Story Time.

       Today is my brother's birthday and I got him the exact same thing this year as I did last year (don't say I am not consistent).  I did get him a book as well to break up the monotony because nothing says excitement like a big thick encyclopedia full of statistics - this is not sarcasm, we are nerds after all.  But I also got him one of those odd piece-of-mind type gifts that might be a physical item for me but it is a grand affirmation for him and that is where our story begins. 

       Let's jump into the WABAC machine to 1987.  The Mets were reigning World Series champs and a man we call The Franchise had just retired.  I was 12 years old and deep into my obsession with collecting baseball cards and my brother had just gotten his drivers license.  It was a good time to alive in the suburbs of New Jersey.  If you know anything about Jersey, North Jersey especially, you know that kids hang out in the mall because there are like 7000 of them.  One of the late great stores of that era was called The Wiz  (and that little article told me that it still exists online, oh the power of the internets). Now, The Wiz was one of those all in one electronics stores, it sold video games, small appliances, stereo equipment, records, the works.  It was quirky as hell (though not even the quirkiest of local stores) and those not from around here might know it from Seinfeld (and Mets cards) and hell, fucking Joe Namath was their spokesman for a while.

And the jingle, oh my god the jingle.  Frozen in time in 1987 but still so damn catchy that I will hum it at the weirdest times and basically at the mere mention of the word Wiz.  I am going to embed the video to share the earworm.

So now you have the background of how my brother, The Wiz, Tom Seaver, and my Mets all come together.  I don't remember where I heard it, but sometime in the summer of 1987, Tom Seaver was going to sign free autographs at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus.  This was a big deal.  The word was all over the place and I wanted to go.  Oh dear god did I want to go.  My memory is a little fuzzy as to why, but my mother would not take me.  I am going to go out on a limb and guess I was grounded for something (I was a tad rebellious at the age of 12).  I was crestfallen, crushed.  But there was hope - hope in the shape of my brother and his drivers license.  He could get me my Tom Seaver autograph.  Remember, this was before the internet and 1000 insert cards and before every kind of player went to card shows to sign; Seaver being recently retired meant he was not part of the old timers brigade like Mickey Mantle that dominated the shows of the time.  In my mind, this was my only chance to ever get a Tom Seaver autograph ever.  So I turned to my brother...now, he was 17 and could go anywhere and do anything he wanted with his new found freedom, so doing a favor for his pain in the ass little brother that did not involve girls and/or beer was not high on his list of priorities.  I begged, pleaded, cajoled, and several other synonyms of nagged my poor brother until I wore him down.   He did not collect sports memorabilia with the fervor that I did but he was a huge Mets fan and I think in the end the notion of getting to meet Tom Seaver, if ever so briefly, changed his mind.  So he went to The Wiz in Paramus on a Sunday afternoon and it was an absolute mob scene.  Apparently every little Mets fan around had somehow convinced his mother to go.  My brother parked liked a million miles away and waited on line for over two hours and his interaction with Tom Seaver was a nanosecond of recognition and hardly a glance.  But he got me my autograph.  He got it on a 1987 Topps Tom Seaver card that I had just gotten.  An odd choice, yes, but I was a kid and really, all I wanted was Seaver's autograph on something, anything.  I remember every square inch of that card.  The day game shadows on Tom's Boston away uniform.  The blue sharpie that kind of tilted ever so slightly on the signature.  It was a great autograph.  And my brother got it for me.  And believe me, he didn't let me forget it.  I had that card very prominently displayed among my things and for weeks and months afterward, my brother would guilt me about going through the throngs of barbarian hoards to get me my Tom Seaver autograph.  And I was grateful. Really, I was.  So damned grateful that a year later I traded it to my friend Jared.

Wait, WHAT?!?!??

