1981 Donruss

Sometimes I like to think about card sets that I love.

            I mean, collecting is supposed to be fun in general, but every collector out there has those sets that stand out for a reason. Maybe it’s the design. Maybe it’s where you were in your collecting life. The first card pack you even opened. The first set you ever built. The first team set that you built. It just that specific year or years of cards that just do it for you.

            These three sets do it for me every single time.

            1987 Topps, Fleer and Donruss, and I’m instantly thirteen-years-old and on my bed going through them on summer nights that were still reasonable enough to be indoors without a fan blowing (for the most part). Those cards paid for (mostly) from the money that I made delivering the morning newspaper. 1987 was probably the highwater mark for me. The year I was most interested. Most invested. 1988 and 1989 were still big too. But the money I made was also going toward cassette tapes and movies, and used VHS tapes of films that I loved. I don’t think I ever loved card collecting like I did in 1987.

            Now, this set/design takes me all of the way back to the beginning.

            1980. I’m six-years-old and I’m at a five and dime (we called it that) with my Grandma on Butler Steet in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh. She’s buying lottery ticket and told me that I could get whatever candy I wanted. Reaching for, probably a Milky Way, I spied a pack of 1980 Topps baseball cards. What are these? I probably said to myself. I remember opening them on the street, after we left the store. Going through the cards. Getting my first Pirates card.

            Okay, that’s not the OG from 1980…but when I got back into collecting, I had to have that card again.

            Good card sets can give you good memories.

            But what about those sets that…don’t make you feel so good?

            For me, it’s this one.

            The first time that I saw 1981 Donruss baseball cards, I was seven-years-old in the backseat of my parent’s car, a moving truck idling behind us, getting ready to leave Pittsburgh for Wellsburg, West Virginia; getting ready to leave the only, city, the only streets, the only home, and the only friends that I ever knew. And I was sad. Even though Wellsburg was under an hour away from Pittsburgh, it felt like I might as well be across the world. And why were we moving? Because my old man had taken a job at a bank in Wellsburg…and the one nagging stipulation was that you had to live in the town.

            It was bye-bye Steel City for me…hello farmland.

            The Donruss cards were, of course, given to me by good ol’ Grandma, who could recognize a fellow addict when she saw one. Opening the cards was supposed to be salve on the wound. I was seven and obviously had no clue about the decades of litigation between Topps and Fleer, the busting of Topps’ monopoly on the The Hobby. That Fleer and Donruss had been making non-sports cards for years. But I did know that Donruss were different from what I was used to. I’d already seen and bought 1981 Topps cards. My buddy Chris and I had found them at George’s Pharmacy on Butler Street. Think those old soda fountain pharmacies if you want to picture George’s.

            And I already liked the design.

            I already had a pile of them stored in that blue suitcase that I used to keep my cards in…until a lesson was learned a few years later.

            My Topps sticker book was already over ½ way filled too…and somewhat ruined (at least the back cover) by Chris’ older sister who spilled cherry Kool-Aid on it.

            But I digress.

            And it’s not that 1981 Donruss cards are bad.

The 605-card set is a bit sloppy with duplicates.

The set sequencing is strange.

But there IS a Marquee rookie card in the set.

And Donruss would go on to make some of the best sets of the Junk Wax Era.

The Hobby could USE a Donruss or a Fleer to give Topps a run for its money again.

It’s just that 1981 Donruss cards were just something for a sad and soon-to-be lonely kid to use to take his mind off moving, to pass the time as the familiar landscape of Pittsburgh morphed into the unfamiliar rural landscape of Wellsburg, West Virginia, with its Main Street that still looked like a relic from the 1950s. 1981 Donruss are the set that I think about when I think about an unhappy year. About the principal at my new school refusing to let me be called by my nickname, so I was John instead of Jay in second grade. It was my parents arguing a lot. Neighbors calling the old man a city slicker. A neighbor threatening to shoot our Golden Retriever, Sam, who kept getting loose and getting into his yard. And then the same said neighbor actually shooting Sam in his leg.

1981 Donruss reminds me of a year where my family was so unhappy that, in the end, we had no recourse but to move back to Pittsburgh, not the city, but the suburbs, where I’d, yet again, be the new kid, all at the risk of my old man losing that bank job.

Which he did.

That’s the stuff I think about when I see 1981 Donruss. I guess it could’ve been Topps. Or it could’ve been 1981 Fleer, which I first saw and bought in a general store in Wellsburg, one morning when the old man was driving me to school. It just so happened that 1981 Donruss is what I opened during that car ride, so it bares the weight of that time in my life. This March, I was home visiting my folks and I came upon the 1981 Donruss set on the cheap at a flea market. Those memories actually propelled me to buy the set. To bring it back to Brooklyn and look through it from time to time. To write this. To try and find that seven-year-old kid who was going into the first real unknown of the many unknowns that he was going to face as he got older.

