2002-2019 : Or My Various Affairs in the World of Sports Trading Cards

 

It was a small white lie.

            But in the essay, I wrote back in October, the one about coming back to collecting in 2019 after nearly twenty-seven years out of the hobby, maybe there were a few untruths in the writing. That’s not to say it was a totally mendacious piece of writing. I told the truth about my anxiety and my life. I told the truth about my collecting history, for the most part. It’s just that my leaving the hobby and then subsequently picking it back up all those years later, well, it wasn’t as seamless and vacuous a time as I made it sound. There were dalliances with card collecting in those in between years. Flirtations. Small relationships that didn’t even last a year. But nothing that I committed to. At the time I didn’t think those brief cardboard diversions were worth mentioning.

            When I got back into collecting, to stay (I hope), in 2019, I often looked back at those other attempts at collecting and wondered why they never stuck. Where was I at in my life that I suddenly wanted to get back into collecting cards, but ultimately decided against it? What made 2019 so different from say, 2002? Or 2007? 2008 and 2010?

I claimed to get back into card collecting in 2019 because I was an anxious man who needed an outlet. My wife’s ultimatum to me: get a therapist or get a hobby. But wasn’t I always an anxious man? From being an overweight latchkey kid placed in charge of my younger brother to getting my first gray hairs, I’ve always checked doors numerous times, worried about windows being locked or if I left the oven on. Juvenile feelings of inadequecy that never left me. I know my anxiety has gotten worse as I’ve aged, and if ever there was a candidate for therapy it would be me. But the seeds were there all of those years ago.

            I want to take a look at three distinct eras of me dabbling back into the hobby to see what went wrong. Okay, not wrong. But why things didn’t stick. What made me a collector now, as opposed to nineteen years ago when I decided, hey, maybe this hobby is right for me again.

 2002-2003:

The summer of 2002 was the first time that I really tried to get back into cards since my collecting heyday (1983/84-1992). I was twenty-eight and living with my girlfriend (soon-to-be-fiancé) of five years in an apartment in the Bloomfield section of Pittsburgh. I remember that summer as feeling lost. I had always had plans to move from Pittsburgh. To live in different cities. To travel. Since I was seventeen-years-old I wanted to be Jack Kerouac. Or, rather, my version of him, whatever that may be. Instead, I was on the cusp of turning thirty and living in another Pittsburgh apartment…again.

When I met my girlfriend, Ally, in 1997; she had those same rambling aspirations. We sold tons of CDs for money to go to Chicago. We bummed around the Windy City aimlessly for two days. We thought it was going to be the beginning of a great adventure. When Ally finished college, we were going to move to Denver. Then Denver became Boston. Both cities we picked under the guise of attending some MFA program. We saw friends leave Pittsburgh. For Philadelphia. For Brooklyn. Life had to be better in Denver or Boston.

We thought it was only matter of time before we’d be the next to leave. We got our own place to bide our time and save money. Then we got another place. Then another. Moving became a habit. Instead of leaving Pittsburgh, we just moved from one section of the city to another. Shadyside. Squirrel Hill. Bloomfield. We lived like nomads but in the same metro area. There were semi-serious talks about buying a house and moving to the suburbs. The fucking suburbs? By summer of 2002, I felt like the adventurous part of my life, or at least the desire that I had for one…was coming to an end.

I must’ve been looking for something to fill the time and the boredom. Back then, Ally worked occasional weekends and I didn’t. I’m not a needy or extroverted guy, but I didn’t like feeling both lost and alone, especially on a weekend when everyone else was decompressing from the work week and going out. I guess we search for what once made us feel good. And that for me was always baseball cards. I started going to card shows on the Saturdays that Ally worked. Small ones they still had at the Monroeville Mall. Bigger ones at the Monroeville ExpoMart. The occasional flea markets.

I can’t speak much on the hobby in the early 2000s, as I wasn’t a real part of it. I just know what I witnessed. And what I witnessed was sparse. The Mall card shows were a shell of themselves. Flea markets that were overrun with sports card dealers; they took up maybe a table or two. The big card shows at the ExpoMart were reduced to sharing the space with other small to midsize conventions. Cosmetics shows and baseball cards? Dogs and cats living together, man.

There were maybe a third of the dealers at those shows then when I was a kid. More sports memorabilia than cards. The cards looked different. Shiny. Glossy. The card shows at ExpoMart didn’t even have concession stands for a Coke, a crappy hot dog, or a box of popcorn to eat while looking over your finds. Not that I found much to moon over. The autograph signings from the late 1980s and early 1990s heyday seemed a thing of the past.

I didn’t even know what I wanted in terms of getting back into the hobby in 2002. Or what was even out there. I remember buying a lot of Topps Total. There was something about the 990-card set that attracted me. The Ulysses of card sets. The Infinite Jest. Something vast that needed to be conquered. A sports card Mt. Everest. So, I bought a lot of Topps Total.

I also bought a lot of Pittsburgh Pirates cards. Team sets mostly. I filled in the gaps from the last set I bought in 1993 up to the present 2002 issues Pirates team set. But I wasn’t very enthusiastic about it. In the years since I quit collecting, twenty-card team sets were reduced to a handful of players. Especially for the Pirates. But who in God’s name wanted a team set of the 2002 Pittsburgh Pirates?

