Remembering the Hostess Baseball Cards of the 1970s

By Dan Epstein | Contributing Writer

For American children of the 1970s, there were few treats more enticing or more popular than Hostess snack cakes, those prepackaged, creme-filled sugar bombs that were more chemically-enhanced than Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa put together.

And if you were a baseball fan, the allure of Hostess Twinkies, Cupcakes, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs (also known as King Dons, depending on what part of the country you lived in) or Choco-Diles was never greater than during the five-year period from 1975 through 1979, when the company printed baseball cards on the bottom of their “Family Size” boxes.

Introduced during a period when Topps thoroughly dominated the baseball card market, Hostess baseball cards — much like the 3-D baseball cards that could be found at the time in specially-marked boxes of Kellogg’s cereal — were more of a fun bonus than any sort of substitute for the “Real One” that Topps produced.

Certainly, they were less economical to collect; a wax pack of 10 Topps cards was 15 cents in 1975, while a box of Twinkies with three cards on the bottom cost $1.19 (Of course, you’d also get 10 individually wrapped Twinkies, so that was cool…). Collecting an entire 1975 Hostess set would have run you nearly sixty bucks plus tax, or nearly $270.00 in today’s money, and would have put you at serious risk for diabetes.