Let's tilt the lever of the WABAC ahead a smidgen to a year later.  I was hanging out with my friend Jared at his apartment and I had brought my baseball binder full of all my favorite cards.  Now, Jared was a bigger Mets fan than I was.  Hell, Jared might be the biggest Mets fan of all time.  When he turned 13, he didn't have a bar mitzvah, he had a bar Metsvah, that should tell you all you need to know.  When Jared heard that I had Tom Seaver autograph, he wanted it.  I told him I would never trade it.  I spent the entire day in his house that day and we just talked about baseball cards and how much he wanted that card.  Eventually, he wore me down. 

He laid out all his cards and let me pick out whichever ones I wanted.  He talked up all his cards.  He talked down the Seaver autograph - heck it wasn't even on a Mets card, why would I want it?  He was a master manipulator; he knew what he wanted.  And eventually he got it.  And sadly, I don't remember most of the cards I traded for it.  I do remember a 1975 Harmon Killebrew being involved because that is an awesome card.  I remember maybe some Pete Rose cards involved and some Mets doubles he had.  The point was, I just traded a dollar for 10 nickles.  I was weak or perhaps Jared was just strong.  He was a smart kid and I somehow imagine him a high profile lawyer or something now.  We lost touch not long after this trade and I wouldn't blame the trade, per se, but I had moved away from the town he lived in and that's just how friendship works when you are 13.  Out of sight, out of mind.

What was not out of mind was the fact that I had just traded away what was the cornerstone of my collection.  I regretted the decision immediately.  Oh, and my brother.  My brother has NEVER let me forget it.   You did what??!?!??!?  He was mad then and he is still pretty miffed now if the subject comes up.  What was probably the nicest thing my brother had done for me up to that point and I had just given that away.  And what's worse, I gave it away for stuff I cannot even remember.

I think my brother has reason to be kinda pissed.  Though that Killer is pretty sweet.

Let's fast forward to a couple weeks ago.  I was searching Listia aimlessly and I stumbled upon this listing.  To end the suspense, it was this:

It couldn't possibly be.  I emailed the seller as to how he obtained this card.  I asked him about 100 other questions about it.  He didn't have a lot of answers.  He did have many other signed raw cards online.  I compared this card to a few other Seaver autographs.  It's not perfect, but then again, when Seaver was scribbling a bazillion autographs at The Wiz in 1987, his autograph wasn't perfect then either.  The odds that this is the same card are practically nil as I still imagine Jared somewhere clutching and loving that card more than his family.  I didn't care.  I decided it was fate, I must have it.  And I won it.  And earlier in the week, I opened an envelope and there it was, after 26 years in the desert.  Now, like I said, I am quite certain that this is not the same card my brother got me but to me, it is a symbol.  A representation of a small but very specific kind of redemption and affirmation.  I have had it sitting on top of a pile of cards that I see every day when I wake up and seeing it never doesn't make me smile.  I hope my brother can forgive me my impetuous nature at the age of 13.  I hope my brother knows how much I appreciate not only the fact that he got this card for me, but about a million other things he has done in time as my big brother that have gone above and beyond the call of duty.  I hope somewhere Jared is happy with his card, but for me, this card is much better...I re-earned a piece of my soul by obtaining this card.  Happy Birthday, bro

Football Week 11: The Autumn Wind.

       ...is a Raider, pillaging just for fun. At least that's how the poem goes. As far back as the 1970's, the Raiders represented rebellion and they were "the bad guys."  They were the repository for every castoff, thug, and ne'er-do-well in the NFL.  And worse, they won.  A lot.  Like most males of my generation, I went through a brief fascination with the LA/Oakland Raiders in the late 80's and early 90's.  By the time I was a teenager, gangster rappers had adopted the silver and black and made them cool all over again by being everything conventional society and parents hated.  They used the Raider colors as their own uniform and really, look how simple and badass those uniforms are:

Now I am very white and from a very very white town, but I lived briefly in a non lily-white area so I know first hand how ridiculous it is when upper middle class kids adopt the urban attitude.  For the white kids in the 'burbs, it is a poseur persona; for kids in the ghetto, it is just the way life is.  So I never really liked the Raiders because it was "cool," I liked the Raiders for a different, better reason: Bo Jackson.

