Finally...

 

Once upon a time,

             I was a fifteen-year-old kid with a paper route, and the occasional money burning a hole in my pocket. This would be 1989. Yes, I’m old. And most of that money was being spent on baseball cards and football cards, although some was now being allocated to buy cassette tapes of music that I liked.

            That’s right…no more taping songs off the radio for me.

            I grew up in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh. A place called Penn Hills. It was your standard landscape of strip malls, fast food restaurants, and other assorted business associated with having to mostly use a car to get from point A to point B. One thing that was unique about Penn Hills was that way out in the outer part of the suburb, we had a place called City Limits. City Limits mostly acted as music venue, something that wasn’t very common to tony suburbs in the 1980s. Most of the bands that played at City Limits were punk and hardcore bands. I was too young to attend any concerts at City Limits, and to be perfectly honest, to this day punk and hardcore music really aren’t my cup of tea.

            But City Limits hosted another kind of event that was more akin to my interests at the time.

            A flea market.

            Every Saturday and Sunday morning from 8am to 12pm or 1pm I believe.

            Flea markets attracted local sports card dealers. If it wasn’t a card show, the American Coin at the Monroeville Mall or, more importantly, my local Thrift Drug or RevCo; I was probably buying my baseball cards at the flea market at City Limits.

            Provided the old man was willing to drive me and my brother there.

            On one particular late spring/maybe early summer day when I was at City Limits, I came across a dealer who was selling this.

            Yep.

            I didn’t see a lot of Upper Deck in 1989. Maybe at the Coin or at card shows. Packs certainly weren’t showing up at Thrift Drug. And when I did see 1989 Upper Deck, the inclination wasn’t there for me to buy them. I believe Upper Deck retailed for 99-cents a pack, which was more than double what a pack of Topps, Fleer, Donruss and Score were going for in 1989. Why buy one pack of Upper Deck, when I could get two of the other brands?

            And I still had a couple chances of scoring me a Griffey Jr.

            But that 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. card was already legend in 1989. It was already classic, and the kid was barely beginning his career. And the dealer at that flea market knew what he had on him. He was selling that Griffey Jr. card for $25. Cheap in comparison to now. And I had the money on me. It was a weekend after I collected for the paper route. I was flush…for a fifteen-year-old. But I couldn’t buy that Griffey card. Could I? I mean I’d never spent more than a few dollars for a single card before in my life. And this was $25. For a guy who hadn’t even proven himself yet.

            But I wanted that Griffey Jr. card.

            My how I wanted it.

            But all I could picture in my head was my old man saying, you paid WHAT for that card?

            All I could picture was me having little to no money until it was time for me to go collecting on the paper route again.

            So, I didn’t buy the 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. card.

            I don’t even know what I bought that day at City Limits.

            And as for the value of the card…

            You all know the rest.

            Flash forward 36 years later and I’m on my way to the Dave & Adam’s pop-up sports card store outside the Empire State Building. The quest was to get myself a few blasters of 2024 Topps Archives to try and start building that set. Or, at least, to start considering whether or not it was worth it for me to build that set. Well, Dave & Adam’s had those 2024 Archives blasters. And under a glass case at the register, they also had this at a price I told myself I was willing to pay, should I ever come across that card again.

            Fate had struck for a second time.

            Only this time I wasn’t passing it up.

            It looks good in its One-Touch.

            And it looks good with the rest of my Ken Griffey Jr. rookie family.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

 

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

 

I recently got on a kick.

            It happens every few years around Thanksgiving.

            I get a kick for this.

            And this.

            And this.

            And...

            I think you get the picture.

            And no, I don’t think the Star Wars movies are the end all be all. But I don’t have the problem with them that some childhood into adult fandom do. I like the prequels. I enjoy Jar Jark Binks. I think The Rise of the Skywalker is the worst of the bunch. The Solo movie is a blast. I’ve been enjoying the TV shows…at least the ones that I’ve seen.

