Sports action figures and the fans who didn't love them
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# Starting Lineup: Shoddy Goods 043 ### Sports action figures and the fans who didn't love them
Jason Toon
May 6
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Ever look back at a trend and feel like it just barely missed you? I'm Jason Toon and if the subject of this week's Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stories behind consumer culture, had come out a couple of years earlier, I'd've been all over it.
It was 1985. In a concrete office building towering over the red-brick row houses of Cincinnati, Pat McInally waited to pitch an idea to the hottest toy company in America. Kenner Toys had basically created the action-figure market with its Star Wars line, and followed it up with megahits like Strawberry Shortcake and Care Bears. The Kenner touch could turn a new toy line into a household name and make everyone involved very rich. McInally probably wasn't especially nervous. He'd faced high-pressure situations before, many of them just a few blocks away at Riverfont Stadium as a punter and a wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals. But this ten-year National Football League veteran was an unusual one: he'd graduated cum laude from Harvard, and to this day remains the only NFL player to achieve a perfect score on the Wonderlic intelligence test given to all draft prospects. Where most athletes spent the off-season fishing or golfing, McInally's side hustle was writing a syndicated newspaper column called "Pat Answers for Kids", with advice for young athletes like "Don't allow yourself to get hung up on championships to the point that you lose track of the place sports should hold in your life." So he was probably smart enough to know he needed a really good idea. Even in Cincinnati, his Pro Bowl past wasn't enough to get a company like Kenner to invest in him. So he brought two props: a GI Joe figure he'd bought on the way over, and a baseball card. Players gonna play At the time, both action figures and baseball cards were booming. So combining them must have seemed like one of those sure-thing X-meets-Y elevator pitches. But it only happened because Pat McInally was moving his family to California now that his Bengals career was over. The guy he sold his Cincinnati condo to happened to be a Kenner executive. They got to talking and the Kenner guy told Pat that if he came up with any good toy ideas, bring them to Kenner. It took a few years, during which Kenner merged with Parker Brothers, and then was acquired by Tonka as Kenner-Parker. But the first Starting Lineup figures finally took the field in time at the American Toy Fair in February, 1988.
Don't look so excited, kid, jeez. I'd hate to see the photos from this shoot they didn't use. The MLB set included 132 players, the NFL set had 137, and the NBA had 85, a proportion which roughly reflected the popularity of the leagues at the time, before the NBA really took off. Each figure stood 4 inches tall and had a couple of moveable parts while being mostly locked in a specific action pose. Each one wore the accurate, fully-licensed uniforms of their real team, and included a trading card. From the start, buzz was good. Tonka told investors that "two lines, Sega and Starting Lineup, were excellent candidates to crack the magical $50 million-$100 million annual sales level." Does it seem ridiculous now to talk about Starting Lineup in the same breath as Sega? Consider this: sales of the Sega Master System imported by Tonka struggled so badly that both parties dissolved their arrangement a year later, while Starting Lineup lasted 14 years. Yeah, that 1988 set sold well enough that they released even more the next year, adding NHL players a few years later. Starting Lineups became a fixture of early 1990s toy sections and baseball card stores alike. Kenner was bought by Hasbro in 1991 and the new figures kept coming. But the '90s sports card crash hurt, and the 1994 baseball strike and 1998 basketball lockout didn't help. Starting Lineup concentrated more and more on special editions and variations of the same star players. As great as the players were on the field, it turned out that the public only had an appetite for so many different poses of Jeff Bagwell and Tom Glavine. Forays into sports beyond the big four met with limited success, too.
Feels like these are stretching the concept of "action" figure Hasbro quietly let the licenses lapse and Starting Lineup eased into oblivion in 2000. By then, the figures, still optimistically encased in never-opened packages, were a common sight in thrift stores and flea markets. Like baseball cards from the "junk wax" era, most of these figures haven't seen any significant bounce in value: you can buy standard Starting Lineup figures by the lot on eBay for a few bucks apiece. An attempted revival in 2022 announced new NBA and NFL figures, but the NBA ones sold so poorly the NFL line was never released. By the power of Damon Berryhill! Why didn't all that promise translate into a permanent presence? In retrospect, the cracks in the concept are clear. Starting Lineups had some of the characteristics of baseball cards and action figures, but not necessarily the ones that made those products irresistible. Trading cards are cheap to make and easy to store. It's not at all unwieldy for Topps to produce thousands of different cards a year in dozens of different sets, and even an enthusiastic kid can reasonably hope to collect 'em all. But hundreds of action figures? At a list price of $3.99 each back when minimum wage was $3.35 an hour? You'd have to flip a lot of burgers to even make a dent in that checklist. And where would you keep them? Just a couple of figures still in their packages take up about as many cubic inches as a whole Topps baseball set. Also, baseball cards offer accurate photographs of the players. Early Starting Lineup figures all had the same few faces - white guy or black guy, with or without glasses or mustache - and the same wide-shouldered body for linebackers and shortstops alike. They got a little better over time, but still, take them out of their packages and even a fan would be hard-pressed to identify them.
Jose Uribe and George Brett with their alleged likenesses. Not that anyone took them out of the packages. For alleged action figures, they just weren't much fun to play with. If a guy was posed diving for a ground ball, you couldn't send him up to bat. The scope for any kind of imagination was as limited as their points of articulation. That's why there's been no nostalgia bump all these years later: very few people have fond memories of playing with Starting Lineups. Mostly kids, like, got a couple for Christmas and put them on a shelf or under a bed, hoping they'd be worth of lots of money someday. Starting Lineups just weren't high-quality enough to appeal to collectors of sports memorabilia, either. There are grown men who will happily display a miniature statue of Larry Bird in their home if it actually looks like Larry Bird. Other more specialized companies stepped into that market, which was too small for a company like Hasbro to bother with. As for the geek collectors of other kinds of action figures and toy lines? Forget it. When you can capture mythic icons like Chewbacca, Optimus Prime, and Skeletor in your vault of unopened toys, why would you settle for a backup catcher and career .240 hitter? No, despite the seemingly can't-miss concept, Starting Lineup didn't do quite enough to satisfy its various audiences to become essential to any of them. And yet, unlike the misbegotten music cards of 1991, you can't call Starting Lineup a failure. It lasted 14 years, and generated a reported $700 million in total sales. For an athlete, that's the kind of career that could get you a Hall of Fame plaque - or even your own action figure. I was never into straightforward action figures, so I was especially unlikely to get into sports ones. For me, my primary “move the guy around” imagination time was focused on Transformers, because it felt like they actually did something. How about you, what dolls or action figures played a major role in your childhood playtime? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat. —Dave (and the rest of Meh) Presenting the superstars of the Shoddy Goods Hall of Fame, immortalized in stunningly lifelike pixels: Tariffs cast a shadow over game night One man's obsession: the Orville Redenbacher story Why was 1991 the year of music trading cards?
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