Bo Jackson was unbelievable. There will never be someone like Bo Jackson ever again.  He was an athletic savant.  He made everything look easy.  I watched Bo play baseball with awe, but then he started playing football too, you know, as a hobby (seriously).  And whatever the equivalent of 500 foot homers are in baseball, he did that in football.  Every time he came to bat, you dropped what you were doing and watched.  When he was in the back field, every single time he touched the ball, a touchdown was likely.  He made moves that defy logic.  They needed a higher league for his talents.  If you never saw him play, go to youtube and watch some of his highlights.  It's OK, I'll wait...

Unfortunately, he was a shooting star that streamed across the sky briefly and faded away.  Because he chose that rather dangerous hobby, he got hurt.  And by hurt, I mean he got brutally tackled and it ground his hip into dust and hamburger.  After that, he never played football again.  But defying all logic once again, he got a hip replacement and came back to play baseball for a few more years.  That's right, he played baseball with a frigging artificial joint in his leg. 

I say that we will never see another person like Bo Jackson again because, sure, while maybe there will be another athlete like him, no one will ever play baseball and running back at the same time again nor to the level that he achieved at each (All Star and Pro Bowl, respectively).  We might get another Deion Sanders or Brian Jordan, but another Bo? No way.  He is unique amongst athletes in history.  And in a way, we kind of got cheated.  If he had focused on baseball, who knows what we could have seen.  What was the celing - Ken Griffey Jr., maybe?  Sammy Sosa may have been the floor.  If he had focused on football and not gotten hurt?  We would probably talk about him over Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith, since he was pretty much a combination of those two, with some Earl Campbell thrown in for good measure.  Bo Jackson is one of the all time What Might Have Beens in sports.  Oh, but what we got was pretty damn good.

I am using the Raiders today because my Saints are playing them in Oakland (and I even get to watch them on the television because of the Giants bye week...woohoo!). My infatuation with the Raiders is long over, so watching New Orleans stomp them today will bring me great joy.  I used Bo Jackson today to introduce one of my absolute favorite player collections.  I have a whole cube of Bo which means about 150 different cards.  Very few of my player collections are in binders - Mike Piazza, Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, Todd Hundley are about it.  The rest are in a big box trapped in plastic cases and cubes waiting to get the call to the big time.  I think of all my player collections, Bo might be the next to get the nine page treatment. 

***

UPDATE:  I posted this 12 days before Bo's 50th birthday.  Bo Jackson is 50?  Wow.  I am old.

Hometown.

       I grew up living in a few different places in northern New Jersey before my family finally settled in the town of Ramsey.  Now, Ramsey's big claim to fame is...well...come to think of it, it has no claim to fame.  It is the epitome of the upper middle class, white, bedroom community, suburban ghetto.  It isn't rich or special enough to have famous people live here nor is it poor enough for anything nasty to transpire here leading to infamy.  Anyway, I could not get out of this place fast enough when I turned 18, going away to Boston first for college and then to live.  But, of course, in the usual It's A Wonderful Life cliche turn of events, I came back here to live seven years ago - and have been plotting, in vain, to leave ever since.  So, if you were to ask me what my hometown was, I would reluctantly yet firmly say "Ramsey, NJ."

       I was surfing around some card blogs a night or two ago (stay with me, the point is coming) and I hit upon an especially odd group of players being discussed and in one of the comments, a player was given props merely for being from someone's hometown.  That little defense got me to thinking of my childhood. Going further in the WABAC, I was a pretty terrible athlete as a kid.  At first, I was short and chubby, than after puberty hit me (like a ton of bricks), I became lanky and awkward.  While I am tall and wide, I lost the overall natural lottery with an overall goofy body with no discernible center of gravity.  All in all, though, I was very enthusiastic about playing sports and went out for all the teams, sometimes even making them.  When I was in middle school in the late 80's and then high school in the early 90's, Ramsey was known as a local hotbed of athletics.  Unfortunately, it was the classes behind me and ahead of me that had all the good jocks (it seems the mid-70's were not a particularly fertile time for those kinds of genetics in this town).  The late 70's and early 80's had brought a couple county champions in baseball and one state champion.  That state championship team featured a player that was spoken of in hushed tones in my hometown: Mike Laga.

