The Fourth (Verse).

O Beautiful


for patriot dream


That sees beyond the years


Thine alabaster cities gleam



Undimmed by human tears!


America! America!


God shed His grace on thee


And crown thy good with brotherhood


From sea to shining sea!

Complete Set Sunday: 1990 Starline - Long John Silver's.

       In my last post, I went on and on about my birthday presents to myself, one of them being a repack.  In that rather disappointing pile of cards was four cards that immediately sparked my memory and yet, at the same time, made me say "hey, I don't remember these at all."  The cards belonged to the 1990 Starline set.  Now, I remember these posters being everywhere when I was a kid.  It was a very clean design and if you went to toy stores or shoe stores or sporting goods stores, they were everywhere.  I cannot, though, for the life of me, recall them releasing a card set of them.  On one hand, this makes perfect sense - I have never eaten at a Long John Silver's joint ever.  I don't even know if they have them in Jersey, to be honest.  On the other hand, I pride myself in owning oddball food issues, so I am truly surprised this set got by me.  I went to ebay and picked up the set of 40 cards for $3- shipped.  Plus it was sent from a town in New Jersey, so I got it the next day; practically instant gratification. 

The set came still sealed in the original packs that came from the restaurant.  I assume you got one with each purchase, meaning you'd have to choke down 8 different meals of fried mystery fish to finish this set.  Yuck. 

I was kind of torn how to handle this set.  As you may well know from reading this blog, I am kind of obsessed with having everything neatly fitting in to 9-pages (thus the name).  If fact, I have covered this particular predilection before.  A 40-card set does not fit neatly.  Even with the 8(!) header cards, this would be 48 cards, also not neatly divisible by nine (checks 3rd grade math flash cards, hey! I'm right).  So I looked at the way the cards were packaged and realized that these are eight pretty big stars.  Plus I had the leftover cards from the repacks to fill in the one blank, so voila:

They all work very well aesthetically and the loose Chris Sabo breaks up the color scheme.  I love it when a plan comes together.  

Let's look at the back:

Wow. That is pretty ugly.  You do get to see one card back, and it is not Chris Sabo but Glenn Davis (I like to keep people guessing).  I checked my set books before I decided to keep them wrapped to see if there was a set with a 4 or 3 card gap and there was not, so for now, I am satisfied to keep the set this way.  Maybe one day in the future I will get the urge to spring them from their decades-long plastic cocoons.

      Click here to see the checklist, if only for posterity and understanding.  And if you would like to actually see all the cards in the set, check out this post from Fuji, who covered them better than I ever could.  For now, this thick awkward page will sit in my set binders as a monument to the fact that as a teenager, I liked to get fat on burgers and doughnuts and not fried fish.

America.

O beautiful


for spacious skies


For amber waves of grain,


For purple mountain majesties


Above the fruited plain!


America!



America!



God shed his grace on thee


And crown thy good


with brotherhood


From sea to shining sea!

Mothers.

        My mother has always been a bit of a pack rat.  I pause to use the word "hoarder" because of that TV show, but she has been known to have trouble throwing things away from time to time.  She passed this particular habit on to her children, specifically, her middle child.  As I have hammered home over and over again in this blog, I have issues with completing things, both good and bad.  My baseball card collection is a bit of an obsession and I am working hard to keep it all manageable.  My mother has always been a little terrified of my collection.  I think partly because of how much time and space it has taken over the years and partly because she is certain that is mostly her fault.  When I was a kid, she was very supportive of my card collecting.  She would take me to shows and card shops and wait patiently for me because I never wanted to leave.  She would even buy me cards for birthdays and Christmas, usually the wrong ones, but it was the thought that counts.  As an adult, I don't quite think she understand me and my hobby anymore.  As with most parents, she has a hard time seeing me as a grown up, so I think she still sees me as a 10-year old when I talk about my baseball cards.  I suppose she has a small point about that.  My card collection now is a therapeutic pastime.  I think she still sees me as fooling around with them, even though at one time, I made my living buying and selling these things.  As always, she tries to remain supportive, after all, she is my mother and that's what mothers do.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with my mother over lunch and she says "Oh! I have something for you!" and she reaches into her purse.  She pulls out three little stacks of baseball cards, all held together with giant paper clips.  "The kids at the autistic school were having a sale (my 8-year old cousin is autistic - They have these sales to try and teach these kids how money works, which can be an issue with autistic kids) and one of the kids was selling his baseball cards, so I got some for you..."  I saw these old, mangled, junk wax cards held together by a paper clip and had to bite my tongue...

