Collecting by the Book: RICKEY

 

I’d never considered Rickey Henderson.

            Let me be more specific.

            Yes, I had considered Rickey Henderson. I considered him a great ballplayer to watch. A fun ballplayer, before fun meant bat-flipping and celebrating an April win like you’d just won the World Series. Not that I mind that flare in current baseball. Makes up for all of the walks and strikeouts. Obviously, Rickey was a master base stealer. The Man of Steal. The greatest of all-time. The stolen base champ with an almost (unless the game drastically changes back) untouchable total of 1,406 bases. Rickey is a ten-time all-star. A Gold Glove Award winner. An MVP. He holds the record for runs scored. He’s in the bloody Hall of Fame, where he deserves.

            Of course, I’ve considered Rickey Henderson.

            …I just never considered him, as a collector.

            Yes, I had Rickey Henderson cards as a kid. I collected three ways as a kid: Pirates cards, Star cards, and everyone else. Rickey was a star. His cards were star cards. They went into the star card box with the other stars, accumulated each year whenever the new cards came out. Rickey wasn’t a player I searched for in packs, even though he was regularly breaking records when I was a kid. I didn’t look for Rickey cards at card shows. He was just another star card to me, like Robin Yount or Paul Molitor or Ozzie Smith. I never bought into the Rickey flash. The supposed Rickeyisms.

            Maybe it was a West Coast thing.

            Being a kid on the East Coast in the 1980s, I didn’t really get a chance to see Rickey play much.

            Hell, even when he was a Yankee, it was still hard getting American league ball in Pittsburgh.

            So, I kind of surprised myself when this book came out, and I found that I wanted to read it.

            Or maybe it was because of how I felt about Rickey Henderson that I wanted to read Howard Bryant’s biography on him. I wanted to figure out why I wasn’t a Rickey collector as a kid. I wasn’t averse to flash. I adored my Bo Jackson cards. Barry Bonds played in my city for the first seven years of his career. I loved watching The Kid play. I liked flash. But something was missing for me and Rickey, as a collector, and I wanted to find out what it was between us.

            As anyone whose read this blog knows, I’ve been doing certain posts that I’ve been calling “Collecting by the Book.” This was brought on by my desire to begin collecting cards for players I’ve either picked up biographies on, or players that have shown up in certain baseball books. I’ve added some Dick Allen cards to my PC this way. More Dave Parker cards. A Henry Aaron card when I can get them. I just added Bill Buckner to my collection, because of Tyler Kepner’s book on the World Series. And I should have some Ken Caminiti cards coming soon, courtesy of SportLots and the fantastic bio on him that Dan Good released last year.

            I figured Rickey would be a cinch.

            Better start saving up some cash because Rickey don’t come cheap.

            To be honest, I do have some Rickey cards in my collection.

            It seems that as an adult collector I still collect three ways: Pirates cards, Star/Hall-of-Famer cards from my era and Star cards now, and everybody else. I’m kidding on that last one. The guilt of buying boxes of cards, at what they cost now, has turned me, at least somewhat, into a set builder of both the old and the new. The Rickey cards that I have are doubles from packs that I’ve opened, or from cards people sent me when I was getting me feet off the collecting ground after a 27-year absence.

            In fact, I got one of my oldest Rickey cards from someone’s generosity.

            But I’d say most of my Rickey cards these days; they’re in binders or boxes in sets that I’ve either built or am trying to build.

            So did the Howard Bryant magic work on me this time? Will there be a budding Rickey PC that is totally unrelated to doubles or set collecting. Well…no? I want to say that I really enjoyed Bryant’s book. I loved his book on Henry Aaron, so I was an easy sell. The book does a fantastic job of not only solidifying Rickey Henderson’s place in the pantheon of great players, but Bryant puts Rickey into an historical context as well. In the context of The Great Migration. The context of the legions of gifted athletes from Billy Martin to Jimmy Rollins, who have come out of the Oakland area. Howard Bryant dispels the myths of Rickey’s moodiness, his so-called lack of drive. He spends time dissecting the racial intentions behind “Rickey being Rickey,” the third person speaking nonsense, or those Rickeyisms I mentioned above.

            Feel free to look them up because, sadly, there’s too many to mention here.

            The book was a truly wonderful read…but it just didn’t work that collecting magic. I’m not going to be doing some big ComC order on Rickey Henderson. Not like I did with Dick Allen. Or buying all of those Steelers cards and basically beginning to collect football cards again, because of Gary Pomerantz’s book Their Life’s Work. And…I don’t have an answer as to why. If I hazard to guess it’s probably because Rickey isn’t new to me. His cards have always been there, in every season’s packs that I opened, in every set, in every insert set. He was a ubiquitous presence during my collecting years. And simply not a very interesting one to me.

            They say never say never...so who knows.

            But do you know who I did find interesting?

            This guy.

            Lloyd Moseby was also mentioned in Bryant’s book as being another Oakland area talent. I’m kidding that I’m staring a Moseby PC…maybe. But the 1984 Topps card is a special one to me.  I believe I’ve mentioned the blue suitcase and the loss of pretty much every single card I collected from 1980-1983. 1984 was the first rebuild year for me. I was ten. Other than Pirates and Pete Rose, I didn’t really know many of the current stars of the game. Obviously, that would change very quickly. The budding aesthete in me was drawn to the color and design on cards There was just something about the Lloyd Moseby card that I always loved as a kid, even when I began figuring out the collecting pecking order of home team/star card/everybody else.

            But I still like that Lloyd Moseby card.

            Maybe I’ll start collecting just it.

            That said, the Rickey Henderson cards of the collecting world will get me in one way...I'm slowly, very, very slowly working on completing the 1980 set...and guess who's rookie card I don't have?

           

            You guessed it: 

 Thanks for Reading! Happy Collecting!

SPECIAL ALERT: There will be a special EARLY Junk Wax Jay coming February 6, 2023. A celebration of Babe Ruth on his birthday, written by the talented and knowledgeable Russell Streur.