For the record I am not a thief or a crook, or generally a dishonest person.
I’ve been known to spin a yarn here
and there. Tell a white lie to get out of a social engagement because I’m about
as introverted as one can get; let’s just say I’m not the kind of guy starving
for human contact, even during a pandemic. I’ve told long tales to leave
another person just baffled enough by me not to bother. I’ve stretched the
truth to save someone their dignity and pride. I fine dine on mendaciousness
when need be, but never overeat.
And I’ve pilfered a little bit. Mostly from corporations. Mostly small things. A cassette tape. A Robin the Boy Wonder action figure from a Hills Department Store; it was already out of the box so it wasn’t any good to anyone anyway, though the theft still resulted in my getting grounded for a week (note to any budding thieves: a Velcro Pittsburgh Pirates wallet is not a good place to stuff a stolen action figure). And as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve stolen a pack of cards here and there from the Thrift Drug or the Revco, when I was a moneyless kid in need of a carboard, gum and wax fix. Raw capitalism affects us all, my friends.
But
I’ve never done the desperate yet conniving used car salesman act the way that
I did on Rick Stanton back in 1984.
When I got back into card collecting in the summer of 2019 it was with the intent to both build complete sets of the cards (primarily Topps) that I enjoyed growing up. My main collecting years of 1984-1992. I also wanted to build a pretty decent PC (personal collection) of the stars and Hall of Famers I enjoyed during my collecting era. I had it in mind that I would build the current base sets for Topps and the yearly Heritage sets (I’ve since gone back on building Heritage, which I’ll explain in a future post), as well as create a simultaneous PC of some of today’s brightest and upcoming stars. I quickly expanded my set building goal by adding the years 1980-1983, as the very first pack I ever opened was a 1980 Topps pack. I figured why not just go full circle.
The Sets:
The PC of old stars and HOFers:
The
thing is I’d never really been able to build complete sets when I was a kid.
The discipline wasn’t there. Neither was the money. I was always more
interested in opening packs and pulling out whatever star cards were in them,
putting said cards in penny sleeves or top loaders, and into a box I had for
those cards. The same with going to card shows. Why spend my money riffling
through boxes of common cards, break my back for some bloody checklist, when I
could spend the paperboy money on cards of the players that I wanted? Also, the
idea of taking the time collating sets just wasn’t my cup of tea. I broke up
Traded Sets for the cards I wanted personally. I was Veruca Salt with cards. I
wanted them now! The only set that I ever built was the 1988 Topps Baseball
set. And that’s only because they were so damned plentiful it happened by
accident.
The adult collector in me found set
building more appealing. Building sets gave me a chance to sit down with the
cards, look through them, re-engage with the hobby and the sport of baseball;
realize there’s no such thing as a common card when only approximately 19,000
players have made the major leagues since 1871. I found that I really enjoyed
collating the cards and building up the sets. Set building was calming and
relieved the anxiety that was always bubbling up wanting me to drown. The adult
collector in me was essentially the exact opposite of the inpatient boy back in the
1980s, who just wanted to flash his Wade Boggs and Don Mattingly bling to his
friends. Though I now have some new Boggs and Mattingly bling.
With
wax boxes from my era being relatively cheap and plentiful still thanks to
overproduction, and places like ComC and Sportlots available to me to buy
single cards, I was able to build sets pretty quickly. To date I’ve built
1986-1992 Topps, 2019 and 2020 Topps, and am a stone’s throw away from finishing
1984, 1985 (the bulk of the sets bought at an LCS because those wax boxes are
too rich for my blood) and 2018 Topps, as well as 1987 and 1988 Donruss. I’ve
purchased complete sets of 1982 and 1983 Topps, and at some point, I said to
myself that I was going to get those 1980 and 1981 Topps sets going too.
But then distraction set it in the
form of 1974 Topps.