The team had finished 62-100 the previous season. The Bucs hadn’t had a winning record in a decade. Van Slyke. Bonds. Bonilla. All ghosts. The only good thing about a 2002 Pirates team set was that some of the images were taken in the brand-new PNC Park. God, I hated that era of the Pirates. The Jason Kendall/Brian Giles era. How could I be excited about buying cards for a sports product that was so terrible on the field? I kept thinking why was I even buying the cards?

These two....no fond remembrances here:

By the fall of 2002, I knew my heart wasn’t into collecting again. My Topps Total project had failed because a 990-card set is, well, a 990-card set. The 2002 Pirates had “bettered” their record to 72-89, and I knew I wasn’t going to be hungering for their 2003 sets. I felt like I was wasting money buying cards. Money Ally and I now needed.

She’d decided to go to grad school in New Orleans. The ol’ MFA guise. That wondering spirit was coming back into our lives! NOLA. The Big Easy! There’d be no move to the ‘burbs. No kids coming in a few years. This time we were really going to do it. We also got engaged. As 2002 turned into 2003, it felt like I was finally going to get out of Pittsburgh and experience something else, somewhere else. I felt like things were going to change for real this time. And they did. Just not like we expected.

I wrote about the passing of my father-in-law last week. What I didn’t detail was how long he had been dealing with the cancer that ultimately played a role in his death. Just after New Year’s 2003, Ally and I learned that Big Ron had cancer. Bladder cancer. Bad cancer. Stage four cancer. Ally was devasted. Suddenly Pittsburgh seemed too far away from her dad. And If Pittsburgh felt far, how far away would New Orleans feel?

Ally deferred her acceptance to that MFA program, but not to our leaving Pittsburgh. By April of 2003, we were living in Brooklyn (about an hour south from where her parents lived) and doing our best to be there for Big Ron as he was operated on and began to heal until there was initially no evidence of disease in him. My brief dalliance with cards? Card collecting quickly became a distant memory when I was hunting for a job in one of the biggest cities in the world, and had a $1200 rent breathing down my neck every month. Not to mention the culture shock that I never expected to hit me in the way it did. Let’s just say be careful what you wish for. But that’s for another type of blog.

 2007:

In the late winter/early spring of 2007, Ally and I had been living in Buffalo, New York for almost two years. 

We’d moved to Buffalo from Brooklyn in April 2005, after a couple of tumultuous, sometimes joyous years in NYC. We’d married in June 2004, and it was a good feeling to say that Big Ron was in full recovery, and we didn’t feel like we needed to be around all of the time. He was at our wedding and that mattered in ways we couldn’t even comprehend.

Ally and I also weren’t sure how we felt about New York City. New York, despite my affinity for The Beats, had never been on my radar in terms of places I wanted to live. Ally had her own reasons for distaining New York at the time. We’d moved there to be close to family when family was in need. When that settled down, I think it was hard to see what the city really had to offer us.

Also, the Brooklyn neighborhood we lived in didn’t make it easy. Carroll Gardens is posh as hell now, and I couldn’t afford to live there if I tried. But in 2003-2005, sections of the neighborhood were still raw. We had gang members on our street. We had the Guardian Angels in their little, red hats. Our upstairs neighbor lived for loud bass music. I saw a guy throw a brick through a car’s window after it sped away.

Want more?

On President’s Day weekend of 2003, I witnessed a dog murder another dog. Yeah. From my living room window, I watched a muscled, white Pitt Bull come out of the apartment next door, trot across the street, and casually clamp its jaws around the neck of a chained-up German Shepherd’s neck. The Pitt wouldn’t let go until the other dog was dead, despite the wailing and beating of the German Shepherd’s owner. When the carnage ended the Pitt Bull strolled away as casually as it came. The Shepherd’s body lay wrapped in a garbage bag for almost a week. Pittsburgh this was not.

We were working lousy jobs as well. Ally got stuck somewhere in HR, and I was working a “librarian” job in the medical library for a major pharmaceutical corporation. We both began dabbling in smoking cigarettes again, to calm our nerves, after working so hard to quit in 2001. We were in a different city but we were still at the same dead end. Our jobs were a few blocks away. On lunches Ally and I would meet, smoke, and discuss what in the hell were we going to do now?

Life was too raw for 2003 to 2005 baseball cards. Although I love the '03 design now:

The idea of grad school floated up again. But not in New York City. What we needed was a smaller, more manageable city. Maybe we were small city people after all. But not Pittsburgh. I was determined not to tuck my tail between my legs and head back there. No, it had to be somewhere else. Ally’s sister lived in Buffalo. She seemed to like it. We’d visited her there a few times, and the city seemed all right. We’d seen Ani DiFranco in a downtown coffee shop on one of our visits. That was cool, right? Why not Buffalo?

Plus...these:

Buffalo was an adjustment in a different way. We were going from subway culture to car culture again. I’d gotten used to hopping on a subway or walking everywhere, and there I was stuck in traffic. Things were spread out in Buffalo. They had strip malls. I thought my job at that medical conglomerate was lousy, but I couldn’t even find a job in Buffalo.

