FOMO, 1987 Fleer, 2021 Topps Update, and Having a Round with the Examined Life

 

As a returning sports card collector, I learned a new acronym.

            FOMO

            Fear of missing out.

            Believe it or not, I’d never heard that phrase/acronym/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, before I began collecting again. Then there it was. On card podcasts. In collector’s feeds. FOMO. Fear of missing out. Usually, it was attributed to the inability to buy a card product that other collector’s had access to and they wanted. Or it was a product that said collector wasn’t really into, but was going to buy anyway because they didn’t want to be left out of the experience of opening that particular release, or be unable to participate in a discussion over a product.

            FOMO.

            Fear of missing out.

            Like everytime i see this.

            

            I’ve been going through a bit of an existential crisis as a collector these last few months. Or maybe this whole time. They say the un-examined life isn’t worth living. I say, the over-examined life is a pain in the ass sometimes.

            Yet there I was with my thoughts.

What kind of a collector am I? What’s this all about? I bought nearly every new release in 2020 and I still was confused. I thought buying less product in 2021 would help me (it certainly helped my financial bottom line) figure it out. I’m a flagship man and nothing else. Or, wait, I’m a Heritage collector too! Ah, but Stadium Club sure does look nice this year! How about them gypsy queens?

No…it’s chrome, chrome, chrome all the time.

            When in the hell is Big League coming out?

            I don’t know if part of this malaise is FOMO, or me just being a confused old man. I wasn’t exactly jealous of another collector opening product. Typically, I felt happy for them when they pulled something they liked. It wasn’t always this way. As a kid I had huge card FOMO. I remember Dimitri Danielopoulus showing up like clockwork every year with new cards, the punk. And then me being frantic trying to find them in every chain pharmacy I went into. Or Phineas. How he always seemed to have the latest Fleer and Donruss cards, when I was usually stuck with Topps.

            Oh, I’ve been to FOMO town and I’ve shook the FOMO down.

            But as an adult?

FOMO feels more like compulsion as an adult, rather than the fear of missing out. But still…it exists. I tried to quell that compulsion to buy product, by sticking with Flagship, and buying the cards of the players that I wanted from the other products. I’d wait for a release, watch as other collectors had fun opening said product, and then I’d buy the players I wanted on the secondary market.

There.

No need to feel jealous of anyone.

If I was, in fact, jealous.

But doing this presented another problem for me.

Who do I collect?

And why?

            I don’t want to slag off fandom and admiration for talent, but as a forty-seven-year-old collector, it takes a lot for me to get excited ripping a pack of cards and pulling out cards for kids who are twenty to twenty-five-years old. Yeah, Vlady Jr. is good. Great maybe. But I could be his dad. There’s no mystique in the card of a twenty-two-year-old kid. There’s nothing aspirational for me.

I’m not being a crank.

I swear.

I’m just not as enamored as I would be if I were thirteen-years-old, like I was back in 1987, and I was hunting for a Barry Bonds or Bobby Bonilla rookie card.

            Ah, 1987.

            Some of you out there remember 1987.

            I sure do.

            Alyssa Milano’s image plastered to my wall. The Bangles Walking like Egyptians on MTV. Michael Jackson back on the airwaves, being “bad” in a way that still seemed innocent. Madonna box office bombs. But Madonna hot as hell. Reagan and Gorby meeting and cooling that Cold War. Punching out Mike Tyson on Nintendo. The Lost Boys on the silver screen, and Stand by Me playing constantly on HBO.

            And, of course, the baseball cards.

            I think I’ve more than expressed my infinity for all 1987 baseball card products. If collectors have a wheelhouse year, then 1987 sure as hell is mine. Topps, Donruss and Fleer did no wrong in 1987 in my humble opinion. The designs are brilliant. My memories are brilliant. Summer nights sitting on my bed in my room, going trough packs and boxes of those cards. Nights where all it seemed you needed was a fan, instead of the a/c blasting from May until October. No pressures. No fears. No real problems.

            Just gazing lovingly at those cardboard works of art.

            I’m being generically idyllic for the purposes of this blog. Thirteen-year-olds have plenty of pressures, fears and problems. They have tons of FOMO. Lord knows I had my share of mine. But sitting here as an adult those problems seem intangible. They were trifles. Or issues that I was able to surmount. Suppress.

Now…you sit here aging. There are work issues. Kowtowing to supervisors. Feeling like you live at a job. Family issues. Sick parents. Aging parents. Not seeing your family enough because of a fucking job. Keeping a roof over your head issues. Global issues that scare the living piss out of you. And no matter what it was back then that gave you anxiety, surely it had to be better than what’s keeping you up now.

