1988 Baseball Cards : You Got It (The Right Stuff)... Andy Van Slyke

 

Once upon a time I had a motto:

I only run when chased

It’s an old motto. It certainly originated back during a time when I physically didn’t need to run, or there was little chance of me being chased. Though I was once chased by a pack of long-haired high school burnouts for giving them the finger, because I was sick of them giving us catholic school kids the finger and shouting invective at us every time their school bus passed us on walks home. Ah, memories. Bu now time has caught up with me. I do this horrid activity called jogging, at least three times a week. I’m turning forty-seven this year. If things go right, I’m likely to see fifty (and maybe Dodger Stadium). Fifty. The very idea of turning fifty, well, it feels like I’m being chased.

            But back when I was in seventh (1986-87) and eighth (1987-88) grade, when I wasn’t running from bullies who looked like Warriors movie rejects, the kids in my catholic school ran for charity. We ran laps around the track at Penn-Hebron school to raise money for Pittsburgh’s Children’s Hospital. We got friends and family to sponsor us based on the number of laps we were able to complete. Then us scrappy, industrious, yet pious, school children took said money and donated it to Children’s Hospital. And Jesus smiled on us from his throne in heaven, or his local McDonald’s franchise.

The payoff for such a benevolent act? Me and my classmates got to take a class field trip to downtown Pittsburgh during Christmastime. We got to stand in a line outside of KDKA radio (any John Cigna fans out there?) with all of the other charitable kids who ran laps at their school, waiting to talk into a mic, boasting about our charity and booming out a Merry Christmas to all of those friends and family who made this possible. Then we got to have a chaperoned day in the city going from store to store, buying gifts, gazing admirably at Pittsburgh’s Christmas tree, and have lunch in the food court at Warner Center, before we piled on the school bus, full of blessed vibes, back to good old St. Bartholomew grade school.

My grandma always claimed to have heard me on the radio. But between her lotto numbers and the beer…I found such a bold statement to be suspect at best.

            Picking your group to be in for the trip was a big deal. It was more like a pecking order. Almost worse than being picked for sports in gym. Gym was based on athletic ability and that was bad enough. But you couldn’t help if you sucked at kickball or hoops. Picking a group for a field trip was personal. A selection based on actual relationships.

My mom always took the day off of work, and volunteered (I have no clue why she’d want to spend a day looking after eight to ten teenage boys) to chaperone. So did Mike Calvin’s mom. They chaperoned our group together. Mike and I were friends so that made my choice easy. No pecking order for me. It was the other kids who went through their small Lord of the Flies rituals in order to fill the remaining spots in the group. My mom and Mike’s mom were cool and less strict than the other chaperones…so there was a lot of Lord of the Files bullshit.

            That particular eighth grade Christmas trip to downtown Pittsburgh, I remember our group being restless toward the end of the day. My mom and Mrs. Calvin were haggard from having to keep nine or ten thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys in some sort of respectable order, as we trapsed the city of Pittsburgh. We’d done the radio bit. We’d seen the tree. 

We’d Christmas shopped for all of our friends and family in the little kiosks that Kaufmann’s had set up for children shoppers. We’d filled our bellies on fast food and large pops in the Warner Centre food court. We’d tortured the girls we were suddenly becoming attracted to, but had no clue why that was happening. In our last hours of freedom, we stumbled upon Eide’s Entertainment.

Eide’s Entertainment has been a Pittsburgh institution since 1972, back when it was known as “Pittsburgh’s first Comix and Sci-Fi Shop.” Old timers will tell you they remembered Eide’s when the store was on the North Side. Eide’s is the biggest and largest comic book shop in Pittsburgh, and be one of the premier comic and music shops in the United States. By 1978 Eide’s became Eide’s Comics and Records, and a general hip hub for anyone looking for rock to alternative to punk to hard core to indie music. In its present incarnation the store is at least three floors full of comics, music, dvds and videos, and all sort of collectibles.

What do I remember it being like in December 1987? Overwhelming. Eide’s was this vast room full of record and cd bins. Metal music blasted overhead. There was poster all over the walls. T-shirts hanging everywhere. Rows of video cassette tapes against the wall. Tons and tons of comic books. Long-haired men flipped through bins of records. Their nerdish counterparts the boxes of new and vintage comic books. There was a faint odor of cigarette smoke, incense and… certainly our chaperone’s, one being my own mother, had unleashed us catholic school boys into a world we may have been too young to understand. All because there was nothing left to do on our field trip, and there was a life-size cardboard cut-out of Batman loitering in the window.