One of the places that actually hired me was a bath and sink warehouse. The guy interviewing me, overly chipper to a fault, was convinced I was going to write a novel and leave the job simply because I put down writing as a hobby on my resume. I also had baseball down; guess I didn’t look like major league material. He had a picture of himself and his staff kayaking. No reasonable man kayaks. I didn’t take the job. I couldn’t find a job, and I refused the one job that was offered to me. I felt like a failure and an absolute jackass.

A month, and many beers later, I ended up getting a job in a wine store the size of a car dealership. They put me in the warehouse and then thought, because I had a college degree, that I could sell wines. That’s too much of an experience to mention here. But you can buy the novel and read all about it. And, yeah, if forced, I can pair a decent red with a good steak.

What does any of this have to do with cards? I’m sure anyone who reads this blog on a weekly basis must ask that question at some point.

Well, by summer of 2006 I’d quit the wine store, and had hooked up with a temp agency that got me gigs from time to time. File work. Invoice processing. There could be weeks in between one job ending and another beginning. Because Buffalo was cheap, and Ally had a steady full-time job, money wasn’t as much of an issue. I had my classes to fill some of the time home alone. But the work involved in getting a masters of library science degree? Let’s just say, you aren’t really pressing yourself intellectually.

The goal by spring of 2007 was to finish the degree. Move to Monroe, New York, and live in my in-law’s basement until Ally and I found jobs as public librarians. Yes…in New York City again. Another long story as to why we’d go back. Let’s just say once you get the stink of NYC on you….

WAIT.....HANG ON....

Live in my in-laws basement? Move back to New York City? The city where you can never walk down the street alone? The city of dog murders? I felt the anxiety beginning to bubble up.

One spring morning in 2007, I found myself out of work with nothing to do, and in front of a sports card shop on Hertel Avenue. I remember looking in the window at a man behind a glass showcase with boxes upon boxes of cards behind him. Suddenly, I got that old itch. The itch I’d had as a kid. The racing down the mall hallway with Phineas, Miller and my brother itch. The itch I started to scratch back in 2002. The itch that would quell any lingering doubt. Here we go again, I thought.

I went inside that card shop and bought a few packs of 2007 Topps cards. I loved the bold, black design of the cards. The foiled lettering. The black and green grass backs. I was hooked. I found myself going back to the store and buying more packs. Then more. Finally, I bought myself a hobby box, as they were now being called. Within a few packs I pulled this card.

I thought I was back in to collecting for sure.

But then May came. Ally and I got our degrees and hightailed it out of Buffalo for Monroe, New York. We stayed with my in-laws for about two weeks before it was time to travel. We’d saved some money in Buffalo. We had some cash. Before settling in to look for jobs, Ally and I made a plan to travel the USA by car. My Kerouacian dream was coming true after all.

And boy did we! From New York to New Orleans to Dallas to Arizona and then California. To Wyoming. Through Kansas. Kansas City and St. Louis Barbeque. Chicago deep dish. Chicago to Pittsburgh. And then Pittsburgh back to New York, where the car that had taken us some six-thousand miles, had its check-engine light go on the minute we pulled into my in-law’s driveway.

By August of 2007, Ally and I both had librarian jobs in the city. And we both had more student loans to pay. We moved out of the basement in Monroe, and found ourselves an apartment in a part of Brooklyn where dog on dog murder was not a common theme. I was joining committees at my job. Ally and I were going over to Manhattan on weekends, and really taking the city in, in a way we were unable to back in 2003. We felt we belonged in New York City this time. We joined the MoMA and I fell for art in a way that I never had before in my life. 

From time to time, I’d look at all those 2007 Topps cards that I bought in Buffalo. They seemed like purchases made by a stranger. As with 2002, I asked myself why had a bought these things? There was an answer at the time, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Anxiety or something? The cards felt like clutter. I’d still look through them from time to time. Then I put the box in my closet. I stopped going through the cards altogether.

 2008-2019:

            But there was less of a lull between my collecting liaison in 2007, and getting back on the bike in spring of 2008. Why was that? I’d discovered something called Topps Heritage. Putting modern players on older Topps designs seemed a genius move. And in 2008, Topps was using their 1959 design for their Heritage brand. When I was a kid, I LOVED 1959 Topps cards, and always wanted some. I had to have them. My awesome wife managed to find a hobby store (in our old Carroll Gardens neighborhood), and she surprised me with a hobby box for my birthday.

    This led to me buying packs again. Topps, Heritage and Upper Deck. I found a comic book shop in my newish Brooklyn neighborhood, and was happy to find that they sold cards. I bought a lot of 2008 Topps. The design was such a sharp contrast to the 2007 Topps cards. Stark white, where 2007 had been black. More a traditional design. Scaling back from all of the foil. I liked them but I didn’t love them.

My buying seeped into 2009.  I could never get used to this card.

