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.