1988 Topps Big Baseball : Part One

 

I have an old joke for you.

            Although I have to warn you.

            This blog post is FAR from funny.

            But…first…the joke.

            Ready?

            How do you make God laugh?

            …make a plan.

            I think I’ve used the one on here. It’s actually one of my favorites, even though I’m not what one would call spiritual or religious in, like, any sense of the word. Secularly, I guess it means that no matter what you think and/or believe is going to happen, nothing is certain, and there is always the chance that anything could happen to disrupt and change those plans.

            I should’ve gone home on my lunch.

            Then things would be different.

            Let me back up a bit.

            About three or so weeks ago I was just messing around online, searching some card sights like Baseball Card Exchange, just to see what product they had in stock. I don’t use Baseball Card Exchange as much as I used to when I started collecting again and wanted to build a lot of the Junk Wax Sets of my youth. But occasionally, I go on the site, mostly to just dumbfoundedly stare at the prices on card older that 1987 and just how much they’ve gone up the four years I’ve been back at it. And they’ve gone up A LOT.

            On that particular day I came across these.

            Remember these?

            Topps Big Baseball (the 1988 series) doesn’t show up a lot of Baseball Card Exchange. I know. I’d been looking for it off and on for a good eight month. And there it was, Series 1,2 and 3 in all of its glory.

            The whole Factory set of this was also on BBC Exchange that day.

        I’ve long given up the idea that I’m going to collate 1987 Fleer by hand, using wax box and the like to do so. Unopened 1987 Fleer has gone the way up in price as well, even though hand collated and factory set themselves, I’ve seen anywhere from $25-$50. I guess it’s the thrill of the chase, and perhaps not as much Fleer to go around as Topps and Donruss.

            Regardless.

            There were these.

            And there was that.

            Right there waiting for me on the BBC Exchange web site.

            But…there was a problem.

            I found the items a few days before I was set to travel to Buffalo and Pittsburgh. I couldn’t order the items if I wasn’t going to be around to pick them up. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, the post office leaves packages right on my steps. I suppose I could’ve asked my downstairs neighbors (also my landlord) to take the package…but I didn’t want to have to throw the responsibility onto them.

            So…see you in another eight months to a year Topps Big Baseball.

            Cut to a week plus later and I’m back checking card sites, seeing what’s out there, picking my jaw up off the floor at the cost of unopened 1980 Topps boxes etc., lamenting the loss of the 1988 Topps Big wax boxes and the 1987 Fleer Factory set when…hot damn! Wouldn’t you know it! All four items were still on the web site and available to purchase. And purchase them I did.

            I get excited over card packages. But I can’t explain how excited I was over this one. I love, love love 1988 Topps Big Baseball. I love 1987 Fleer. It stands there in the pantheon with 1987 Topps and 1987 Donruss as the year three perfect sets were released during my collecting heyday. Suffice it to say…I was anxious for the package to arrive. And BBC Exchange, those pleasure delayers, it took them almost four days to even get a label together for the shipment. And then I had to wait on that.

            And then.

            Last Thursday.

            IT arrived.

            11:33 A.M. EST to be exact.

            Soon I’d be feasting my eyes on these.

            And putting these into sheets to binder.

            A part of me wanted to go home on my lunch (I live close to work) and bring the package inside because I wanted to secure it like a precious jewel. But my neighborhood is safe. My landlords/neighbors are always around doing yardwork. I’d been getting packages sent to my place there for almost two years without worry. Why waste an entire lunch and then some to race home, when those cards would be sitting there for me at 6:00 PM.

            On that particular Thursday, my wife beat me home from work.

            The following is a text exchange we shared around 5:50 PM.

        Obviously, that was me panicking. And my wife does not have that kind of Gallows humor (or perverse sense of humor) in her to joke about a package not being there that wasn’t. I asked her to please see if the landlord/neighbor had the package. It would be out of character for them to handle a package of ours, unless asked, but stranger things, right? The landlord didn’t have the package. She’d seen the package just only an hour ago. My wife had to call me back with the bad news. The package had been stolen. And I took the rest of the walk in a long slowly building fury that would consume the rest of my evening, and the next morning before I began to calm down.

            All I thought about was how I told myself, earlier in that day, to go home.

            Packages get stolen in Brooklyn. A lot. Not always in an ever-flowing steam of thievery. It ebbs and flows. Blurry pictures of would-be package thieves grace our telephone polls. Everyone I know has a I’ve-had-my-package-stolen story.  And now I had one to go along with theirs.

            There’s be no these.

            There be no this.

            I was angry about the theft. But I was also saddened. I figure most package thieves are probably looking for big ticket items: Tech, that kind of stuff.  As shitty as this is, I’d like to think these assholes would go ahead and sell the items online. To someone like. Someone who really wanted those cards too. After all, they came with a packing slip. They know what the items are worth. I hate the very idea that these assholes took my package, opened it, saw that it was, ugh, baseball cards, and just threw the whole thing away.

            If I…and I’m trying really, really hard here to be diplomatic/optimistic what have you…If I can’t have the cards…I’d at least like another collector to get to enjoy them.

            But not all is lost.

            A few days later, still feeling bad for myself, I went online to, you know, look around and see what I could find. It turned out that Dave & Adam’s Card World had this.

            And this.

            So, I bought them.

            And, yes, I know and I’m thankful that I’m in a position that I reclaim some of the items. Some people can’t do that. I actually used an entire vacation day waiting on the UPS man to deliver the items this past Tuesday. I’m a fool me once kind of guy. I’m happy for the package…but some things are changing. I don’t feel secure having packages sent to my apartment anymore. These were cards. But what if they’d been birthday/Christmas gifts for my wife and family. My wife’s meds. She’s a children’s author with two books. Copies of those books get sent to our home. What if someone had stolen the copies she was to be sent of her latest novel.

            Now I’m looking at a P.O. Box

            Or UPS mail retrieval.

            Or a mom and pop mail retrieval place.

            Small inconveniences.

            But an inconvenience just the same.

 

Thanks For Reading! Happy Collecting!

Next Friday: We ARE going to discuss 1988 Topps Big Baseball in earnest…and look at Series 3.