Getting back into the hobby meant
also re-engaging with people within the hobby. I started following a lot of
collectors on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. I paid attention as they
detailed their collecting needs or their new quests; cheered them on as they
got their cards in the mail and showed them off online. A lot of collectors
were looking back, collecting sets that may have been out of reach to them when
they were kids. One thing that I found very interesting were the number of
collectors collecting the set of their birth year. It seemed an obvious task,
yet one that I found intriguing.
I always liked my birth year cards:
1974 Topps. I loved the white boarders with the pennant flags at the top and
bottom of the card, listening the city and team name. Thought the colorful band
that framed the players quite artful. Considered those green and gray card stock
backs tasteful and alluring. I loved how the 1974 set was full of stars.
Players in their prime in the 1970s, Like Nolan Ryan and Mike Schmidt. Guys
from the sixties like Pete Rose and Willie Stargell, Frank Robinson and good
ol’ Brooks. How it had the rookie cards of Dave Winfield, and two guys whom I
loved as a kid in Pittsburgh: Bill Madlock and the Cobra; Dave Parker.
1974 Topps seemed like a classy set
to add to my collection building. My birth year! A commemoration of me! So, I
printed up a 1974 checklist at my job, and got to building in my still naïve
way. I wasn’t as concerned with condition as a lot of other collectors. Not
that I wanted beat-up junk. But a rounded corner here and there…it didn’t
matter so much to me. I went through the checklist and found a core of players
I liked, players I wanted to PC as well, and then I went to ComC and found
versions of those cards that I could afford. I figured then I’d find people
online who were selling lots of card, so I could round up some of those
“common” cards needed for the set. It seemed a perfect plan. A perfect goal.
Some cardboard therapy and fun. What could go wrong?
Some of the cards I bought:
Then
Rick Stanton showed up in my head, living rent free, and screwed the whole
thing up.
Again…I stress…that I am not a thief
or a crook or generally a dishonest person.
As I remember it anyway, it was just
a small group of us kids trading cards at Phineas’ 8th birthday
party, back in that long, gone summer of 1984. By small I mean it was me,
Phineas (ignoring his party guests in the way that baseball cards will do that
to a cardboard addict) and my brother. I use the word trading lightly. Mostly
it was me, the ten-year-old, supposedly older and wiser than the others,
throwing down precious card after card from my modestly, rebuilt (a post for
another time) collection, trying to get the ever-stubborn Phineas to complete a
trade. Hell, I don’t even remember what card it was that I wanted so badly.
Phineas was a known card trading
procrastinator. The kind of kid who’d sit back and contemplate the loss of a
minor star card from his collection, even if he had three of the goddamned
things to spare. He was bad at eight and would get worse as he aged. Phineas turned a simple trade into a goddamned Vida Blue/Charlie O.
Finley contract negotiation each and every single time, until frustration
bloomed on the other kid's end, and the whole deal was off. In retrospect, his
stubbornness was a good thing. Phineas saved me the loss of a lot of good cards
thrown down in fatigue and exasperation.
“What are you guys doing?” Rick
Stanton said, coming over to the round, glass table. A child’s version of a
gambling den, really. An Umbrella to create a dark mood. Scattered bowls of
pretzels and chips; stained Kool-Aid cups; untouched bowls of fruit.
“Trading cards,” I said, not paying
him much mind, and probably throwing down another lost gem.
“I have cards at home.”
The phrase struck me. I lifted my
head up and gave Rick a good look. “What do you have?”
“A box of cards,” he said. “They were
my dad’s.”
I lit up inside. Dad’s? A gift from
dad? Dad cards. That meant older cards. That meant Mays. Aaron. Roberto
Clemente. Surely this kid was sitting on a Micky Mantle or two. “Well, go and
get them,” I said.
Rick showed up back to the party not
ten minutes later with an 800-count box of cards. There weren’t any Mantle or
Clemente or Mays cards inside. But there was a Hank Aaron. In fact, it was the
first card in the box. What Rick had brought to the table was a complete set of
1974 Topps cards. The thick white boarders. The pennant flags. The colorful
frame around the player photos. An anxious warmth raged in me. Sweat dampened
my brow. I looked at Rick and his wide, innocent,
I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing-I-don’t-know-what-I-have bright blue eyes, and it
was to hell with Phineas and his procrastination. I got Rick a seat at the
table. I used my age and my weight and I muscled up next to him. And I
subsequently ripped him the hell off for everything good that he had.