    But as with everything else, there’s change in life. Having an actual career now meant having actual money in our savings account. Having been a relative pauper from the age of twenty-two to thirty-four, it was nice to not live paycheck to paycheck. Traveling the USA by car had made the traveling bug grow. Not only did I want to revisit the honky-tonks of Nashville, the Jazz joints on Frenchman Street, and kill an afternoon over a pint of Anchor Steam in Vesuvio’s San Francisco; I wanted to go international. London. Paris. Madrid. Vienna. 

Dublin to walk in the footsteps of James Joyce.

    A travel budget in 2008 couldn’t really support collecting cards. Or at least that’s what I thought. So I stopped again. But I wasn’t really out. My brother got back big into collecting and selling cards. When I visited him, he always had the latest Topps brands around. He’d give me Pirates cards. Pirates cards were worth having again. 

    Andrew McCutchen. 

    Pedro Alvarez. 

Pittsburgh had a winning team, and I could admire them from afar. Really afar. I began watching the 2010 baseball season in a Canadian sports bar…in Paris.

 So why didn’t collecting stick those other times? The answer was obvious but it took nearly 3,380 words to get there…and I’m still writing.

The real answer is: I’m old. I’m settled down. My life isn’t in flux the way it was at those times, and I consider that a good thing. I’ve been in the same job for fourteen years now, wherein I used to work a place for two years and then move on…just like with apartments. I’ve also lived in the same place for fourteen years. Same city. Same apartment.

And I've traveled.

There is anxiety. Too much on most days. But I feel like I have more time, energy and money to invest in a hobby than at any time since my youth. The twenty-eight-year-old me was lost and searching. The thirty-four-year-old me was on the cusp of new horizons: career and travel. The soon-to-be forty-seven-year-old me? He’s seen some things in this world. Good and bad. Most days now it’s nice to sit back with a stack of cards or some packs, put on a little bit of music, and just have some fun.

Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.

NEXT FRIDAY:  I'm taking a break and we have guest blogger Russell Streur here to talk about the Brewers. Russell's post has a come-from-behind win in the bottom of the ninth, a no-hitter, a 39-game hitting streak with a little bit of Greek sculpture mixed in. Oh, and free hamburgers! Hope you enjoy! 

           

 

 

 

 

Pops...we love you : a look at Willie Stargell...and a fond remembrance of someone else

 

Once Upon a Time, a legend lived amongst men.

            Or that’s how I felt when I thought about Willie Stargell as a kid. Willie was a living legend. The captain of the Pirates. The man who molded the Pirates into his image after the tragic death of Roberto Clemente. The legacy of the 1971 and 1979 World Series championships. A founding membet of the Lumber Company. 

            Pops.

Wille Stargell isn’t Roberto Clemente. Roberto continues to be the soul of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The tragic hero. A Pittsburgh icon. Although if people in Pittsburgh took a closer look at how Roberto was treated while he played in the city well…let’s leave that for another time. And no one (looking at you Topps, you lazy bastards), other than a soused Bob Prince, ever called Roberto “Bob.”

Clemente was a legend. But he wasn’t the face of the Pirates for me. Roberto was gone for almost seven years by the time I really started paying attention to baseball in 1980. Willie and the Fam-I-Lee were the rage. Willie Stargell was in full Pops mode. He was the player that I wanted to see, the player that I wanted to be. I even practiced his batting stance with a long, yellow wiffle ball bat. Willie might not have been Clemente. But Stargell was a giant. Up and coming players, in Pittsburgh and around the National League, had to stand on his shoulders just to see how far they could go.

            I’ve talked about Willie Stargell on this blog before, but his statistics are worth mentioning again. Pops played twenty-one years in the major leagues, all with the Pittsburgh Pirates. An end of an era in terms of legacy long-term players on the team. Wille was a seven-time all-star. The NL co-MVP in 1979. A World Series MVP. The NL player of the year. A first-ballot Hall of Famer who amassed 475 home runs in his career, and probably would’ve reached 500 had injuries not plagued him toward the end. Etc. Taking all of this into account and the way Willie was revered, it made sense that he would become one of my first favorite players of all-time.

            And as a card collector, it also made sense to get as many Willie Stargell cards as I could get my grubby hands on. But as with being a kid in the 1980s, collecting players like Willie Stargell never came easy. There was no SportLots. No ComC. Being a kid with no money meant that I was relegated to getting Willie’s cards via a costly trade, or a trip to the American Coin collectibles shop in the Monroeville Mall, hoping for a deal. It meant that I was relegated to getting a lot of Willie Stargell’s cards from the end of his career, because those were the ones that I could afford. Anything older was unfathomable to my consistently empty pockets. Not that cards from that era were any kind of a slouch. 

To see older Stargell cards, funky 1970’s bearded Willie, or fresh-faced Willie from the 1960s, meant that I had to pour enviously over some older kid’s collection, or to view them under glass at a card show or local LCS. I had to wait until I got a bit older, and was able to buy some of those cards on my own. Or trade for them when I was able to build up my collection so that it included various older cards of the same value.  Being a kid during the inflated value of Junk Wax Era cards, also meant that I could pull cards like a 1987 Topps Bo Jackson and actually trade some kids for cards from the 1960s and 1970s. It was a strange economical time to be in the hobby.

That said, here are some of my favorite Stargell cards from the 1960s to mid-1970s.