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

            

 

2024 Topps Heritage and the Big Bamboozle

 

I’m late to the game.

            That’s been happing a lot to me lately.

            2024 Topps Heritage came out on April 10^th and I’m just getting around to it. There’s a story about that…but it’s not a long or very interesting one. Really, it came down to me wanting the authentic experience of buying my Hobby boxes in an actual sports card store as opposed to buying them online. That can present a problem being a card collector in NYC. There’s the lack of card stores. How spaced out the card stores are.

            Then there’s dealing with the subway.

            That said, this isn’t really a post about 2024 Topps Heritage.

            Although I like the cards.

            Even though I’m not a big 1975 design fan.

            I guess you had to be there.

            If this blog post has anything to do with 2024 Topps Heritage, it has to do with how Heritage helped me to finally (after 5 years back into collecting) see what kind of a collector I truly I am. Maybe not 2024 Topps Heritage directly.

            Honestly, I should just be thanking the Topps/Fanatics corporation in total. Through their actions they’re the ones who truly helped me figure it all out.

            And save some money along the way.

            To explain…we need to start here.

            Ah, 2023 Update. That magical time when Topps/Fanatics chose to go from 24 to 20 packs in a Hobby Box, and at the same time going from 14 to 12 cards per pack. 

            That choice was a “boon” for us folks who enjoy (enjoyed) building set from ripping open packs of cards. It took me a Hobby box, a Jumbo box and an order on SportLots to complete the 2023 Update set.

            Yeah.

            Flash forward to February 2024 and the release of 2024 Topps Series 1. Now, and I’ll be honest here, I fucking LOVE 2024 Topps’s design. It’s the best design for anything Topps has done since I got back into collecting, and looking back on all of the collecting years that I missed and the collecting years that I did experience (1980-1992); I honestly thinking 2024 Topps might ne one of my favorite designs ever. I had a Twitter (X whatever etc) post to the effect that I was going to buy a SHIT TON of these. Or something to that effect. And I did buy a shit-ton of 2024 Topps Series 1. Just not in the way that I imagined.

            Full disclosure: I purchased two Hobby boxes and one Jumbo box of 2024 Topps Series 1.

            That’s probably the most that I ever spent on a base release of product to rip.

            But I turned 50 this year…so…Happy Birthday to me, I guess.

            Here’s the funny thing though: two Hobby boxes and one Jumbo box later…and I still need 16 cards to complete my series 1 base set.

            Un-fucking-believable.

            Two Hobby boxes and one Jumbo box later…and I didn’t get a single Mitch Keller or Yordan Alvarez card.

            The Keller I bought via SportsLots and the Yordan I found in a Cooperstown card shop.

            What Topps/Fanatics seems to have done, aside from scaling back on packs and cards (in at least Hobby boxes) is also mess with the card collation. Since 2023 Update I’ve seen more doubles in single Hobby boxes/Jumbo boxes than I’ve experienced in five years back collecting cards. It’s hard enough putting a set together with less cards…but add a bunch of doubles.

            I mean this isn’t 1987, right?

            Ah, 1987...

            And what about 1987?

            Based on packs costing $.40 cents in 1987, a 36-pack Wax box of Topps retailed for, oh, let’s round up…$15.

            That’s approximately $42.00 in 2024 money.

            2024 Hobby boxes of Serries 1 run anywhere from $89.00 to $120 depending.

            Even with the bells and whistles inside the boxes, that’s on helluva mark-up from 1987.

            And judging by the angry Tweets I see from collectors on and shortly after new release day, it’s not a very fair mark-up.

            But I digress.

            When I got back into collecting, I accepted what the newer product cost. But with that, came the experience of not have to shell out a shit-ton of money to put together a 300-330 card base and/or update set. That’s not the same experience now. Just ask the 17 cards that I still need to complete 2024 Series 1.

            And what does any of this have to do with 2024 Heritage?

            And why am I thanking Topps/Fanatics?

            Well, I made my little 2024 Heritage wish come true. A couple of weeks ago I bought two Hobby boxes at an actual real live sports card store in Upper Manhattan. The next morning I got up with my iced coffee, my Grateful Dead, my checklist, and I began ripping packs and collating the cards to start building the 2024 Topps Heritage base set, even with the ugliness of the first 100 cards being this year’s short prints.

            And…

            Not counting the 85 short print cards, after two Hobby Boxes I still needed 120 of the base cards to collect to finish the base set.

            In previous years when I did the same thing, I maybe made a big SportLots purchase to finish off the base set.