Mike Laga is by far the most famous baseball player to come out of Ramsey.  There was a brief time when he was thought of as one of the best prospects in all of baseball.  You could just ask Sparky Anderson (except he's dead) and my long time local high school baseball coach and they would tell you all about it.  Unfortunately, Mike flamed out and never amounted to much.  He had power to spare, but never got that contact or defense thing down.  He is known in card circles, sadly, for his awful airbrushed 1987 Topps card (oh the pink! see above) and in baseball circles for hitting the most impressive foul ball in Busch Stadium history.  Not a grand legacy...but in my hometown, he is still held in high regard.  I got that autograph on the 1986 Donruss card in person at a card show in Ramsey High School sometime in 1987 or 1988 and, I can say from experience, Mike is a very nice guy...the very definition of a hometown hero.

The other three cards on that page are of Frank Eufemia, and 64 silver dollars to you if you'd ever heard of him.  He is, though, a bit of a North Jersey legend.  He made the big leagues in 1985 (as you can plainly see by his three 1986 cards) with the Twins.  He got hurt and bounced around the minor leagues for years trying to get back.  Around 1991, he was the star of the local Hackensack Troasts, a semi-pro team.  Having family and once even having lived in Hackensack, I knew the team well.  On more than a few occasions, I got to play catch and warm up Frank Eufemia, my closest brush with the big leagues.  For a 15 year old, this was a pretty big deal (his time with the Troasts led him to being signed by the Mets in 1992, but he never got higher than AAA). I never got up the nerve to ask Frank for his autograph, but he does teach gym a few towns over now, so maybe if I am ever bored, I could go over and make up for that oversight. 

Fast forward a decade or so to when I lived in Boston and, as I have described before, I worked in a baseball card store.  I actually lived in a suburb of Boston named Somerville.  At around the same time, a slugger named Paul Sorrento was bouncing around the American League.  He put together a pretty decent big league career all through the 90's.  He was even an original Devil Ray:

So, one day I had this big, happy Italian customer in the baseball card store and when he handed me his credit card, I saw his last name was "Sorrento" - for whatever reason, I mention Paul Sorrento and asked if he knew of him.  "Know him, he's my cousin!" was the reply and he went on and on about his cousin Pauly.  I then had a customer for life and he came in the store all the time.  One afternoon, he walked in and introduced me to his cousin, Paul.  Both of them were big, goofy, friendly guys.  Turns out, I also lived about three blocks from Paul's parents. I ended up becoming pretty decent friends, for a time, with the entire Sorrento clan.  Very nice people, definitely hometown guys.

So, those are my hometown people and a couple of interesting little brushes with greatness.  As I said, I was not great, or even a very good, baseball player.  Luckily, by the late 80's, that didn't matter.  Most little league teams got their own homemade baseball cards, myself included:

I think I was 12 in that picture.  The other two homemade-type cards are of my cousin (Robbie) and a childhood friend (Jared).  They were nice enough to autograph their cards for me.  And yes, I signed my own card. Sad, sure, but practicing your autograph is what you do at 12 when you just know, with a few breaks, you'll make the majors.  Alas, my cousin and my friend never made the majors, either, but their autographs are priceless in my book.  In an odd twist, another one of my cards had an awesome brush with greatness:

It is very hard to tell, since it is blue sharpie on a blue jersey, but there is an autograph on that card, and it isn't mine.  My mother was traveling through Baltimore on business one time in the late 80's and there was some kind of meet and greet in her hotel with local famous folks.  She saw one of them was a baseball player and, not having anything for him to sign, she pulled out my baseball card from her wallet and had him sign that.  She had no idea who he was (my mother is not much of a baseball fan) but that card has a unique place of honor in my collection.  The player?  Brooks Robinson.

Complete Set Sunday - 1995 Topps Cyberstats.