            I have FOMO for my youth, if that’s possible.

            This brings me back to my current collecting malaise. When I began collecting again, a major part of it was to collect the cards of my youth. It was those cards, more than opening current packs full of twenty-year-olds, that was going to be my modus operandi. But shit happens. I forgot how The Hobby just pulls you in. And I ended up doing both.

            And it’s kind of worked out.

I’m of the Junk Wax Era, so the cards, even in wax box form, were still plentiful and cheap. I had a nice symbiosis of buying both the old and the new. Until 2020 hit. And everyone became a collector again. And prices shot up. On everything. Even the Junk Wax. To ridiculous extremes that it didn’t even feel like FOMO if you didn’t buy a product you wanted, but just good financial sense.

As for the rise in Junk Wax Era wax boxes? I had bought most of what I’d wanted/been able to buy in wax box form, and had a good portion of the Junk Wax sets that I loved, completed, before the spike. But the rise in costs made basically buying anything older than 1986 impossible and, to be frank, a foolish endeavor. $600-$800 for a wax box of 1985 Topps baseball cards? That was enough to make me curse card graders. I refused to buy those products and I refused to feel any FOMO over it.

            Except for one.

            1987 Fleer.

            1987 Fleer baseball is the one product that seemed to always borderline in terms of cost. I’m a cheapskate at heart. So, back in 2019, when I was buying boxes of 1987 Topps and Donruss for what I still considered very reasonable prices, 1987 Fleer hung back there at $50-$60 dollars a box. My logic back then was a such: Fifty-dollars a box? For Junk Wax! I don’t care how beautiful those cards are, I’m not paying $50 for a box of 1987 Fleer.

            Dumbass.

            April 2020 was the last time I saw 1987 Fleer baseball cards at any price I personally considered reasonable. By the end of 2020, 1987 Fleer was hovering around $150 for a wax box from a sealed case. As of this writing in November 2021, 1987 Fleer wax boxes from sealed cases are going for around $195.

            And it doesn’t look like they’re ever going to come down.

            I’ve been harboring some serious FOMO over 1987 Fleer baseball cards for a long time.

            The heart wants what it wants.

            Although the heart can take a hike at $195 a wax box.

            Topps 2021 Update is coming out. Or its fully out by the time the three of you read this. Though I was never a Traded set fan as a kid, and I’m not really an Update fan, I resolved to buy the product in both 2019 and 2020. FOMO, right? Or I considered it a part of the Flagship project, and no set would be complete without the addition of cards U-1 to U-300 (or U-330 now).

2019 Update has some good stuff in it.

The less said about 2020 Update the better.

But my reasoning for not really liking Topps Update is pretty simple.

            I feel ripped-off buying it.

            I never felt the need to have an all-star card for every single player that played in the game (yes, I know they’re inserts this year). Or having home run derby cards. There are too many team-related cards in Update. Full disclosure, I don’t like team cards or league-leader cards. They take up space that could be used for more regular player cards. 

            Though I will admit that having rookie cards of some late call ups is a cool thing, especially if its someone like this.

But do we really need all of these “rookie debut” cards?

Seems like a ploy on Topps’ part to make a second rookie card.

            Although I guess we won’t be worrying about Topps pretty soon.

            The collecting world could go back to a 132-card Traded set and be fine

Despite my protestations, I was poised to buy 2021 Topps Update. Even though I wasn’t wowed by the checklist, I was ready to drop another $220 (rounded up) to buy another two hobby boxes of the product to put together a set, and keep some doubles for my schizophrenic PC. And, you know, get another two relic cards (I never get autos in any flagship product) of a piece of a uniform from some kid I didn’t care about. And get insert cards of players that I didn’t care about. Or get gold cards and/or parallel cards of players I didn’t care about.

            There’s a pattern here.

            I didn’t want to buy 2021 Topps Update, but I had a fear of missing out if I didn’t. FOMO. And I didn’t particularly like that about myself. It brought me back to those Dimitri Danielopoulus and Phineas days. If I’m going to invest time and money in something I collect, I want there to be joy involved. The feeling like I had as a kid. Like back when I was thirteen. Alyssa Milano smiling at me from my wall. Vern and Gordy on TV running from a train, while I leafed through stacks of cards. Michael Jackson’s new single on the tape deck.

            Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!

