Cards I Love Part 7- 1998 Fleer Tradition Update J.D. Drew

I was positive that J.D. Drew was going to be a great baseball player.  He was incredible in college, and I thought that would carry over to professional baseball.  When the Cardinals drafted him out of Florida State in 1998, I got really excited to see him on a baseball card.  Drew got through the Cardinals Minor League system in half of a season, and made his Major League debut the same night Mark McGwire hit his 62 home run.  

He pinch hit for Kent Merker in the 6th inning, and then stayed in the game in place of Ron Gant in left field.  

There were three early J.D. Drew cards that I loved at the time, and that I thought would be a good start to a collection of his cards.  I still love all three of them to this day.  Obviously my favorite is the 1998 Fleer Update, which I will talk more about in a minute.  The other two were 1999 cards.  

One is the 1999 Pacific Private Stock card.  

I like the design of these cards.  They were released early in the 1999 card calendar, so probably one of my first J.D. Drew cards after his 1998 Fleer Update.  I think it was pretty highly sought after at the time, but you can find it for little to nothing now.  A dollar might be too much for this card.  

I also liked his SPx card, which was autographed.  

Lastly, there was the 1998 Fleer Update card.  You could only get the card in a box set, and I went to college in a town without a real baseball card store.  Technically, there was one there, but the guy who ran it was a jerk.  I did not really like to go in there if at all possible.  So, I had to acquaint myself with a little website known as Ebay.  

It looked awesome in those days.  

I don't remember what the boxed update sets cost at that time, maybe $20 or so.  PayPal was not a thing at that point that I was aware of, so I had to find a place to buy a money order in the little town I was living, and send off to get my Fleer Update set.  It was my first ever Ebay transaction, so it was kind of a big deal.  

The closet place to campus to get a money order was a hole in the wall store front that also offered notary service, P.O. boxes, and all sorts of odds and ends.  Basically a ma and pa UPS store with an old guy smoking cigars.  I put my money order in the mail, and a week or two later I had a package slip in my mailbox at college.   

(Glowing sound) 

You can find these sets for so little now.  A couple of bucks max.  

There are other good players in the set, but all I really cared about was the J.D. Drew rookie card.  It was a thing of beauty in my opinion.  

Here is the front of the card.  

and the back of the card.  

Drew never lived up to his hype, but at the same time he was not really as big of a bust as people some times make him out to be.  He was an above average for the majority of his career and had some healthy career numbers by the time he retired at the end of the 2011 season.  

If nothing else, he was the reason the Cardinals ended up with Adam Wainwright.  

The 1998 Fleer Update card is still sorted in with all of my really good rookie cards.  Plenty of reason to still love this card.