            At a back counter of Eide’s there were cards. Movie cards. Star Wars cards. BASEBALL cards! What were baseball cards doing in this den of heavy metal intrigue and possible sin? As it stands now, baseball cards come out right before Spring Training. But as a kid, I remember the new cards coming out anywhere between the end of the previous year up until Spring Training. We found out about the new cards by word of mouth, in my case whenever Dimitri Danielopoulos found them and came a’callin’ on me. This time I’d found them first.

Yes, Eide’s Comics and Music, in the midst of head-banging and illicit foreign films, was the first place that I found 1988 Topps. I had to have them. And I had money to burn from the old paper route. Okay, and maybe a little pocket money thrown my way via my mom. One didn’t just go on the annual downtown field trip without having a little scratch on them.

I’d done the charitable part. I’d done the requisite Christmas shopping. Cheap aftershave for the old man. Cheap perfume for my mom. Zilch for my brother. What did he need a gift from me for? He had Santa Claus. Now it was time to take care of me. And scared as I was of those long-haired, tattooed clerks (and I would remain so into my later teenage years when Eide’s became a place I often pilgrimaged to, to buy CDs and the previously mentioned illicit, foreign films), I mustered up the baseball card courage, bothered the surly clerk doomed to be stationed at the card collectibles counter that day, and bought myself a wax box of 1988 Topps.

I barely made it into the house, before I plopped in front of TV and began to rip wax, while my mom retreated to the kitchen for a stiff drink, unwind from a day dealing with teenage boys, and question why she ever undertook such an adventure in the first place. The good son in me should’ve checked on her. But she didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Not even my brother’s crying and moaning that no one bought him any cards. All that mattered to me was opening the packs. 

All that mattered was finding the star cards. Mattingly. Canseco. Bo Jackson. All that mattered was finding my new, young, exciting Pirates team in the packs. Drabek. Bonds. Bream. Bonilla. All that mattered was opening the pack that would get me the card of Andy Van Slyke for the first time in his Pirates uniform. 

Update and Traded sets be damned!

Let’s digress for a moment, shall we? If you’re a Pirates fan there are many red-letter dates in your history. Mazeroski’s home run to win the 1960 World Series. The 1971 series. Clemente’s 3,000^th hit. His fatal plane crash on New Year’s Eve 1972. The Fam-I-Lee of 1979. Clinching the NL East Pennant in 1990. Doing it again in 1991 and 1992. If you’re dark like me, you remember October 14, 1992, as one of your saddest days as a Pirates fan. But a big date for me will always be April 1, 1987. April Fool’s Day.

And boy did that day feel like a joke when it happened. That was the day that the Pirates traded away star catcher, and one of the sole bright spots in the franchise, Tony Pena. 

To explain what Tony Pena meant to the fans of a sinking Pirates franchise, would take a blog post of its own. Let’s just imagine what Red Sox fans felt like when Mookie Betts went to the Dodgers….eh, actually they might’ve felt worse. But Tony was beloved. He and second baseman Johnny Ray were all we had.

And we go and trade our precious Tony? To the goddamned Cardinals? For someone named Andy Van Slyke? A catcher named Mike LaValliere? We already HAD a catcher…and you TRADED him. And who in the hell was Mike Dunne? Who in the hell were any of those guys?  I immediately went to my 1987 commons boxes and sorted through them. Pulling out these:

Of course, I didn’t know it then. I had no clue that the Tony Pena trade (and others) were building a core for an exciting, competitive Pirates team, a team that would give fans a ride from 1987 to 1992. A comeback season in 1987 like no other. A second-place finish in the coming 1988 season. Three straight NL East Pennant winning seasons from 1990-1992.

That trade, in my humble opinion, was the catalyst for a Pirates organization heading for success, and team that would restore pride in Pirates fan from all over. And a big part of that excitement was Andy Van Slyke. And Mr. Van Slyke would win five Gold Gloves and two Silver Slugger awards along the way (the first of each coming in that 2^nd place 1988 season), during his time in Pittsburgh. He’d make three all-star teams (again, for the first time in 1988). And the way he played Centerfield was pure poetry in motion. To talk about Andy Van Slyke is to talk about one of your favorite Pirates ever. I can never leave him off a list. And as a card collector you can bet I PC Andy Van Slyke.

As for Mike Lavalliere….to me he’s forever known simply as Spanky.

I did get the Van Slyke card in my wax box that day. But, going into 1988 proper, there were a few more Van Slyke cards in his new Pirates gear for me to go searching for. 1988 being nearly in the heart of the so-called Junk Wax Era, you could find cards everywhere. Topps and Fleer were plentiful, and the previously hard-to-find Donruss (at least for me) were showing up everywhere. They were so ubiquitous that an actually pretty sharp set is considered the red-headed step-child of the Junk Wax Era; the bane of all of that over-production. Christ, I could find Donruss cards at gas stations that year.