            (If I accomplish nothing else on this blog, I’ll be satisfied if I make someone pick up The Great Gatsby and give it a re-read)

            I found myself on Baseball Card Exchange during a lull at the job. I was looking at cards from the 1980s, as I’m apt to do. The stuff from 1980-1985 that have become pipe dream purchases. The stuff from 1986 that, well, if I wasn’t buying current product…maybe? As always, I landed on 1987. And there were those Fleer wax boxes. The ones that were once $50 and are now $195 dollars. I sighed at my previous stupidity and cheapness.

            But.

            On the BBC Exchange site there was a box of 1987 Fleer baseball cello packs going for $130. That’s not $200, I thought. That’s damned near…reasonable? It’s not, considering what the sets and singles of star cars are actually worth. At least worth raw. But what’s logic in the throws of capitalism? I wanted that cello box of 1987 Fleer baseball more than I wanted anything, save a handful of cards, from 2021 Update. I made a deal with myself right then and there. I’d buy one box of the 1987 Fleer cello packs and skip out on 2021 Topps update altogether.

            I bought it right then and there.

            Jay Gatsby was ultimately wrong. You can’t repeat the past. No matter what you do everything is forward motion, until we meet our ultimate fate. Can’t repeat the past? Nope. But for a good hour or two you can invoke the past. And that’s how I felt when those 1987 Fleer Baseball cards arrived, and I set up to open them. I didn’t feel thirteen. I wasn’t going to run-off with Alyssa Milano when she came knocking on my door and admitted her love for me, as I fully expected her to do some thirty-four years ago.

            But I was going to have some fun.

            Some real fun.

            And fun I had. First of all, the cards themselves are goddamned gorgeous. If one can call a baseball card set gorgeous. 

            They have those icy blue borders that fade into white, only for the ice-blue to return again. The pictures of the players are sharp. And 3-D. 1987 Fleer, and feel free to correct me on this, is probably the first base-set to have a portion of the photograph come into the border area. I always say that of the three in 1987, Topps will be my forever favorite. And then I see a Fleer card. And I just don’t know. I just don’t know.

            With Junk Wax Era cards, one always had to worry that the packs may have been tampered with. Wax packs especially. While this cello box wasn’t from a sealed case, it was what the BBC Exchange classifies as a BBCE, which, I think, means that most likely the box is as it should be. But there’s still always a worry.

            Yet when I opened it, this guy was staring back at me.

            And I thought maybe all would be right in the world.

            Half-way through the first cello pack, this guy’s rookie card showed up too.

            For the record, every single one of Bo Jackson’s 1987 rookie cards is an absolute work of art.

            It only took a couple more packs for this one to show up.

            I don’t think I can explain how wide my smile was when I pulled that.

            It was like being thirteen.

            Speaking of, the thirteen-yea-old in me would’ve wrestled someone (Phineas) to the ground had we both stumbled upon this cello pack in a store.

            Then there’s your standard, garden-variety Fleer ink errors.

            Yeah…the Nolan Ryan card.

            But it was still an improvement for Greg Minton over this.

            About half-way through the cello box is where a lot of those Junk Wax Era doubles started showing up. It’s great when it’s Pete Rose or Reggie Jackson, but not so much when its Juan Bonilla. Plus, I still hadn’t pulled the Barry Bonds rookie yet. Half-way though the box and he hadn’t shown. I was starting to get worried.

            Then this happened.

            And two cello packs later a second one arrived.

            Inserts 1987 style.

            And look at this rouge’s gallery.

            Back then I hated everyone in that picture.

            Now I PC three of them.

            1987 Product was the last time I’d see this logo on anything.

            Last but not least, the bottom of the cello box.

            Opening 1987 Fleer baseball was an absolute joy. It brought me back to being a kid, and everything I loved about cards and collecting. Yeah, it cost me more. But I do plan on building the 1987 Fleer sets and I managed to get a good number of doubles of players I collect. To hell with FOMO over current product!

That morning I said to myself, this is what collecting is all about. This is what collecting should be for a guy like me. Why buy a box of 2021 Topps Update? Or even 2022 Flagship next year, when I can spend my card money opening up a box of 1986 Fleer. Or Donruss. Find those Jose Canseco rookies.

            And find that spark.

            That joy.

            Man, I’d finally done it!

            Overcome my existential card dread!

            The examined life truly was worth living!

            But then I went online and watched a dude open up a jumbo box of 2021 Topps Update.

            Then the checklist for 2021 Archives came out.

            And I was back in FOMO town all over again.

            Damn.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

Because I feel bad for slagging him, f you’d like to know more about the life and career of Juan Bonilla you can do so HERE and HERE.

NEXT FRIDAY: Russell Streur returns with a look at Music to the Ears: Opera and Base Ball Come to Old Chicago.