Starting Lineup (toy line)

Starting Lineup was a brand of action figures produced from 1988 to 2001, first by Kenner and later by Hasbro. They were conceived by Pat McInally, himself a former professional American football player with the Cincinnati Bengals, in 1986. The figures became very popular, and eventually included sports stars from baseball, football, basketball, and hockey; and, to a lesser extent, boxing, track & field, skating, soccer, and golf.

McInally came up with the idea during a visit to a toy store. He noticed there were many figurines available of the likes of G.I. Joe, but nothing based on real-life sports heroes. McInally and a former college friend who was running Kenner's day to day operations decided to work together on the project. Today, the figures are collector items. The prices on the figures vary dramatically. The low-end items can be acquired for around or above retail cost, but many rarer items can fetch prices as high as several thousand dollars for a single figure.

A typical figurine stands about convert|4|in|cm tall, but the brand at times launched various special series that can be much larger including a 14" NBA line.

1988 Major League Baseball Starting Lineup

Kenner debuted the Starting Lineup figures in 1988 by releasing a 132 player set. Most figures had similar poses and look strikingly similar in physical appearance as well. For example, Billy Hatcher and Kevin Bass looked to be indentical twins, though in real life they were not. Each team had at least four players in the set except for the Canadian teams of Montreal and Toronto that had only one player because they were the smallest markets in the league, (Tim Raines and George Bell, respectively.) The Chicago Cubs and New York Mets had the most players in the set with seven per team. Kenner tended to distribute the players to stores by geographical region, so it was virtually impossible to complete the collection or find players from out of market. A child in Michigan would have found many Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs on the shelves of the local Meijer's Thrifty Acres, but locating Texas Rangers or California Angels figures was a more difficult and trying task.

References