League Leader cards, Team Leader cards, and Rookie Debut Cards or AKA Stuff I Don't Like

EXCLAIMER : THE ABOVE CARD IS NOT A DWIGHT GOODEN CARD.

            But...this is Rickey Henderson card.

Sadly, this is not.

I’ll use someone else to clarify my point.

This is a Bill Madlock card.

This is not.

You can do it with other sports too.

This is a Franco Harris card.

This is not.

Or at least they aren’t to me.

Ah…but what about this?

We’ll get back to that one.

I know a lot of collectors out there feel different about some of the cards I showed above. I see it when people post their PCs online. A collector posts an image or a video of a binder full of Mike Trout cards, inevitably the collection is rife with league-leader cards or team cards that feature Mr. Trout. I see it when people show off cards, they got at card shows. Someone went hog wild at a local show, buying tons of cards of the player they PC and they want to show them off on Twitter, more than likely their haul will include record-breaker cards or team leader/league leader cards of said player.

And that’s fine, I guess.

For them.

Oh and speaking Mike Trout…and Shohei Ohtani for that matter.

This is a Mike Trout card.

This is a Shohei Ohtani card.

This is not.

I’ve just never collected that way. That isn’t to say that I dislike league-leader cards, or other cards of that ilk. I build sets. Those cards are integral to set building. Like base cards, they help tell the story of a season. Hell, thanks to advertising and the infestation of corporate money into broadcast sports, sometimes a card, like say, a World Series card, actually tells me what I missed in a game a fell asleep on.

But this NOT a Max Scherzer card.

I felt this way as a young collector as well. League leader cards, team leader cards, and record-breaker cards of player that I collected; they always felt “other” to me. Maybe because the player was usually sharing the card with a few other league leaders, or the team’s top pitcher that year. I never felt that the card solely belonged to the player. It belonged with a set. The 660 or 792 card set, or a team set that I bought or put together. And because I felt that way, those cards were not going into my PC. I was not collecting them. And I certainly wasn’t trading away a base card of a player, for a league leader card featuring another player.

Modern collecting had become more deceptive though.

Case in point, that Scherzer card I posted above. Modern cards have personalized the universal. A world series card celebrating Max Scherzer’s win in game 7, becomes less about the team effort and more focused on the individual player. That makes it more enticing to say, hey, I’d like to add that card to my Scherzer PC.

But not me buddy.

In 2020, shortly before normal life ended and we were all thrust into this pandemic hell, I got to open up a couple of Hobby boxes of Topps Series 1. Say what you will about Topps 2020 design, I was excited for Series 1. Series 1 marked the first time in my returning to collecting that I would be opening up base product on its day of release. Pete Alonso was the cover boy for Series 1. Pete broke the rookie home run record in 2019. His base card was in Series 1. Topps even had good ol’ Pete at their rip party.

To say that I felt like a part of the zeitgeist would be an understatement.

The first Pete Alonso cards I ripped that year was this one.

And man, I was excited for that card.

Until I noticed that little yellow, slanted bar in the left corner.

That is not a Pete Alonso 2020 card.

This is a Pete Alonso 2020 card.

I sort of collect Pete Alonso cards.

Hence my excitement.

That league-leader card is not in my collection.

Though it is a sharp looking card.

But you can see where a guy like me would be deceived. It looks like a Pete Alonso card. It’s just Pete on the front. There’s no little box also featuring Eugenio Suarez and Cody Bellinger, the second and third league leader in home runs. Pete’s name is on the card, just like his base. The Mets team name and logo feature prominently on the card as well. Old league-leader cards never had the logos for the teams on the front or back of the card.

It’s almost like Topps wants me to put that card in my Pete Alonso collection.

Nice try, Topps.

It looks nice in the set though.

But seriously....

Also...this card is awesome.

But guess what?

Okay...I'll stop.

Sticking with Mr. Alonso, this brings me to another thing I don’t like: the proliferation of rookie cards. Pete Alonso was big news in 2019, what, with breaking the rookie home run record and all. And Topps wanted you to know how big Pete was. They gave him a rookie card in Series 2. And a rookie debut card in 2020 update. And an all-star card bearing the RC symbol. And a home run derby card, also bearing the RC symbol. Pete Alonso had four rookie cards in base/update Topps sets alone in 2020.

I suppose if they did league-leader cards in Update, Pete would’ve had a RC symbol stamped on that too.

And I’m not even going to get into the number of rookie cards in other releases.