In 1988 there was also a new kid on the block making its arrival. And no, it wasn’t Donnie Wahlberg.

After seven years of Topps, Fleer and Donruss all competing for our card-loving affections (I never did and will never count Sportflics), Score threw its hat into the hobby ring. And boy were they some good-looking cards. 

Cards even came in BIG sizes that year.

Overall, I like but don’t love what the card brands offered in 1988. As an adult, aside from Score, which I still think is a beautiful debut set, I find a lot of 1988 cards to be bland and a touch uninspired. Like all of the creativity went into 1987 cards. I’m sure people are bound to disagree. And I welcome that. But the hazy borders and red and blue stripe motif of Fleer never really did it for me. Neither did that icy blue/flannel I-don’t-know-what design of Donruss. And having a bit of 3-D action in Topps paled in comparison to the masterful, legendary wood-bordered 1987 set.

The 1988 card releases feel like they are the middle-child between amazing sets in 1987 and some pretty good to great ones in 1989. As a kid, I probably thought 1988 had the best card designs in the world. It was the only year I ever completed collecting an entire set with 1988 Topps. 1988 is the only year I ever remember even trying to complete a set. Guess I wasn’t a total, lazy slacker after all.

            Speaking of lazy or slacker, but maybe not really, this brings me back to my original motto. I only run when chased. To be completely honest, I didn’t run those laps for charity. In the fall of 1987, I was a fat and embarrassed kid. There was no way I was going to hustle around a track, letting the parts of me that I desperately and futilely tried to conceal, jiggle all over the place. Not even for a trip to downtown Pittsburgh, and for my grandma (rest her soul) to hear me wish her a Merry Christmas on the radio.

I also HATED that track at Penn-Hebron for personal reasons. My grade school played their JV and varsity football games at Penn-Hebron, as the track surrounded a football field. In 7^th grade I quit the varsity team about a 1/3 of the way into the season. I’d suffered a bad leg injury a year or so before, and I hadn’t completely healed. I couldn’t really keep up at practice or on the field. I felt less-than as an athlete as well.

My Coach didn’t see it that way. He thought that I was being lazy and coddling my injury. As a punishment he had me run laps around that track during practice. To make it more humiliating for me, the coach had three big eighth graders jogging behind me, taunting me the whole time (the burn-outs weren’t the only time I’d been chased). I started to hate going to practice, and I hated going to games. So, I did what I did best back then…I quit. Believe it or not it was actually easier dealing with the shoulder shoves in the hallway from my ex-teammates then to embarrass myself every afternoon and Saturday morning.

The Penn-Hebron track was, what people would call now, PTSD for me, only I couldn’t articulate it back then. I couldn’t physically or emotionally run those laps. Thankfully, I didn’t have to. My grade school had a deal that any kid who didn’t want to run laps (and there were quite a few of us), but still wanted to go on the field trip to downtown Pittsburgh, could donate a certain amount of money. I don’t remember the amount. But my parents did so for me…both years.

Thanks mom and dad....I owe my 1988 Topps to your kindness and generosity.

 

***I know I’ve prattled on for too long here…but I actually got to meet Andy Van Slyke once. I was working at the Pirates Clubhouse Store in the Monroeville Mall. Andy was coming to the store, as players often did, to sign autographs for people who purchased a charity Christmas carol cassette that he was promoting. I want to say this was Christmas of 1992. Phineas stood in the long line, and had Van Slyke sign a ceramic cookie jar sculpted into the form of a monkey, which amused the centerfielder. Andy was Phineas’ favorite player, so I guess he wanted the attention.

            The one thing that I will always remember from that autograph signing was when my co-worker, Paul asked Andy Van Slyke, in all sincerity, if he and Bobby Bonilla were still friends. I’m now guessing that Paul didn’t read much in the sport press about the, rightfully so, grumblings that Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla made in regards to Van Slyke’s “favorite son” status with the Pirates Organization. Right or wrong, the animosity went both ways. After Paul asked his question, Van Slyke stopped signing, like dead stopped, looked at Paul as if he were an alien and just said….Friends???? Like it was the most outrageous statement ever made. Then Andy went back to signing autographs…and I think the boss made Paul go and steam t-shirts***

Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.

If you want to learn more about Andy Van Slyke you can do so HERE and HERE

If you want to learn more about the 1988 Pirates, give THIS account a Twitter follow

Next Friday:  I’m going back to 1985...again. Must be the Back to the Future fan in me. I'm going to take a look at 1985 Topps football cards (an unusual design for the brand), and explain why I ended up having said leg injury I mentioned above. Trigger warning for anyone who doesn't like a little bit of blood.

 --JG