            It was the doubles again.

            It’s great when one Hobby box yields two of these in one box

            Not so great at other times.

            Not slagging either player, but these are the doubles of them...from two Hobby Boxes..,I didn't even include their cards from the set I was trying to build.

            And I get it…less packs…shoddy collation…Topps/Fanatics wants collectors to spend more money on their product. They’re a corporation. This is America. I’m not going to fault their capitalist drive. It kind of puts a damper on a collector trying to build sets from packs. The same goes for trying to be short prints on the secondary market. Short prints average $1.50-$4.00 for common cards, with star cards costing more. When you need 70-80 short print cards on top of the base...well...yeah. While it might still be financially feasible for some collectors to build sets this way…it doesn’t seem fun. And the doubles just take up more space in the good ol’ card area.

            But, again, I’m not blaming and/or faulting Topps/Fanatics.

            And I'm not blaming collectors selling cards on the secondary market, trying to make back what you spent on the product.

            With this blog post…I’m actually thanking them.

            When I got back into collecting, I used to think that the cost of buying Hobby boxes necessitated that I build sets. As I've said here before, when I was a young collector, I was never a set builder. I PC’d players and collected Pittsburgh Pirates cards. I still do that. But now, taking into account all that I’ve written above; maintaining a select player (past and present PC), PC and my Pirates cards are going to be the sole focus of my collection. Not buying Hobby/Jumbo is going to free me up to build some Pirates team sets from the 1950s-1970s, and purchase some of the higher end cards for players that I PC. And that’s going to be the focus of this blog going forward.

            Topps releases a set every year after Series 2…so if I’m feeling completist I’ll just buy that.

            As for Heritage…

            I guess we’re breaking up again.

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

 

           

Cooperstown, Whatever, Etc.

 

I recently had the displeasure of turning 50.

            50.

            Okay, maybe it’s not a displeasure considering the alternative to turning an age, any age; but it feels kind of blah. I feel kind of blah. No longer a young man and not quite ready to be put out to pasture either. Fifty seems like the most middle-aged of being middle-aged. It feels like being a walking, talking ghost at times. And, yes, I can still wear all of my cool t-shirts. Wear my hat backwards and try and find cool, new music to listen to.

            But at the end of the day buddy…

            …you know what’s on the other side of that mirror.

            But I didn’t want be mired in 50. I wanted a brief respite from the malaise that I’d been feeling. I wanted to go somewhere to, not exactly celebrate 50, but to not exactly dwell on it either. I’ll revise that: my wife wanted to go somewhere to celebrate. I wanted to stay in bed in a dark room, doing nothing but stare at the ceiling. I like being mired in things, I guess. I love me a good malaise. And traveling? That’s another thing about tuning 50; I want to spend less and less time away from home. Thrill seeking to me used to be wandering the streets of Paris. Now it is checking out the grocery store after a renovation.

            Not the stuff of Kerouac, I know.

            After some hemming and hawing (and procrastinating long enough that a trip to San Francisco to revisit some old Beat haunts and see a Giants game, seemed unreasonable financially), I did decide on somewhere to spend my 50^th birthday. Somewhere where I always felt good vibes. Somewhere out of my childhood.

            I went back here for the first time in 32 years.

            Through good and bad, happiness and depression, for most of my life, I can say that baseball has been my one constant. I had on brief spell where it wasn’t, but the less said about that here the better. But baseball. It’s been around me, casting its aura and magic, for as long as I can remember anything else tangible being around me. I’m as excited as a child when baseball season begins, and I’m as inconsolable as one when baseball season ends. There’s no salve for the first few weeks after the last inning of the last game is played. Not football. Not basketball or, god forbid, Hockey, for Christ’s sake. Baseball allows me to tolerate summer.

            Cooperstown was a good way to celebrate being the most middle-aged of the middle-aged.

            Of course, there were memories that I wanted to revisit.

            I’d been to Cooperstown twice before

            1989 when I was fifteen.

            1992 when I was eighteen.

            Memories aside, I couldn’t tell you if the town had changed much, or if it had stayed the same. There were a good number of closed storefronts. A continued epidemic of the pandemic, perhaps? Cooperstown was subdued, if I can say that. My teenage memories are of the place in the summer. A town in motion. The packs of people in the Hall. Loud families on Main Street. Me, my brother and Phineas running in and out of the Hall all day, running in and out of the various baseball card and sports memorabilia shops.

            That was the Cooperstown of memory.

It was April when we went this year. Things were just opening for the season. At 50 and 46, my wife and I might’ve been the YOUNGEST people visiting the Hall.