A lot of collectors like rookie cards. I get that. I came of age in and era of collecting where rookie cards became the rage. 1984 Donruss Don Mattingly anyone? And with every yearly release we all salivated over that year’s rookie cards. Yeah, I hoarded my share of Danny Tartabull cards. But this madness in modern collecting? Four rookie cards? I don’t even want to get into the excess of Home Run Derby cards, and trying to fill up a 300-card set so that the cost of a Hobby box feels somewhat justified. But four rookie cards?

The 1987 base Danny Tartabull is a sweet card by the way.

The most egregious of these rookie card to me, is the Rookie Debut card. I don’t like the Rookie Debut card. It’s superfluous at best. I guess I can understand the Home Run Derby card, and I can certainly understand an All-star card. But a card celebrating someone’s first game? And not EVERYONE someone. Just certain, select someones. Rookie Debut cards just seem like Topps taking another stab at giving a player a rookie card. And because Rookie Updates exist in Update Series, they seem like filler as well.

A part of me wishes Update sets still looked like this.

Forgive me I’m an old man.

But, yes, I do put the Rookie Debut cards in with players I PC.

And it burns me when a Rookie Debut card looks better than the actual rookie card.

Hey, remember that Franco Harris Instant Replay card?

This one?

Okay, here’s where I may sound like a hypocrite to some. I consider cards like Franco’s Instant Replay card to be legit single-player cards. I say the same thing for the individual All-Star card. My reasoning is simple. The All-Star card or the occasional Instant Replay card are representative of one player. Slapping Pete Alonso on a league-leader card and trying to make it look like a card of his own is not the same thing.

Eddie Murrary makes All-Star cards badass.

That said, I’m showing my age here. When I was a kid, and because we didn’t get four or five individual cards (or rookie cards) of a player, having an All-Star card of someone you collected was pretty special. Action cards, at least in the 1970s, served a purpose. It was a way for Topps to show off motion photography, which was relatively new come, say, 1971. Having a 1972 Roberto Clemente In-Action card, or a 1972 Terry Bradshaw Pro-Action card was pretty sweet.

Though I’m not sure what the thought process was for Topps by 1982.

Action cards were plentiful by then.

That is to say, those cards feel more player oriented to me than having a favorite player on a card with two or three other guys. And, I guess, like Rookie Debut cards, those old Action cards made it easier to afford a card of a player I wanted to collect. In cases of players like Dan Marino in 1984 Topps Football, his Instant Replay card was the Rookie Debut card of its day.

Of it is now because of the difference in cost between the two.

And maybe that is the point of someone putting league leader cards, or Rookie Debut cards into their PC of a player. Cost. Collectors want something representative of a player they like, and cards of that ilk are often affordable. They make it easier to round out a PC. Give it some weight. Some prominence. If nothing else, a reason to justify buying a three-inch binder and all of those sheets for one or two guys.

It's just not my cup of tea.

And as we know in collecting…that’s okay.

Now I’m going to go and burn all of those unnecessary Rookie Debut cards.

But one last thing....

Rookie Short Prints burn me too.

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

 

NEXT FRIDAY: The complexities of collecting Ben Roethlisberger cards.

 

 

 

           

1993 : The Year Collecting Went on Without Lil' Ol' Me

 

 

1993.

            I’m trying to remember myself at a specific time and place.

            I know I was eighteen turning nineteen.

            A second semester freshman in college.

            The country had just sworn in a new president. Bill Clinton. The first democratic president in twelve years. I was excited. I was learning that my political views were not very similar to my traditionally conservative family, and a good many of my traditionally conservative friends. I was excited for change. I was excited Bill Clinton, despite what we all know about him and his neoliberal politics.

            But that’s for a different blog.

            This was probably my favorite album.

            So was this.

            But I was really getting into this guy.

            And, yes, I’m talking about 1993 not 1963.

            My tastes were becoming complex. And I couldn’t understand it minus the feeling of just going with it. I wanted to be older. To feel older. Or cultured. I wanted to feel cultured. And I did sometimes. Art films and jazz. Coffee at The Beehive. I discovered Kerouac and cappuccino only a year or so before, and with more time on my hands because of the freedom of the college class structure, I indulged in them both.

            I chased girls around campus to little or no success.

            I was still a boy in that regard.

            A former fat kid who’d spent the last four years in an all-boys Catholic high school.

            With women, I’d have to reinvent the wheel.

            But there was one thing I was certain that I wasn’t going to do in 1993.

            And that was collect baseball cards.

            Some people can leave a hobby cold turkey. They just stop. And I always thought that was the case with me and card collecting. That I just stopped. Packed up my collection and handed it to my younger, still-collecting brother, and said, here you go. Then I just walked off into the non-collecting sunset with my Charlie Parker records, and my beat-up copy of On the Road. Off to see another Goddard film, without looking back even once.