...after all, it is the thought that counts.  My mother was doing a good thing for these kids, and by extension, a good thing for me.  Let's completely disregard that these are exactly the kinds of cards that I am trying to eliminate from my own personal collection and that they have no actual monetary value.  Let's dive in and look at some highlights of what mom got for me...

Kirby!  A hall of famer.  And Mark Grace, a rookie all star.  Nice cards both.  I believe at one time, I had 20 of each of those cards.  I was shocked to see a 1981 Topps card in there, as that is older than any of those kids and most of their teachers.  As you can see by the cards, they have been played with, as junk wax owned by children should be.  That Jose Silva Victory card already had roller marks on it out of the pack, the kid just added some more love to it. 

There were some 1986 Topps Traded cards in here too:

...that 1987 Mickey Hatcher was also an Update set card.  I wonder where this kid got them?  Were they his dad's?  Those 2009 UD First Edition cards on the bottom were very very well loved.  I imagine one of these kids opened the packs themselves and played with the cards, had them in their pocket, etc.  How else to explain all the rounded corners and creases?  This is what kids should do with baseball cards.  I think I am gonna keep those three, they have definite personality.  Thanks Mom!

LuniTek.

       This post is about my furthest journey out into the collecting wilderness, Topps Tek.  In the late '90s, it seems card companies could not draw the line on what wacky crap they would put out.  Cards escalated with gold, shiny, gold and shiny, then thick, then plastic, then 1998 brought us the first set of Topps Tek.  It was plastic, thick, AND shiny; a set that had 90 players, 90 patterns, which means a master set of these badboys would be 8,100 cards. Eight Thousand One Hundred Cards.  And I know collectors who attempted this.  I sold them boxes and boxes of this stuff. I watched them trade and use a website called eBay to augment their collections.  It was a major obsession for some and I thought they were nuts.  1999 brought a second round of Tek - 45 players, this time with home and away variations, making 90 cards total and 30 patterns each.  This is a more manageable 2,700 cards for the master set ("manageable" being a very loose term here).  Having watched the insanity the year before, I anticipated a similar crazy push and bought a lot of it for the store.  Turns out, people had come to their senses and I way over-ordered this product from Topps and ended up having 3-4 cases of this stuff laying around for months.  During a late season lull in product, I got the bright idea "hey, why don't I buy all this Tek stuff and try to put together a set myself?"  As usual, I was way ahead or (in this case) way behind the curve.  I bought it all, busted it and was, um, not even close.  At only 80 cards per box, 6 boxes per case, and less than perfect collation, I wasn't even half done.  Oh, I went the eBay route and sold the gold cards (numbered to 10! - they actually still bring good money) and inserts (FantasTEK Phenoms and TEKnicians - oh those punsters at Topps) and bought some other lots and everything, but after a year, I was still only about 2,000 cards in. 

      The cards sat in a jumbo shoebox for a few years, nearly forgotten as I focused most of my energy in those years to vintage sets.  Then in 2003, the madness returned and I was like "hey, why don't I finish that Topps Tek set?"  Yes, in retrospect, it was a poor decision.  I went back to eBay and after 6 months only got another 300 cards.  2,300 out of 2,700 would seem like way too much to turn your back on.  But I did.  My girlfriend at the time was a very kind and understanding woman, but she never understood my love of baseball cards and really REALLY did not understand my obsession with finding the same card over and over and over again (yes, I made the mistake of explaining it to her one day when she asked me "whatcha doin'?"  Let that be a lesson to all the boys and girls out there - never ask that question and never answer it).  So when we decided to move in together, one thing I did was pare down my card collection and one big casualty was the '99 Tek near set.  I don't regret dumping the set - even though, later on, the girl dumped me - and I cannot imagine what people who tried to put together the '98 set are like.  I suppose there is a wing in asylums everywhere for the 1998 Topps Tek set builders.  I mean, the 2,700 cards beat me, a devout (if recovering) completist...I cannot imagine what 8,100 cards has done to the psyche of some men.

In my binders lies a few reminders of my insanity tango with Tek.  Enjoy.
 
As a post script, Tek went out with a whimper in 2000 with a set I don't think anyone remembers.

If anyone knows of anyone who has completed a master set of Topps Tek, please let me see the link.  And the phone number of their psychiatrist.