       Today I wrap up what became parallel weekend here at Starting Nine with one of my favorite sets of all time.  First, let's jump into the WABAC machine...1995 was an odd time for baseball.  The 1994 strike was damn near armageddon for the sport.  Both sides got themselves in a Mexican standoff over the issue of a salary cap and neither side blinked; we lost the World Series because of it.  Spring of 1995 brought folly to the proceedings when the owners decided to bring in replacement players for spring training.  Once they realized how ridiculous that idea was, they blinked and the sides settled, but nothing was really settled.  Not to get into the boring details, but it is obvious that the only one's who lost the 1994 strike were the fans.  I know folks who still don't care about baseball because of the whole nasty affair and I really can't blame them.

       Topps released their flagship set of cards in 1995 in a rather muted manner.  It wasn't in every toy store and CVS and they say the presses were run at their lowest levels since the mid 60's, so the cards were a little hard to find.  I was in my junior year of college in 1995 and probably at an all time low in terms of excitement about baseball in general and card collecting specifically.  So, due to the combination of youthful shenanigans and ennui over baseball, I don't think I bought a single pack of 1995 cards in 1995.  And it is a shame, because the Topps put out a quality set:

The simple borders and non-offensive but stylish font make for some good looking cards. They used some nice pictures and the area for the photo is nice and big.  Most noticeably, for the first time, Topps used gold foil on the base set, not the parallel set.  Turn the cards over and you see the backs also had some flair to them:

You get two pictures, an action shot and a head shot cleverly stylized into a Diamond Vision scoreboard look.  There were also the usual stats and some good write ups.  It is a shame no one noticed at the time, but the 1995 Topps set was put together very well, I wish they put as much time and creative effort into the contemporary base sets.

So, with gold foil on the front of the base cards, what on earth was Topps to do for a parallel?  I think the world would have continued turning without a parallel set (the base set did just fine without one inserted from 1996-2000), but Topps did something very different and kinda ballsy.  Now, because the mid 90's cards are not as deeply discussed in blog circles as current or vintage stuff, I have not seen many opinions about this parallel set...but I will throw out the notion that what Topps did was one of their most ingenious and daring efforts.

I present the 1995 Topps Cyberstats:

First, let's cover the aesthetics, the shimmering, refractor-like glow these cards have make them very attractive.  Sadly, I don't think my scanner captures the effect perfectly, but believe me, the shiny foil fronts alone would make this a worthy parallel set.  The kicker is the backs:

This is where this set differentiates its self from any set, before or after.  Topps decided to run a computer simulation to complete the unfinished 1994 baseball season and the put the results of that on the backs of these cards...

That's right, this is a parallel set from a parallel universe.


Like I said, I was too busy ignoring baseball and being a capricious youth to notice this set early in the year.  But the 1995 baseball season in Boston (where I was living) was pretty exciting.  The Sox surprisingly won the division and, little by little, they sucked me back into baseball fandom.  It was this team that made the Red Sox my baseball mistress (I am married to the Mets, after all).

Oh, back to the cards, lets look at a few more fronts and then get back to those backs.




Diving into some of these stats...according to Topps, Ken Griffey Jr. would have a monster year: .330 average 55 HR 133 RBI, which seems pretty accurate, given how well he was doing up until then and he would pretty much have two or three years just like that in the next few years.  I have to disagree with the Jeff Bagwell numbers, though.  The players went out on strike on August 12, and Bagwell was hit in the wrist with a pitch on August 10, breaking it.  I am pretty sure he would not have returned until very late in the season, if at all, so his numbers would have stayed right where they were (Bagwell won the 1994 NL MVP unanimously with a .368 average 39 HR and 116 RBI and an incredible .750 slugging - and no, I didn't have to look those numbers up...I am a big Bagwell fan). 