When I got back into getting back into collecting, for medicinal purposes in 2019, I had to decide what kind of a collector I wanted to be. I’ve gone into this in past posts, but I was never a set builder. My view on getting back into collecting is that I would come at it from the perspective of someone who built sets and didn’t collect individual cards. That frame of mind lasted until I ripped my first packs of 1987 Topps and pulled a Bobby Bonilla rookie card. Then I wanted a PC.  Willie Stargell cards absolutely had to be a part of that.

The first Willie cards that I found were at a flea market in Pittsburgh in December of 2019. Living in New York City, there aren’t many cards shows to attend and not many LCS that cater to older cards. So I didn’t have much of chance to look through stuff from other eras than the present one. At that flea market I remember thinking how cool it was to be sifting through cards again. I went there with my younger brother. It was like we were kids again. But kids with actual cash in our pockets. One of the places in the flea market had a $1 bin full of Pirates, Steelers and Penguins cards. 

I got this one for .50 cents:

At the time my thinking was that I’d be able to build Willie Stargell’s entire career at flea markets and card shows. I say NYC is a baren wasteland in terms of card shows, but we did have a small one in Midtown that you could go to every second Saturday. My brother and I made plans to go to the National in 2020. Big plans. Go to Atlantic City. Buy some cards. Take a side trip to Philadelphia for a Phillies game. Come back home and see the Yankees or the Mets. But we all know how 2020 went.

Sigh.

Instead of making the flea market and card show rounds, like some newly crowned debutant, I spent months stuck indoors or running away from people in grocery store. I went on epic quests for toilet paper. I listened to sirens wail up and down my Brooklyn Street for weeks on end. My wife and I watched the death count rise, and fear for our lives and the lives of our families. Fear became a lifestyle choice.

I did collect. The hobby was on the cusp of exploding in those early Covid days, but older stuff was still reasonable. I started buying a lot of Junk Wax. I started putting together sets  from that era that I wasn’t really into. No offence 1991 Donruss and 1989 Fleer. I forgot about buying individual cards because, other than in person at card shows, I really didn’t know where to buy them. I wasn’t following a lot of collectors online yet, so I was pretty much navigating the hobby on my own. Until I came upon THIS YouTube post by the fellows at Up North Card Collectors.

I’ve admitted here that I don’t like to make online purchases, and that I have a lot of anxiety with using my credit card. But necessity being the mother of invention, I started using ComC to buy some of the singles that I so desperately wanted and thought that I was going to find at those now lost flea markets and card shows. And episode of Hobby Quick Hits by John Newman keyed me in on SportLots. I suddenly had trustworthy places where I didn’t have to feel so nervous buying cards. So I did. And I bought a lot of Willie Stargell cards.

By May I had pretty much bought his base cards from every year and company save this one.

A purchase like that was going to take a lot of nerve on my part. I’m still not ready to make that purchase. I was like that kid who ate all of his Halloween candy in one night, and wondered what was next? What was left to buy? Where in the hell was I going from here?

Enter post-playing career cards.

I’ve said it before on here and I’ll say it again. I love…LOVE…card designs that feature players who were never on those actual cards. And my love is not just for the cards of Willie Stargell that are like that. Show me a Hank Aaron card in the 1979 design and I’ll melt. 

Willie Mays doused in the gold of a Topps 2002…yes please. 

Babe Ruth? The Bambino? The Sultan of Swat? On a 1993 Topps? 

Yeah it might not be his 1936 Goudey card. But I’ll take it.

And the Willie Stargell search continues.

Once Upon a Time, a legend lived amongst men. 

On March 6, 2020, my wife and her sisters lost their gentle and kind father, my niece and nephews lost their grandfather, my mother-in-law lost her beloved and loving husband, and I lost my-father-in-law…and a good friend. To articulate my feelings, it still feels too raw. But I knew I was going to write about Big Ron Malinenko at some point on this blog. It was only when my wife and I were reminiscing about him the other night that I decided an upcoming blog post about Willie Stargell would be as good a time as any.

You see, there’s a bit of a small connection between Big Ron, Willie Stargell and I. Ron died on March 6^th, on what would’ve been Willie Stargell’s 81^st birthday. Willie died on April 9, 2001, on what was then my 27^th birthday. Granted it’s not much in the way of a connection, but my wife said that her dad always found tidbits like that to be interesting and entertaining. So I include those facts for Big Ron.

What is there to say about a man whom I’ve known and loved for twenty-three years? Well…a lot. Ron was kind and Ron was gentle. I’d never once seen him angry, except jokingly at A-Rod. Ron was patient. Boy, was he patient. I’m impatient to a fault, but around him I felt like I could be patient. I felt calm around Ron in a way I never felt around anyone else.

