A consumer’s guide to the best and...

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “BubbleGum Heroes” video cassette. (Echo Entertainment/3 Ring Productions)

Price: $14.95.

A 60-minute video devoted to the history and practice of sports card collecting?

At first wince, the invitation sounds as tasty as a non-foil-edged slab of recycled cardboard in fair to poor condition. Repeat after me, and try not to nod off: T-206, E-145, R-327, T-210 . . .

Sizing up the problem from the start, the makers of “BubbleGum Heroes” opted for diversionary tactics, recruiting comedian Richard Lewis to host, enlisting Pat O’Brien to narrate and putting a stickball stick in the hands of Pete Rose.

So there’s Lewis, neuroses working overtime as usual, informing us that he’s a sports nut from way back, collected cards as a kid and suffered a harrowing childhood trauma, from which he’s apparently never recovered, when “my mom vacuumed up the entire National League.”

And there’s O’Brien, reading from an anecdote-filled script, detailing why the T-206 Honus Wagner and the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle are the crown jewels of the card-collecting business. Both cards are scarce, obviously; “BubbleGum Heroes” explains how it happened.

Wagner, objecting to his card’s inclusion in packets of cigarettes, threatened a lawsuit unless his card was pulled from the set. Thus, only 40 Wagner T-206s are believed to be in existence.

The Mantle card was part of a second set printed by Topps in 1952, a set that glutted the market and stalled on store shelves. Faced with a mountainous surplus, Topps piled the excess cards on a barge and had them dumped in the Atlantic Ocean--hundreds of Mantles among them--eventually creating “a pirate’s treasure at the bottom of the ocean.”

Nuggets such as these crop up often enough to keep the eyes from glazing over.

The idea, the video proposes, is to have fun. For most of its 60 minutes, “BubbleGum Heroes” practices what it preaches.