The Junk Wax Dilemma Part 2

At some point two months ago I made a post about trying to finish up my 1990 Upper Deck set which was missing about 100 cards.  After some sorting and quick math the total was actually at 107 cards.  I acquired two boxes of 1990 Upper Deck, which seems like overkill for roughly 100 cards.  It was definitely way more cards than I really needed to finish the set, but ripping open junk wax can be underrated fun.

Just looking at the names on the cards makes me happy.

After opening 72 packs of 1990 Upper Deck I sorted the 107 cards I needed to complete my set into my box and then sat down to flip through the rest looking for cool players I liked watching as a middle school kid back when these were brand new.

First, I had done some dabbling in the 1989 Upper Deck set, but never really ripped a ton of packs from that set.  The 1990 set was the first year that I really worked on an Upper Deck set.  Of course the best card in the 1989 Upper Deck set was the Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card.  It was the most popular card from the moment that the set was first released.  The 1990 Upper Deck set also had a really popular Griffey card.  There were other popular rookie cards in the set, but the 1990 Griffey second year card was my favorite card in this set at the time.....

One of the other really popular rookies in the set was Yankees first baseman Kevin Maas who hit 21 home runs while only playing half of a season.  Everyone was sure that he was going to be awesome. Pretty card to have in 1990.......

Maas played a few more years with the Yankees and a year with the Twins, but never really lived up to the half season he played in 1990.  The junk wax era cards always get the bad rap of not having any really stand out rookie cards, but there are plenty of good name rookie cards in the 1990 Upper Deck set like Sammy Sosa and Frank Thomas.  There are plenty of other players in this set too who turned out to have decent Major League careers......

like these two guys were pretty good players for most of the 1990s.  Sure these cards can be found for next to nothing, but one of these guys had more than 2000 hits and 400 stolen bases.  The other one had more than 350 home runs and 1000 RBIs.  Not a bad pair of players and there are others like this in the set.  

There are also the usual superstar cards like Bonds and Henderson....

but my real enjoyment came out looking at the Cardinals cards in the set.  Being a Cardinals fan living outside of St. Louis I really took time to find their cards in the set.  1990 was really the end of the WhiteyBall Era teams with Vince Coleman, Wille McGee, and Terry Pendleton.  Ozzie stuck around for awhile longer, but I loved those teams.  My favorite two Cardinals out of the set, I eliminated Ozzie because he's the easy answer, were.......

This is actually the last Willie McGee Cardinals card until he came back to the team in 1996 as a fourth outfielder.  He also won the National League batting title in 1990 even though he finished the season playing for the A's.  This is also one of the final Coleman cards as a Cardinal as he would leave for the Mets at the end of the season.

Not the flashiest set, but overall I had a good time opening up these packs and checking out these cards.  Happy that I could finish off a set while I was at it.

Had to listen to some 1990 music while I was writing this post.  I went with my most played album from that year on my iTunes which is......