Not to be confused with the Tarot of Baseball by Robert Kasher and Beverly Ransom, this deck and book set, by the creator of Inner Child Cards and published by Workman Publishing, uses a wholly fresh and original system of correspondences to apply baseball analogies to the game of life in general.  Accompanied by a very thick and nicely illustrated paperback book, this set is good for just about any sports or tarot fan.

The deck contains both major and minor arcana cards and, while using a lot of free play in the titles and explanations, the meanings are still abundantly clear.  I found this deck to be highly intuitive.  The card size is large and gives a good view of the artwork, which extends to the very edges of the cards in an almost-borderless design.  There's something almost nostalgic in the pictures on these cards, almost like the images of baseball are from memories of a child from years gone by.

The Majors follow a very loosely Waite-inspired system of ordering.  The meanings are specific to the baseball analogies used in each card, and when you understand how the meaning applies to the analogy, you can see how it was chosen for each card.  The titles are completely different from any other deck.  The image takes up the entire surface of the card, with titles and Roman numerals floated against the image near the bottom.  Titles are as follows:

0 -- The Rookie
I -- The All-Star
II -- The Coach
III -- The Natural
IV -- The Legend
V-- The Manager
VI -- The Team
VII -- Control
VIII -- Power
IX -- Reflection
X -- The Breaks
XI -- The Umpire
XII -- Slump
XIII -- Retirement
XIV -- The Hero
XV -- The Goat
XVI -- Whole New Ball Game
XVII -- Batting a Thousand
XVIII -- The Catcher
XIX -- The Pitcher
XX -- The Rule Book
XXI -- World Series

The Minor Arcana are slightly altered structurally to better fit the baseball system.  There are still four suits, but within each suit there are 12 numbered cards and then 2 court cards, instead of 10 and 4.  The suits are Mitts, Bats, Balls and Bases.  Court titles are simply the Coach and the MVP of each suit.

The book which comes with this set is a thick little paperback about 325 pages full of information which is readily useable and it explains the cards very well in my opinion.  It's a bit cumbersome to use as a quick reference but doesn't do too badly in this respect.  Eleven different layouts are described, ten of which are more or less original, the last one being the Celtic Cross.

The cards themselves are larger than standard size and are printed on a thick card stock with a heavy gloss laminate, making them stick together and therefore a thick and clunky deck to shuffle and handle.  This breaks in over time.  The back design is a nice design of baseballs against a starry night sky, it's not truly reversible per se but you wouldn't really notice the difference that much.  The set comes attractively packaged in a cardboard sleeve case with a drop-in section for the cards and the book just sort of slides into a slot in the front cover.  And at $20, even the price is right.

I highly recommend this deck and book set for anyone who is interested in baseball and who wants to learn a more enjoyable way to work with the tarot cards.  Since the system is really different, it needs to be worked with the book.  Anyone could use this set, even a raw beginner, since everything is explained so well.  This set would actually be fairly good for young people to use because the baseball analogy works so easily.  There are also no scary cards in this deck.

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Review Copyright 1999 by Gina M. Pace

Baseball Tarot by Mark Lerner and Laura Philips, 1999
published by Workman Publishing, New York
ISBN 0-7611-0347-3