Ron was quiet and sincere. I never felt bullshitted around my father-in-law, and I never felt the need to talk to fill in the gaps between conversations. You didn’t have to talk around Big Ron. He and I spent years silently watching bad movies (yes, we sat through Charlie’s Angels 2), and countless Yankees games. So many Yankees games that Big Ron Malinenko did the impossinle…he made this Rust Belt, Steel City kid…a Yankees fan.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m a goddamned Yankees fan. I think Derek Jeter is the best. I think Mickey Mantle belongs on Mt. Rushmore. I maintain a moment of silence every August 2^nd. I think I understand the psyche of Billy Martin. I overlook ridiculous grooming policies. I worry about the health of Aaron Judge. I think Bernie Williams is a very talented musician. I have an unreasonable hatred of the Boston Red Sox. If I could find a Reggie bar, I’d eat it. I think A-Rod belongs in the Hall of Fame. Sue me. I’ve been watching the Yankees since 2003 with my father-in-law. And watching actual winning baseball can be infectious. 

One of the things that I wanted to do after this pandemic was over, or at least when my wife and I were vaccinated, was to watch a Yankees game with my father-in-law. I wanted to go to that apartment that my in-laws moved to in Buffalo to be close to their awesome grandkids, try not to spill red wine (again) on their white couch, and just sit back and watch the Yankees with Big Ron. I wanted to break our peaceful silence to complain about Gary Sanchez, and then cheer for him when he proved us wrong. I still can’t comprehend that that isn’t going to happen. My wife is fully vaccinated. I have my first shot. Christ, we got so close. So goddamned close.

I don’t want to dwell on sadness here. We’re doing enough of that in our own home right now. What I want to remember is one day in the summer evening 2007 that Big Ron made very special for me. He took me to a Yankees game. Just the two of us, father-in-law and son-in-law.

Memory is a fuzzy thing. As I always remembered it, we went to the game on the evening that Roger Clemens announced that he was coming out of retirement and rejoining the Yankees. But that memory is wrong. Roger Clemens announced his return on May 6, 2007…a Sunday. Ron and I went to the game on a weeknight. Why did I think it was that specific moment?

I realize now the May 6, 2007 game we watched at my in-law’s home back in Monroe, New York. That game happened two days after my wife and I moved in with them, while we looking for librarian jobs in New York City. Minus a coast to coast car ride ala Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, we spent the summer in their basement. The Clemens return game was probably the first Yankees game of the year that Big Ron and I sat down together to watch that season. A memory in and of itself. But it wasn’t our game.

Sadly, I don’t remember the specifics of play, or the actual date other than summer of 2007. But I do know that Big Ron made it special. I remember picking him up at his Post Office station in New City, watching in the office as Ron finished up work, joking with the other guys on his shift, as he was apt to do. I remember taking the ride into the city, the way Manhattan bursts into view from over the George Washington Bridge. 

I remember Big Ron taking me into The Bronx before the game. We drove around the old neighborhood that he grew up in, passing places that existed and places that no longer did, as Ron told me stories of being an immigrant kid transplanted in the big city.

Then going to the stadium. Old Yankee Stadium. 

Ron and I had burgers in one of those stadium restaurants that you had to get tickets to go into. The place was loaded with Yankee memorabilia. Then we went to Monument Park and paid our respects to the ghost of Mickey Mantle. Somehow Big Ron had scored us seats on the second level behind home plate. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to the field in Yankee Stadium. I remember Ron pointing down to field level seats on the first base side. He told me that where his father-in-law used to sit when he came to Yankees games. Then we had a beer and sat back and watched the game. 

It’s the stuff like that you hold on to.

I had the best time at that game. I don’t know if I ever really told Big Ron how much it meant to me. Now, I just hope that he always knew.

Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.

NEXT FRIDAY:  I'm going to talk about how I dabbled in collecting again between the years that I stopped in 1992 and when I got back into it in 2019. About how my anxiety and my own sense of self stopped me from getting back into the hobby much sooner than I did.

 

1991 : I'm Going Through Changes

 

A change was coming for me in 1991.

            And I need a change. I was tired. Tired of being overweight. Tired of being ignored by girls that I was attracted to, or unable to talk with them because I felt less than or invisible. I was tired of being made fun of by my classmates. Or if a friend and I got into a fight, them having the easy scapegoat of calling me a fat ass. How does one come back from fat ass? It’s belittling and embarrassing. In effect, I was tired of being me. I wanted to lose weight. Become, fitter, happier, more productive; comfortable. Be someone different. But it’s hard to escape yourself.

One of the last straws for me was Jamal Johnson, in English Lit class of all place, menacingly stalking around the room before the teacher had arrived. Jamal, in the infinite wit of a bully, had decided to play a version of duck, duck, goose; see how many kids he could get before the teacher arrived. Good ol’ Jamal went around to each kid, sitting aptly in their seats, shouting, duck, duck…or goose.

Jamal wasn’t very bright. But he was cruel. A third-rate varsity football player who had to compensate for his lack of skills on the football field by being a bully. When Jamal got to me, instead of saying duck or goose…he said cow. The joke was obvious and dull. But so was high school. Most of the kids in the classroom had a hearty laugh at it. Most likely I turned scarlet; the hapless victim yet again. Then the teacher came in and everyone forgot Jamal’s joke…except me. It’s 2021 and I still haven’t forgotten the joke.

            That incident happened right before Christmas break in December of 1990. But this essay isn’t about that incident. It’s about what happened in my life during and after. Oh, and it’s also about baseball cards.