            But that’s not what happened.

            Leaving The Hobby in 1993 was a more gradual process.

            It’s funny, but I think I started slowly leaving The Hobby in 1989.

            I think this card is a little responsible.

            I’ll be blunt. I don’t like Upper Deck baseball cards. I didn’t back in 1989 and I still don’t like the first few years of the company. If guys on YouTube are ripping Upper Deck packs, I tend not to watch. Upper Deck baseball cards from 1989-1992 felt cold with a calculated blandness. Upper Deck cards felt like they had no soul. The expense never got to me with Upper Deck; maybe because I never yearned to buy them in the first place. So, other than Pirates cards, Upper Deck wasn’t really in my card buying radar.

            But that’s kind of a lie.

            I wanted that Griffey card.

            I remember first finding it at a flea market. Fresh from a pack, the dealer was selling the Junior for twenty-five bucks. Twenty-five bucks! I’d never, up until that point, seen a card, a card from that year’s product, a card one could still go and rip from a current pack, selling for twenty-five dollars. It seemed outrageous to me. It seemed wrong.

            It seems quaint now.

            I remember having a choice. Spend twenty-five bucks on some rookie’s card that I wanted, or spend the twenty-five on a bunch of other stuff. I’ve said it on here before, I’m a terrible quantity over quality guy. I spent the twenty-five bucks on a ton of other single cards, some packs, some team sets. You know, NOT the Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie card.

            To this day I’ve never owned that card.

            Had I back then, it probably would’ve gone to my brother in 1993.

            Now…it’s just a matter of time before I make that purchase.

            But let’s get back to 1989.

            The cost of that Griffey card, and the eventual rise in cost/quality of sports cards in general, were really the factors pushing me out of The Hobby. Granted it, it took Topps et al a few years to catch up to Upper Deck in terms of production “quality” but it didn’t take the other card companies that long to begin raising their prices. Thirty-five cents. Forty-cents. Forty-five cents. I remember telling friends, if cards go up to fifty-cents I’m quitting. If cards go up to a buck, I’m quitting.

            That statement also seems quaint now.

            I didn’t stop though. I hung in there when packs went for fifty-cents. Then fifty-five cents. I just started buying less cards. My cash went to other things. Music and books were getting more of my money. So were movies. With my conspicuous consumption expanding, I started getting more selective with which cards I actually was buying.

I’ve always been a Topps guy. My first pack was 1980 Topps. They had me in 1981 as The Real One. The rest of the brands, like many of them as I do, always felt like interlopers. So when card prices went up, I stuck with Topps. From 1990-1992, I don’t really remember buying a lot of the other brands unless it was a player card for my PC. I never ripped a box of those 1990 Donruss cards. Or 1991 Fleer…until recently. I missed Donruss ushering us back into the era of series cards.

            No, I was going to be Topps man and Topps only.

            But then this happened.

            Let me state here first, that watching sports is fun. Sports are cathartic. If you, do it in a healthy way, identifying with a team really means a lot. The team colors are signal to everyone to what tribe you belong. What city you come from. Who your people are. Your troops. Your boys. Dare I say, your family.

            We say we when our teams win or lose, right?

            Fan stems from the word Fanatic, after all.

But sports can also rip the soul right out of you, if you get too entangled. Sports can break your heart. That Pirates loss in game seven of the 1992 NLCS bottomed me out. I’d been dedicated and die-hard my whole childhood. That Pirates team from 1987-1992, man, they were everything to me.

And it was all gone the moment Sid Bream (a former Pirate mind you) came chugging around third base.

I punched a wall. I cried. I still fucking hate the Atlanta Braves. I knew the 1992 NLCS loss was it for the Pirates. Bobby Bonilla was already gone, and Barry Bonds and Doug Drabek would be gone soon too. The Pirates would rebuild. They’d be bad for a while.

Twenty-years is a long while.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the 1993 season. I didn’t start watching Pirates baseball, in earnest again, until the “freak show” 1997 team. And that was just pure spectacle, even though it did bring me back to the sport. But, if I wasn’t watching baseball in 1993, then I wasn’t going to collect. There didn’t seem a point.

It’s like the great Eddie Wilson said.

Words and Music.

You can’t have one without the other.

Still, I couldn’t quit collecting cold turkey. I mad two card-related purchases in 1993. The Pittsburgh Pirates team set, because I knew it would be the last with Bonds and Drabek in their Buccos uniforms. And I bought Bobby Bonilla’s first card with the Mets.

I probably bought that to torture myself.

I also bought a Mets hat…that didn’t sit well at home.

