Opening Day...Which one was your First?

 

How old were you when you remembered Opening Day?

            Remembered being excited for Opening Day?

            Wanting to go to games?

            Wanting to watch baseball on TV all of the time?

            Kept up on your favorite players and favorite team’s stats?

            Started building a PC?

            For me that would be when I was eleven.

            In 1985.

            God, 1985 seems long ago and not long ago enough.

            I’d been collecting cards since 1980. Maybe I watched the sport too, but 1980 stretches my memory even further than 1985 does. The first phenom I remember is Fernando Valenzuela and Fernandomania in 1981. But I don’t remember the strike so…memory is funny when you’re under 10 years of age.  I know that I increasingly became intoxicated with baseball then more I collected. But 1985 is the first year I remember being excited for the coming season. Of really wanting to go to games and watching baseball live. 1985 was probably the first year of what I would call my fervent period of collecting: 1985-1988. I was crazy for the sport of baseball, and crazy to collect cards of my Pirates and my other favorite Players.

            This is the first card I remember from 1985.

            I’ve discussed this card on the blog before, but I still get that sense of oddity when I see Mike Easler wearing a Red Sox unform.

            Probably more so than this guy.

            Even as a little kid I knew Dave Parker’s relationship with the Pirates had turned toxic.

            I went to my first Home Opener in 1985. It was my birthday party. Me, my folks, my brother, and a handful of classmates and neighborhood kids got to sit in nosebleed seats at Three Rivers Stadium (total attendance 47, 335), and watch the Pirates beat the eventual NL Champion Saint Louis Cardinals.

            I bought myself this with my birthday money.

            It’s not the same one.

            And I mentioned it in my post on Yearbooks that I did a few months ago.

            I still want to take out that insert page, perforate those cards, and put them in my 1980s Pirates team set binder.

            Getting back to cards, I loved and still love the Topps design from 1985.

            That Ecto-Cooler (look it up younger people) and Orange card back is still one of the more original that Topps produced.

Not that Fleer and Donruss were any kind of slouches either.

That Fleer design I enjoyed as a child. But it has really grown on me, as an adult collector, to the point where I think it’s the best produced set of the three. Donruss…I don’t even remember owning any 1985 Donruss as a kid. It was Topps and Fleer in my neighborhood. I denoted the drug stores by who had them. Thrift Drug for Topps, Revco for Fleer. I wish I’d owned some Donruss back then. If I’m correct, it’s the first base set to use black borders since 1971 Topps. And 1985 was the first year Donruss went to those card backs that most of us collecting during the Junk Wax Era truly remember.

Speaking of remembering…

Do you remember your favorite player the year that baseball became everything to you?

Here’s mine.

I was weened on Willie Stargell and the embers of the 1979 World Series team. But by the time I became an 11-year-old-die-hard-baseball fan…those days were ending. By the end of the 1985 season, three of the last vestiges of the Fam-I-lee, Bill Madlock, John Candelaria and Kent Tekulve, would be traded and gone. Chuck Tanner would be fired. I think that left only Donnie Robinson from that era. The Pirates belonged to younger names like Tony Pena and Johnny Ray. Johnny was my guy. He was the one I rooted for. This left-hander wanted to play second base because of Johnny Ray. When I got back into collecting, I made sure that Johnny Ray’s cards would be in whatever PC I shaped.

It's funny to me now to think about how excited I was for the 1985 Pittsburgh Pirates baseball season.

The team went 57-104 that season.

Management brought in guys like these.

The team was broke and ownership was thinking of selling. Το Τampa. Το Νew Orleans. I distinctly remember this Orwellian nightmare of a commercial in which the pillbox black and gold Pirates hat suddenly morphed into a purple and orange Denver Pirates hat, paid for by an organization trying to prevent the sale. I don’t think I understood what they were talking about. Leave? What do you mean the Pirates are leaving Pittsburgh? Or could?

The baseball drug trials were also going on in Pittsburgh during the 1985 season.

If you weren’t a (mostly) oblivious 11-year-old kid obsessed with baseball and card collection, 1985 could leave a fan in Pittsburgh kind of jaded.

I think collecting kind of blurred all of the bad nonsense happening. I would have to say that 1985 was probably the year I became aware of The Hobby around me. It’s definitely the year I remembered learning about Traded and Update sets. They were, at least for Topps, four seasons old by then (I’m talking the 132-card sets here), but they were a brand spanking new idea to 11-year-old me. The first Traded Set that I ever got was the 1985 Topps Traded set. Probably one of the weaker ones out there in terms of rookie/star power (although Gary Carter and Rickey Henderson are in it).

The set did have this card, though.

And if you were an 11-year-old kid in 1985, Vince Coleman seemed larger than life on the basepaths.

And one last…which one is the TRUE Topps Big Mac rookie card?

Anyway, here’s to Opening Day!

 

Thanks for Reading! Happy Collecting!