            Thanks to Jamal’s delicate prodding and obvious concern for my health, I decided in earnest to lose weight come the New Year. It wasn’t my first time trying. Having gained weight years back while living in West Virginia (ages 7 to 8), I’d spent the bulk of my childhood wearing the fat kid label. I’d suffered the indignities of doctor’s scolding. I found guilt and shame in a box of Pop Tarts. I’d spend weeks eating non-fat yogurt and pretending I’d liked it. Playing J.V. football helped a little bit and I shed some pounds on the offensive line. But then THIS happened.

A leg injury that was probably the beginning of me turning from a chubby kid into a fat and depressed teenager. It seemed de rigueur that people would make fun of me. An accepted part of my legend. And it wasn’t just kids. Jamal mocking me at school was one thing. Like I said before, Doctors did it too. But that very same Christmas I overheard a friend of my mom’s scolding her for letting me eat so much. School was one thing. But the ridicule was happening in my own damn home.

Shortly after, I made a decision. I was going to lose weight. A lot of weight. So much weight that no one could say a goddamned thing to me anymore. I was going to play sports and girls were going to like me. Because I was fitter. Better. I was going to lose weight, and I was going to lose it…with the help of this guy: 

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone’s mother or older sister probably had an exercise or workout tape in their home. My mom was no exception. She had the first of the Richard Simmons’ Sweating to the Oldies VHS tapes. I remembered Richard from the television show that he had back in the early 1980s. He seemed affable enough. A little flaky and shouty. But he’d once been a fat kid too…just like me. Richard Simmons seemed like he’d empathize with my plight. He seemed like he’d care.

I started Sweating to the Oldies three times a week. In my view, anyone working out to a video looks kind of silly. Even fit, attractive people. But a soon-to-be seventeen-year-old obese boy? One who shared a room with a younger brother, who was the exact opposite of him physically. A brother who was blessed by being a picky eater. A brother who had girls calling him in seventh grade. A brother who played sports. A brother who could, and did, walk into said room with his friends while I was in the middle of doing said exercise tape. Often it wasn’t a good scene. But I kept to it. I kept seeing Jamal Johnson walking around that classroom. Duck, duck, COW!

            I also cut down on my food intake dramatically. Hindsight being what it was, I was essentially starving myself. Goodbye double helpings of spaghetti and five slices of pizza. Goodbye Hostess products. So long Pop Tarts. Hello a pack of those cheese and peanut butter crackers, a diet Pepsi…and little else. No junk food at ball games in the spring. I wouldn’t even chew the gum in packs of cards.

It was hard at first. Hunger became a fact of life just like being overweight had been. I had no other friends trying to lose weight. Lunches at school were a smorgasbord of junk food and strong, sugary drink. I felt isolated from my friends now as well. But I had Richard Simmons, Rich…or Dick whenever I was angry and needed someone to shout at while exercising. I wasn’t fully alone.

And…I could feel the change happening. I could feel those polyester pants, the ones my parents had to have custom made at Kay’s Men’s Clothing in Downtown Pittsburgh, because I was too overweight to buy from off the rack (unless I wanted a massive hem job done of the pant legs); I could feel those polyester pants loosening…and loosening.

            In 1991, I was going through changes emotionally and intellectually as well. Before 1991, all of my money went to buying baseball cards. Packs and some singles when I was on the kid’s version of the dole, i.e., digging for change in couch cushions, accepting an allowance for chores that I didn’t want to do to begin with at home, or outright begging for .50 cents. Then I got my paper route job and upped the ante by buying wax boxes. The paper route was financial liberation to an extent. I had the feeling of not worrying about money when I bought cards. As long as I kept the totals from my parents. If I did that, the sky was the cardboard limit.

            Then a funny thing happened in the fall of 1990. Not too long before Jamal Johnson and his wacky, eye-opening duck, duck goose game. I began to develop other interests aside from sports cards. I started getting into music. And not just the R&B and rap of my day, or Top 40 radio. But music. Bands. 1960’s and 1970’s stuff. The Stones. The Door. I became a Beatles addict. I borrowed and dubbed as many of my friend Kris’ Beatles CDs as I could…until he half-sarcastically told me to buy my own. So I did.

            Rubber Soul was the first Beatles CD that I ever bought.

        I also got into literature and film. And writing. My book shelves and VHS shelves began to rival my CD stand in terms of growth. While I was still buying a lot of Topps cards, I was nitpicking the cards from the other brands. I was finding that I had less and less time to whip out the ol’ shoebox and muse over card designs and statistics. Less, desire too. Instead, I fancied myself a poet, and spent evenings in my room trying to compose verses that would attack the culture norms of the time (i.e. my school hierarchy), or make a young gal swoon.

I started submitting poems to school’s literary magazine. They were mostly diatribes against the jerks in school, or wannabe Beatles lyrics circa Sgt. Pepper. Here, unfortunately, are a couple of examples. A portrait of the artist as an over-sensitive seventeen-year-old kid.

But more than anything in my life, I’ve stuck with writing. Thirty plus years is dedication. I’d like to think I’ve done okay at it.