The Bobby Bo is still a sharp looking card.

And that’s what kicks me about quitting collecting in 1993. All of the cards look sharp that year.

Even Upper Deck finally made a set that I like.

And I can't believe I initially missed out on this card.

And 1993 was the first time Topps put player images on the back of their cards since 1971.

Hindsight being what it is, I would’ve gone back and told that eighteen-year-old kid to give it one more year. Scale back with the Dylan and Nirvana CDs, and go get yourself some packs. Take the Kerouac out of the library, if you can find it, and stock up on Topps series 1. Give Upper Deck SP a go. Just go one more round with The Hobby.

But alas and alack.

In my current collecting pursuits, I tend to gloss over my non-collecting years, paying little to no attention (outside of PC needs) to any card product from 1993-2018. Lately, though, I’ve wanted to tap into those lost years. Specifically, the baseball card product from 1993. I feel weirdly nostalgic for that year of collecting. Like the guy who wants to come back and walk through his old neighborhood.

1993 cards feel close.

But still out of reach.

I’d like to start collecting 1993 cards.

The problem I’m having is that I’m not finding much in the way of 1993 baseball card product to open. Topps cards shows up occasionally. But thanks to Derek Jeter I’m not dropping $200 to open up a wax box of series 1. I know I could buy complete sets. I’m doing that for 1980s cards that have become financially out of reach, i.e. anything 1980-1986. But I want the fun of ripping 1993 cards, Hand-collating sets.

I want to feel what it was that I missed.

Christ, the nineteen-year-old me probably couldn’t have card less about cards in 1993. There was no time for him to care. Especially by that summer. Girls were starting to take to me. I was getting dates. Stolen kisses. I was testing my under-aged hand at getting into quarter-draft nights in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. Weed was everywhere I turned. I thought I was a genius because I wrote non-sensical, Beat-inspired poetry.

I probably acted like I discovered Bob Dylan.

Baseball cards weren’t hip enough to nineteen-year-old me.

But I’m almost forty-eight now. The cultural zeitgeist passed me by a long time ago. 1993 and nineteen-year-old me were twenty-nine years ago. If I make it another twenty-nine, I’ll be seventy-seven. It’s preposterous to me that nineteen to forty-eight and forty-eight to seventy-seven contain the same amount of time. Maybe it’s because I can still feel nineteen. I can still call up that nineteen-year-old me.

I can’t fathom seventy-seven.

I’m under no obligation to believe I’ll be here at seventy-seven.

Or how I’ll be if I am.

I hope I can find some 1993 card product. Even if it’s not Topps. Donruss put out a pretty damned fine card that year. I like Fleer and Score too. Hell, I’d even rip a couple of boxes of Upper Deck. Upper Deck finally did it right, at least to me, in 1993. It be nice to sit back and spend a couple of hours opening packs, taking a long look at the cards, reminiscing about the year, and maybe start putting some sets together. Throw on a little Dylan for old time’s sake.

Show that nineteen-year-old kid what he was missing.

 Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

NEXT FRIDAY: WARNING!! Next Friday is going to be VERY negative. I'm going to talk about cards that I don't like. It my ruffle some feathers. If there are feathers to be ruffled.

 

           

           

Wibbly-Wobbly-Timey-Wimey Stugg Again : Here's The Other Guys

 

I’m going to talk about time travel again.

            Time travel of the mind.

            Or the way time distorts the mind.

            I know.

            It’s been a big topic for me.

            I’m still on a sci-fi jag.

            Sorry.

            But lately I’ve been trying, when work and dodging a never-ending pandemic will allow me to, to clean up the big huge mess of cards that I have sitting in boxes on this thing.

            Which I carried and pulled for almost forty blocks.

            Because I don’t have a car.

            And I’m an idiot.

            I still have a scar on my shin because of it.

            And that was back in July.

            Last week, this endeavor caused me to write about quality vs quantity. And while I’m working on the quality aspect, the quantity aspect is what needs to be dealt with in the short-term. I’m beginning to fill shoeboxes, yes, actual shoeboxes, with cards that are doubles from sets that I’ve built/am building, and all of the bells and whistles that I don’t care about that come in modern packs.

            A brief aside…I seem to always pull parallels, autos etc from teams I couldn't care less about. The number of Braves and Red Sox cards boggles my mind at times.

            Because I collect what I collect, a lot of the extraneous cards that are going into these shoeboxes are cards from the Junk Wax Era. What I’m noticing in these boxes are an abundance of players who were stars when I was collecting, but are no longer considered that. Or highly touted prospects who fizzled out or went and had solid careers. Players who, some thirty-plus years ago, were building potential Hall of Fame careers. The potential 500 home run guys who hit 250-300. The 3,000 hit guys who compiled 1500-2000 during their careers. The pitchers who were supposed to win three-hundred games and won fifty.