            *a brief aside, there was one kind in Cooperstown, a townie who ended up following me around a baseball card shop and talking to me about cards. The kid was maybe 11 years old. He was carrying his binder of cards around with him, and because I remembered doing that, carrying those cards everywhere, my initial W.C. Fields-ness toward children…well…it just had to melt a little bit. So, I let the kid follow me around and we talked Pirates and Mets. He was kind enough to gift me this…*

            

            Good kid…bad judge of character.

            And what has Mr. Hoy Park been up to?

            We were even there for the eclipse.

            ...for all that was worth.

            I suppose if I brought anything to Cooperstown as the most middle-aged of the middle-aged, is that the adult me is a student of the history of the game. The teen me appreciated the players that came before, and I wanted their cards for prestige purposes, but the here and now was foremost on my mind as a kid. Maybe because vintage cards of older players were hard to come by, and you could still buy a pack of cards with money you found under a couch cushion. But now I read books about the sport of baseball. Vast tomes dedicated to single seasons or a single World Series. I spend my time looking up articles on older players. I can afford the cards that I couldn’t as a kid. I have a more well-rounded experience with the game of baseball as the most middle aged of the middle-aged.

            But the kid (and beyond in me) couldn’t help but get excited by seeing the plaques of these guys.

            It being 32-years since my last visit, there was something very cool about seeing the plaques for the players that I watched growing up, the players whose cards I collected.

            It’s easier to insert the history of your own fandom into the sport when you see stuff like that.

            Of course, I bought some of the requisite postcards.

            Forgetting to buy one for Tony Gwynn and Ken Griffey Jr....sigh.

            Had a discrepancy, an alteration if you will, shown to me and my wife by a kindly docent who took a shine to this Pittsburgh clad guy.

            Can you spot the difference?

            Jackie’s plaque has also been changed from his initial.

            This is the one that hangs in the Hall.

            This is the one that is currently only loan to the Jackie Robinson Museum in NYC.

            And the folks at SABR have a whole article on this stuff right HERE.

            Sadly, Henry Aaron’s plaque was not there. It had been loaned to an exhibit in Atlanta.

            But my wife bought me a 1967 Henry Aaron for my birthday. And I bought myself the 1966 one. A little bit loved but that’s all right. 

            They are the first two base Henry Aaron cards that I own from the 60s. And they instantly matter. Growing up I’d never really been a fan of 1966 or 1967 Topps. I found them plain and less exciting than a design like 1962 or 1965. Now…now, I admire their simplicity. 1967 is the quintessential BASEBALL CARD. No frills.

            I feel that way about this set now too.

            Feeling a touch nostalgic for the teenage me, I wanted to find a box of something from my childhood to rip from one of the sports cards stores. And, if nothing else, there still ARE sports cards stores in Cooperstown. There wasn’t a lot of junk wax, though. At least not in wax box form. But I came across these in a sports card store a block or so away from the Hall.

            Now, I KNOW 15-year-old me ripped a lot of 1989 Topps Big packs. I know a lot of collectors were thwarted/daunted by the return of oversized cards in the late 80s, but 1988 and 1989 Big, as well, as 1989 Bowman, were a big hit with this collector. I just really enjoyed the throwback to 1955 and 1956 Topps cards inherent in the design. Maybe it did have a lot to do with the fact that, as a kid, getting my hands on anything 1955 and 1956 was next to impossible, and cards like Topps Big or 1989 Bowman...they were as close as I was getting to a seat at the table.

            1988 and 1989 Topps Big respectively:

            Picked up just a few more things.

            I never leave Andy Van Slyke rookie cards behind.

            And 30+ years later, Bobby Bonilla still doesn’t look right to me in anything but Black and Gold.

    

            Had to get my Yordan fix.

            And I'm strangley excited that Joey Bart is a Pirate.

            I didn’t go hog wild in Cooperstown with card purchases, which kind of surprised me because the lack of access to card shops in NYC is a big pet peeve of mine. I didn’t want to go hog wild, I guess. I mean I’m 50 now. The most middle aged of the middle-aged. The days of running into and out of card shops all day has passed. The excitement for those players hanging on the Hall walls and the history of what was in a lot of those glass cases.

 

            That was the real draw now. The blah-ness may have settled in, but it was nice to keep it at bay by taking a trip down memory lane and immersing myself in the National pastime.

            If you’re turning 50.

            If you’re feeling middle-aged.

            If the futility of it all is settling in.

            or if you just want to see Tony Gwynn hanging around where he belongs.

            Take a trip to Cooperstown.

            It’s worth it.

            And make sure you stop by the Farmer’s Museum to see this guy….

            I learned about the Cardiff Giant by reasing David McCullough's epic book about the Brooklyn Bridge. It was wonderuflly coincidental that he was in Cooperstown. You can read about him HERE.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!