            It wasn’t just those aesthetic items that were chewing into my card purchasing money. By spring and summer of 1991, with the weight coming off and my ego getting a small boost, my conspicuous consumption began to expand and change even more. Clothing now entered the picture along with the music, books, and VHS artsy films. And not just the sweatpants and polyester pants that I was forced into buying and wearing. I mean GEAR. Here’s an idea:

That spring of 1991, I got my first, real part-time job that wasn’t cutting my old man’s grass (which I did exactly once, I think), or slinging newspapers and being chased by dogs and my own avid imagination at five o’clock on a dark morning. I got myself a genuine job at the Monroeville Mall. The mall of George Romero fame. The mall of my early baseball card dreams.

And it wasn’t just any job. It was the Pittsburgh Pirates Clubhouse shop, where I joined the ranks of dudes with floppy hair wearing sporting goods gear, and jamming to Jodeci and A Tribe Called Quest. I spent my weeknights and weekends selling baseball caps to everyone from suburban bros to gangbangers from the city. The early 90s were ground zero for people getting into wearing sports clothing as style and fashion. Now baseball hats existing as accessories for everyone from rappers to business bros is the norm. Yours truly had a coveted, ahead of its time job.

You know what else came with that job at the mall? Girls. Girls came into mall in droves. They came alone. They came in packs. They wore short skirt and short shorts in the summer. They seemed to like the dudes who worked in sporting goods, had floppy hair, and listened to A Tribe Called Quest. I was among their ranks. Girls came in the store and loitered for no reason. The change that I’d wanted so badly was finally coming.

            Baseball cards were changing too…albeit at a slower pace than I was changing. The arrival of Upper Deck in 1989 was an obvious game changer for baseball cards and sports cards in general. It took the other brands a few years to catch up. In 1991 they still weren’t there, at least not with their base cards. Donruss and Fleer put out base product like this.

Upper Deck was still the most stylish but my 1991 budget wasn’t paying for that. 

Score was all right in 1991

but, at 900 cards, the set was too vast and too many whistles and bells that took away from it.

        Full disclosure, the card brands were trying to catch up to Upper Deck. Just not yet with their base cards. By 1991, Topps, Fleer and Donruss all had premium, higher quality (i.e. more expensive sets that they produced). Even though I didn’t buy any of the premium sets, I’ve really grown to love Topps Stadium Club over the years and am slowly putting together the 1991 premier edition set. Here’s Bobby Bonilla’s card.

But I still bought Topps base cards. Good old Topps. The smell of cardboard, gum and wax. Okay, not quite wax. Remember those changes? 1991 was the first year that Topps stopped putting its card in wax packs. The brand moved into the modern era but using a more tamper-proof cellophane packaging.  But the packs still had the gum. And the cards were still on that gray card stock. So not a total revamp.

But you could see a change coming in the cards. 1991 was Topps 40^th anniversary so they wanted to make a splash. And did they ever! The boarders where wide and white and crisp, like Topps had something to show Upper Deck. The images on Topps cards were a marked improvement over 1990, and some of the most inventive and startlingly beautiful images that they’ve ever captured on baseball cards.

Topps brought back horizontal image cards. 

A first since 1974. They used the team’s script on the front of the cards instead of just a logo. And the backs on 1991 Topps? Let’s just say some of them could be illuminating to say the least.

Here are some of my favorite cards from the set.

In the fall of 1991, I was a senior. I had a cool mall job. And I had lost 70 pounds. People’s reactions were typical. Surprise. And then the realization that an actual human being had been there all along. When word got out about my job slinging ballcaps at the mall, the “cool” guys from class began coming into Pirates Clubhouse, looking for a discount. Which they weren’t getting. Weight loss or not, and half-baked small talk instead of insults in class weren’t going to cut it after years of abuse. I couldn’t sell myself out for a change in the status quo. Not to those jerks.

But I also found that losing weight hadn’t changed me all that much. I still had the same friends. I still had the same insecurities as before, now coupled with the stress of people paying actual attention to me. I couldn’t get with the cool guys because there was too much resentment. Also, Jamal Johnson was still an asshole; he just found different things to bully a guy over. I couldn’t get with the girls, because I found that instead of having a change in confidence, I was still felt like that invisible fat kid. I couldn’t really shake the old me, even though I was seventy pounds lighter.

I began to develop a chip on my shoulder. If a girl liked me, I was aloof and cold. You didn’t like me before, why do you like me now? Became my motto. Even if the girl had never known me from before. I was circumspect when my co-worker, floppy-haired buddies wanted to hang out. I couldn’t take a complement to save my life. Like Topps in 1991, I still had some kinks to work out before I could really change. I had lost weight. I had new clothes. But I was still gray cardboard stock.

And I did change...kinda. We both did. By 1992 it was going to be a whole new ballgame for me and for Topps. We’d never be the same.

Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.

 If you want to learn more about 1991 Topps, Joey Shiver, AKA Dub Mentality, has an article that you can read right HERE

Wax Pack Gods has an article on the popular 1991 Topps Set HERE as well

Next Friday:  I’m going to dig into the P.C. and take a look at some of the Willie Stargell cards that I have. I want to take a look at Willie the player and Willie the captain. I also have a special connection to Willie, one that has recently increased, which I'll discuss next Friday, as I also pay tribute to an even more wonderful man.

 --JG