            Players that I’ll refer to here as The Other Guys

Not these guys.

Think more the Marquis Grissoms and Delino DeShields of the world.

            But not this guy.

            He’s an asshole.

            I know exactly what to do with his cards.

            But I don’t know what to do with the cards of The other Other Guys.

            I suppose the simple thing would be to throw them in that shoebox with the Mike Lagas of the world, and call it a day. But it doesn’t feel right to throw Juan Gonzalez in with Mike Laga and just have that be that. Juan Gonzalez, though I wasn’t a collector of his, is still JUAN GONZALEZ in the kid card collecting part of my brain. His cards got penny-sleeved and thrown into my star box with the Dave Winfields and Eddie Murrays of the world when I was a kid.

            Here he is with these other, at-one-time, potential members of the 500-club.

            And these big prospects.

            And these borderline Hall-of-Famers.

            Oh, and here’s Eddie Murray looking bad-ass again.

            It's The Other Guys like the above (minus Eddie) who I'm talking about.

            In fact, when I began collecting again, the kid part of my brain treated The Other Guys exactly as I described above. When I was ripping Junk Wax packs and pulling star cards in 2019 and beyond, the Juan Gonzalez cards were penny-sleeved along with the guys whom I collected who actually became the Hall-of-Famers I knew they would.

            I originally collected so long ago, when I stopped, Dave Winfield and Eddie Murray were still playing baseball, as opposed to being Hall of Fame guys.

            In 2019, I penny-sleeved ALL of The Other Guys that I got in packs, and put them in a massive card box with my Hall of Famers. I did this automatically, without even thinking about it. And Juan Gonzalez cards and Albert Belle cards and Dwight Evans cards stayed in my massive star card box with the Winfields, Murrays, Younts etc. for a good two years.

            Until I got on my recent quality vs quantity kick.

            And, yes, before the Juan Gone, Belle and Dewey fans come at me, I do consider those players to be quality players, and, if you collect them, quality cards…to you

            I, myself, am a big collector of one of The Other Guys.

            And a collector of a potential, ahem, SHOULD BE, Hall-of-famer.

            What I’m saying is…I understand.

            But if I’m to streamline my collection, go for quality over quantity, then it stands to reason that I don’t have room for the rookie cards of the Gregg Jefferies and Ken Caminiti cards of the world. Or Juan Gonzalez and Albert Belle. The Dwight Evans and Darrell Evans and Lou Whitaker cards need to go too. Despite what my kid brain still thinks of them. The adult collector knows that Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada cards just take up space.

            Sorry guys.

            Same goes for you Neon Deion.

            And even a rookie card I so desperately wanted as a kid.

            Or two cards that I still find to be absolutely gorgeous to this day.

            Not all, but some, are going to have to go into those shoeboxes with the Mike Laga and Vance Law cards. I’m going to have to remove those penny-sleeves that I so absent-mindedly put on my Dave Stewart and Dave Stieb cards, and put them in with the also-rans.

            But it feels so tawdry to do so.

            Dave Stewart was a 20-game winner when I was a kid.

            Dave Stieb was one of the most dominant pitchers during my childhood.

            And Ron Gant, even though he played for the Braves, was going to be HUGE for decades.

            But alas…

            More than just shoving The Other Guys into a box and putting them on the top shelf of that metal behemoth that permanently injured me; I’d like to find a good home for some of those cards. If I can stand the forty-minute trek to the post-office (I live in Brooklyn and there is no real reason my post-office should be a forty-minute walk from my apartment), maybe I’ll pack up some of those cards and send them to an organization that gives cards to kids. If you’re a collector of some of The Other Guys, feel free to DM me along with the bells and whistle folks and maybe I’ll be able to get them to you. I know I’m always open to someone sending me Bobby Bonilla cards.

            I think it would be nice to find a home some of The Other Guys.

            The Dave Justices, the Joe Carters of the world, The John Oleruds and Robin Venturas.

            Somewhere they’re appreciated.

            And loved.

            But not the Ruben and the Wally 1987 Topps cards.

            I’m keeping those.

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

NEXT FRIDAY: Man, I haven't gone into the sordid details of my life in a bit. Why don't we, huh? Let's talk about 1993 cards, specifically but not limited to Topps base. 1993 was the first year I stopped collecting. And I have a huge retro FOMO over 1993 Topps cards that I don't think I'll be able to satisfy because of one particular Short Stop.