            I still lovingly look at action figure packages when in toy stores.

            Star Wars t-shirts a vital part of my weekly ensemble.

            I even read the comic books that Marvel has been putting out there for a decade now.

            But I was never really into the trading card aspect of Star Wars. I mean I was, a little bit, as a kid. I was too young for Star Wars cards. And when Empire came out I was just discovering baseball cards and cards in general. Return of the Jedi were the cards I remember buying and buying sparingly. Money doesn’t come easy to nine-year-olds. At least it didn’t in my neighborhood. If I had some change and the choice was between buying baseball cards or football cards, or a pack of Jedi cards.

           Baseball and football would've won handily.

            I got my fix on Star Wars with the action figures. I played with them incessantly. My friend Ray-Ray and I made up our own Star Wars TV show with the figures with scripts and plots and seasons.

            Star Wars cards would’ve paled in comparison.

            Although I do have one old Jedi card in my collection.

            While in the midst of re-watching the Star Wars, the adult collector in me got to wondering what kinds of Stars Wars card products were out there. And there’s a good many from low-end to high-end, to those weekly print-on-demand cards that Topps puts out on the regular. The one product that struck me was this one.

            2023’s Star Wars Flagship.

            It seemed like a good place for me to really dip my toes into the world of Star Wars card collecting.

            But there was a problem.

            The cards had mostly, if not completely, sold out in the market. And anything I was finding on the secondary market was overpriced. A case of the “oh well” and “que sera sera” set in, and I generally forgot about Star Wars cards.

            Until I went to my local LCS.

            I guess I wouldn’t call this place and LCS. They have cards. A lot of cards. But the store is kind of a kaleidoscope of hobby interests. There’re toys. There’s those POPZ. Old comic books. Records and CDS. Etc. The place is near my job so I regularly go in there to snoop around. I happened to be a stand featuring a bunch of random blaster boxes, and what did my wandering eye come upon.

            You guessed it.

            So, I had to buy one.

            I had to buy two.

            If you don’t know Star Wars Flagship here’s the gist of the cards, front and back.

            Pretty standard and pretty basic.

            A few more cards for your perusal.

            2023 Star Wars Flagship is a small 100-card base set. With two blasters I was able to make up nearly 4/5 of the base set. Flagship features cards for characters in every Star Wars movie, some of the TV shows, and even some of the animated series that are out there. Regrettably Star Wars animated programming is the one real blind spot that I have in my Galaxy viewing.

            Your standard Topps insert cards are in Star Wars flagship.

            You have your foil cards.

            Your gold foil cards.

            Your parallel cards.

            Your numbered parallel cards.

            And some pretty cool inserts.

            My favorite of the bunch are the lightsaber dye-cut cards.

            But I wasn’t stingy with them. I gave this one to my wife.

            Rey is her favorite.

            Overall, I had a pretty good time opening packs of Star Wars flagship. I don’t often non-sports, but I think I should dip my toes in further. It’s just harder to find out what kind of products are being released for what kinds of movies and TV shows. Or I’m just not looking the right places and need to connect with more non-sports folks.  I’m a pretty big fan of the latest Star Wars program Skeleton Crew. I thought it was a lot of fun. Be nice to see some card product for that.

            Anyway, thanks for reading. Happy Collecting.

            …And MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU.

 

 

 

 

Good Riddance 2024 and the art of hoping for hope in 2025

 

Ah, the way the years bleed into one another.

            Not that I should expect to feel differently waking up on January 1^st, after going to sleep on December 31 (the years of staying up until midnight have long since passed for me). Honestly, I feel the same sort of malaise in the early part of 2025 that pretty much haunted from the summer of 2024 that progressed into such a pit of anxiety from October to the end of last year, that I pretty much gave up on everything aside from just trying to get through my day without having a nervous breakdown.