It wasn’t hard. Rick truly didn’t
know what he had, and he didn’t know what I was offering. A 1983 Fleer Willie
Stargell for his 1974 card. Why have a 1974 Stargell, Rick, when you could have
his last card? A 1984 Pete Rose for his 1974 card. Because this is Rose
with the Phillies, Rick! The Philadelphia Phillies. It went on and on
like that. A ’74 Bench for his ’84 Fleer. Again, his last card Rick. I
did the same with a ’74 Yaz for his ’83 Donruss. I took Rick’s Frank Robinson
card for a Frank Robinson manager card. Got his Nolan Ryan. Got his Reggie. Got
his Rod Carew, Lou Brock and Bob Gibson too. Snatched the Cobra rookie for a
Diamond King. I left no stone unturned. And the only reason the carnage ended
at all was because Phineas went and told on me to his mom. Not because I was
ripping Rick off, but because I’d shut Phineas out of the whole operation. Why
sit there and watch such procrastination when I could get myself a 1974 Joe
Morgan for his 1984 Topps one.
Yeah, I got in trouble. Phineas’ mom
scolded and shamed me. My mom and Phineas’ mom had been friends since they were
teenagers. Phineas was more a cousin to me than a friend. I’d called his
parents “aunt” and “uncle” until I realized how family structures actually
worked. It was like being scolded by my mom, which was still coming. I
was made to sit in Phineas’ living room alone while the party raged on outside,
waiting for my mom to pick me and my brother up after work. Double trouble. But
what did my humiliation really matter when I had all of that 1974 bounty,
received by trading away cards I could still get inside of current packs, or
for a few found dimes at the American Coin?
I suppose this is what
mattered. Rick didn’t just get the cards from his dad as a gift. His dad was
dead. I can’t remember from what. But he died before Rick was even two years
old. The kid never knew his old man. He just had things like pictures to
remember him by. Maybe heirlooms hanging around the house. Or a baseball card
set. A 1974 Topps set that his father had hand collated the year Rick’s sister,
June, was born. Her birth year. A commemoration of her. Maybe he’d
been too sick to hand collate anything the year Rick was born.
I’d forgotten that memory. Until my
order of those 1974 Topps baseball cards showed up in my mail slot. And then
the memories came flooding back to me. The shame. The guilt. The foolishness. I
mean I know I was just a kid…but still. I knew what I was doing. I’d had it
done to me. And I would again. It went without saying that a ten-year-old with
a stack of 1974 Topps stars didn’t stand a chance with the older collectors in
his neighborhood. I traded away nearly everything that I ripped off of Rick
Stanton. I didn’t even keep that ’74 Wille Stargell card. Gone. All of it. Who
knew if Rick knew how I’d ripped him off? The last time I saw him we were both
pumping gas back in 1992. Rick waved. I nodded. We went our separate ways.
So now I have this small stack of
1974 cards. It’s a good thing I’m PCing most of the players that I bought. A
1974 Reggie Jackson doesn’t hold the same profound memory when it’s just placed
in a box next to his 1975 and 1976 card. Still, the guilt lingers with the 1974
set. I don’t know if I have the gumption to build it. Or maybe I should. As
some kind of card collector’s penance. Devote my time and money to rebuilding
that set. But we were kids, right? And collecting should be fun. There’s always
the 1974 Topps Football set to build if I want a birth year set. I always liked
those cards. The goal post borders. The close-up shots. The team name in a bold
block letters at the bottom. Those, sharp black All-Pro cards. I could build
that set!
But…see…there was this kid named Andy…and in 1986, he’d just inherited a bunch of old football cards from his uncle and…
…that’s my story on 1974 Topps Baseball cards.
Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.
Next Friday: I discuss the 1986 Topps baseball card set. Why it meant the world to me back then. Why it doesn’t mean that much to me now
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