This is the last page of the set.  You can check out the stats for Darryl Strawberry on the original base card (above) and here in the Cyberstats world.  Darryl Strawberry was, as usual, coming back from injury and a drug suspension.  Look at that very Pedro-esque year they had for Pedro.  You might have thought it kind of a long shot then, but Pedro went on to put up those kind of numbers - and a heck of a lot better - over the next 10+ years.  Pedro Martinez makes me as happy as Darryl Strawberry makes me sad.

The set itself covers 396 of the 660 cards in the set, so most major players are covered and a lot of the rookies too.  If you have been paying attention to my odd predilections, I love that this set is 396 cards, because it fits perfectly into 44 pages, but that is certainly not why I kept this set.  When I discovered this set late in the 1995 year, I didn't do much about it, but in 1996, when my card collecting habit regained some steam, I bought as much of the 1995 cards as I could to catch up.  I built most of this set myself from those packs and finished it off at a show in 1996.  This set grew on me exponentially, both because of the spectra light fronts and the weird, bizarro-world stat backs.  I found it such an audacious choice for a parallel set and I poured over the alternative universe Topps created.  I wish they had advertised it more back then; I wish Topps would make such bold choices today in their set making.  I wish I knew more people as obsessed with this set as I am.  The set is in the front of the first book on my set shelf and it will probably always keep that status.

Post Script.  The set was punctuated with an insert set that was only available in the very hard to find 1995 factory set.  The set celebrates the pretend achievements of their alternative 1994.  I only have three of those cards seven cards, but I have the shiny foil Ken Griffey Jr. promo card, which is also pretty rare - and features a much better photo than the base card.

I will hopefully complete this page someday.  I have added the cards I need to my wantlist...if you think you can help, drop me a line.

Genesis.

       So where exactly did this collecting idea come from?  Let's jump in the WABAC machine to the magical time of 1998 - Bill Clinton was president for life, the stock market would never ever fail again thanks to tech stocks, and The Simpsons was winding down its run, but still pretty funny.  I was living in Boston, and I had two jobs: I worked in a baseball card store by day and was an assistant manager of a record store by night.  It was my childhood dream jobs come true.  I got to talk baseball and buy and sell cards all day.  Then, I got to change into my cool clothes, talk music, flirt with cute customers, and bang cute clerks all night.  I worked 18-20 hours a day, but not a minute of it was remotely what I would call "work".  Alas, both of those stores are gone (though the card store exists in a different incarnation) and I no longer have the energy to run such a vocational gauntlet.  Oh, to be 23 again.  Anyway, working in the card shop allowed me to augment my collection exponentially.  I built vintage sets, scored choice hall of famers, and bought a fuckton of new product (it's an industry term). 

     Back then, most of my collection ended up in boxes but working in the card shop allowed me access to binders and pages at wholesale prices.  I started putting shiny inserts into pages.  At first, a lot of my pages looked like this:

Inserts all willy-nilly.  I mean, I have since moved these around a bit, but this page is almost exactly how I put together in 1998.

The first conscious effort I made to have nine cards on a page that had a unifying theme was this one:

I loved the '98 Finest, with the busy - but not ugly - ribbon design and the little icons for positions, a conceptual homage to the 1973 Topps set.  It was those icons that I wanted to showcase so I made sure they were all represented; I especially liked the batting helmet for the DH.  I even used the rarer shiny no-protector parallels.  This is it.  This is the genesis.  It became a harbinger.  I started to go back and see if I had nine of other inserts.  So more pages were made:

If I recall, this 1997 UD Great Futures page was second:

I loved these Topps Etch-a-Sketch inserts.  There were 9 of them in the set.  Perfect.


And so instead of this...

You got this:

Instead of this:

You got this:


Once I discovered eBay, it made doing pages like this much easier:

and much much more colorful:
 
Sometimes much much MUCH more colorful: 
Pound for pound, that UD Decade page might be my favorite page, like, ever.

So, from doing this with inserts came the natural progression to do it with all of my cards and collections.  That way I could narrow down some of the bulkier sets and player collections into manageable bites and focus on grander things that I actually wanted in quantity.  I liked the idea so much, I decided to share it with the world, or at least the 50 or so nerds like me who read dozens of card blogs everyday.