            I stopped creative writing before Thanksgiving. I’ve been writing poems and fiction since the age of 17. That’s 33 years. For the past two decades I’ve (mostly) gotten up four to five days a week at 4:45 A.M. to get a couple of hours of writing in before I had to go to work.

            That’s all ended.

            I’m sad it’s ended.

            But I even sadder at the fact that I don’t miss doing the work.

            I sure as hell don’t miss 4:45 AM.

            But this is a baseball card/sports card blog, right?

            What do you want to hear my problems for?

            But collecting is a part of that general anxiety that’s really hit me. I probably had the worst (i.e. least fun/least productive) collecting year since I started back into The Hobby in 2019. Other than Update in October I haven’t bought a single card since I dumbly bought a box of Chrome in July. I didn’t even finish the 2024 base/update set. Haven’t bought singles for the PC/Pirates collections since the summer.

            Just nothing.

            Until I started trying to claw myself all out of this before I went home to Pittsburgh in December. There are good days and there are bad days.

            This past week has been a setback for me.

            But I wanted to at least start writing about cards again…or whatever it is I do on here. And while home for Christmas, I made a pilgrimage to Cranberry Township, in the northern Pittsburgh suburbs, to the Baseball Card Castle, which, hands down, is one of my favorite sports card hobby shops.

            The store is as old school as you can get. Glass cases throughout the front of the place. Battered and old showcases full of old baseball cards. Hobby boxes and old wax behind the counters. Pennants hanging al over. Posters of Pittsburgh sports heroes on the walls. The back of the Baseball Card Castle has shelving full of boxes of completed sets for the four major sports, going as far back as the early 1980s.

            It felt good being in the Baseball Card Castle.

            It felt right.

            I grabbed these two guys.

            The Mazeroski rookie I’ve been wanting since…well…since I was a child. The Baseball Card Castle had three under glass in a showcase, the first two quite a bit above my price range. But the third…the third fit the ol’ wallet just right. The same could be said for the 1979 TCMA Pro Japanese Baseball card for Sadaharu Oh. I’ve been wanting a card of the all-time Home Run champ for a number of years. I’ve always been intrigued by this set as well.

            You can find out why HERE.

            Both were welcome additions to the PC. A

            I got lucky this Christmas as Santa (okay my way) brought me a couple of blaster boxes. One each of 2024 Update and Stadium Club. Both were a fun rip. And my wife kind of has the Midas Touch when buying my cards.

            I started 2025 by buying myself I product that I enjoy but seems to garner a lot of (at times warranted) criticism from other collectors.

Topps seems to drop the ball a lot of the time in the archival continuity of the product. It doesn’t really rub me the wrong way, but if you’re a collector who’s really big on the company maintaining accurate fealty to the product, I don’t begrudge your complaints. For me, it’s a chance to rip and collecting an archival product that has both older and current players and doesn’t bog me down with seeking out short prints.

            I’m not wild about this year’s design choices.

            And there were a lot of inserts.

            24 of them.

That’s 3 packs worth of cards to an avid base collector such as myself.

I also managed to help a fellow collector finish his 1989 Donruss set this year and received these wonderful custom cards in the mail.

I don’t know what 2025 is going to bring for me. I hope it’s better than last year. I hope to keep a lot the anxiety and other demons at bay. As for my creative writing endeavors, we’re almost ½ through January and I have little to no desire for it. Let someone else get up at 4:45 and write poems and novels no one wants to read. 

I’ve done it long enough.

I do want to re-engage with The Hobby though. Collect more. Write about collecting more. I know I’ve made promises about The Blog, but consistency just hasn’t been my strong suit lately. I have a few posts coming up, so I’ll at least be consistent here for the next few weeks. I’d like 2025 to be the year I really re-committed to collecting.

I already like the 2025 Topps base design.

But I’m not getting fooled into trying to build that set by hand.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time read this.

I hope you’re all doing okay, or as okay as you can be.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting! Happy New Year!