputation with the photographers at Pinnacle and the other card companies of being difficult and not overly cooperative. Brinkley’s challenge was to make him smile. She tried and failed, but eventually handed Belle her ne-year-old son Jack.
The two connected, and Belle suddenly had a smile ear-to-ear. Click. Mission accomplished!
Tom Glavine was known as a good golfer among baseball players, so she had him with a pitching wedge on the pitcher’s mound.
Kenny Lofton was like a burglar sneaking off with or “stealing” bases.
Jim Thome had boxing gloves. Manny Ramirez was photographed with a group of fans.
One of the most memorable cards in the set was of young star Chipper Jones. The idea was for him to be the brash and cocky kid, so he had his sleeves rolled up and his hat on backwards and was pictured blowing a bubble with gum.
It wasn’t quite as spectacular as the Kurt Bevacqua Topps card from 1976, but it was very good. It was so good, in fact, that the photo appeared on the cover of Beckett Baseball with the headline “Uptown Boy”.
Jones said in a media scrum that it was a lot of fun working with Christie Brinkley, and that some of the veterans on the team were jealous that he got to go do a shoot with her and spend time with her. He said he was very nervous at first, but she made him feel comfortable and have fun and talked about how professional she was. He also said that while photo shoots were something the players didn’t normally like to do, the whole team turned out to watch the shoot with Brinkley behind the camera.
The backs of the cards are often called the first selfies in hobby history. Brinkley snapped shots of herself with the players using a regular camera. You can imagine the difficulty to nail a selfie with a Canon or Nikon.
The original plan was to have the players pose with a life size cutout of Brinkley. The cutout was damaged before the shoot began and the idea had to be mothballed. Looking back, those pics would have been lame and very un-Pinnacle anyway.
The card that got all the attention, however, was Brinkley’s own card. She posed, in a photo that made her look like she was topless, covering herself up with a book. It was also the promo card for set.
This insert set showcased Pinnacle’s attention to quality and photography. It also exemplified why Laurie Goldberg was the best in the business. She had solid relationships with every member of the hobby media, as well as the key hobby players in the mainstream media. Pete Williams was writing hobby stories in USA Today at that time, and Laurie made sure that Pinnacle was front and center all the time with him. Pinnacle held an event at the All-Star Cafe in New York to unveil the set.
There is no official stat to back this claim up, but there is no doubt that Christie Brinkley’s photo shoot got more mainstream media newspaper and television hits across America than anything else in the hobby during that era.
I remember talking to Laurie about that set, and she told me about what working with Christie Brinkley was like. She said that Brinkley was extremely prepared. She had researched each player, studied their hobbies and what their personalities were like. She had a list of props needed for each player’s photo. She knew exactly what she wanted with each photo, and she was able to get it in a way that no other photographer in the world could have done.
As I never got to meet Brinkley, I never got to interview her either. Brinkley did, however, give an interview to MLB.com’s Michael Clair about the experience a few years ago.
“When I got asked to do that, I thought, ‘Really?’ Because I’ve always been a big baseball fan. I couldn’t believe my luck,” Brinkley told MLB.com. “I had been featured in a couple magazines. My boxing pictures were in Ring Magazine and picked up in newspapers, and some of my auto racing pictures made it into Ampersand. They knew I liked to take pictures.”
Brinkley jumped at the idea of taking baseball card photos.
“They knew that the baseball players didn’t like to take these pictures, and [Pinnacle] said, ‘We thought that maybe if we had a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model taking the pictures they might come to get their picture taken,’” Brinkley said in the MLB.com interview.
Looking back, Pinnacle could have had dual autographs in the set. As inserts evolved in the 1990s, great photos were enough to get some attention in the media, but they weren’t enough to give the cards value. Today, you can grab just about any of them for a couple of bucks.
But for any collectors who loved Pinnacle products and want a fun project, putting together the entire 16-card Christie Brinkley Collection will leave you with some of the best photos ever taken in the hobby’s decade of excess.
