We have reached the end of the month. How did I ever make a blog post per day a few years back? No idea at this point, but we are down to the last card for February. The last card for the month is my first card.
This 1983 Fleer Jim Smith was the first card in my first pack. The six year old me loved this card. Look at those creases and rounded corners. If I ever sell my baseball cards, I am selling them all except this one. It's still one of my favorites to this day.
There were a bunch of Cardinals autographs in Leaf Signature and Donruss Signature, but I bought all of them as single cards, either from card shops or off of Ebay. The first Cardinals autograph that I ever pulled out of a pack?
Just my favorite 1990s Cardinals player.
I bought a box of Upper Deck SP Authentic from 1,000,000 Baseball Cards in Ballwin, Missouri. Upper Deck had rebranded the product that year, it had just been SP for years, so I was not sure quite what I was going to get. The base cards are nice.
Pretty standard Upper Deck baseball card product.
Now, the autograph checklist in the 1998 set is really deep, lots of really good names. It's 1990s Upper Deck, so there is a Griffey. There is also a Tony Gwynn, ARod, Chipper Jones, Andruw Jones, Sheffield, Ivan Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, Scott Rolen, Vlad, Nomar, Roberto Alomar, Mike Mussina, and others.
Those all would have been great cards to pull out of a pack, but there is no better feeling than opening a pack of cards, and seeing a great card of a player you collect. Like many autographed cards, my first view of my first pack pulled Ray Lankford autographed card was the back.
That Richard McWilliam signature on the back of the card brought a lot of joy back in the day. I had to pause for a moment when I saw that the autograph was a Ray Lankford. Best feeling while opening a pack of baseball cards.
The front.
Really sweet card. Lankford does not have many autographed cards, but this has long been my favorite simply because I pulled it out of a pack of cards myself.
I have always wanted to own a Cracker Jacks card. They are an iconic set, but the majority of players that fit my collection would likely force me to take a second mortgage on my house. I have had my eye on a few of these cards for awhile, and finally stumbled onto one this year at a reasonable price. Less than $100.
George Whitted is pictured as a member of the Phillies on this card, but he did play one season with the Cardinals. More importantly, Whitted was a player and manager for the Durham Bulls during the late 1920s and into the early 1930s.
I never thought I would own a Cracker Jacks card. This is currently my favorite vintage card in my collection, and it's not really all that close.
These cards are not even in my collection anymore. I am not sure they was in my collection for more than a week. I do not regret getting rid of them for a second, but they were a pair of cards that I will always remember owning. Even if it was just for a few days.
I bought a box of 2001 Topps Heritage cards from the Sports Card Dugout in Webster Groves right after it was released. I took the box home, opened the packs of cards, and landed a copy of the Classic Renditions Barry Bonds autograph.
There are only 25 copies of the card.
Even crazier is the fact that I landed a Nomar Garciaparra red autograph in the same box.
I do not own this card either. Owned it for less than a week just like Bonds.
The odds for the Bonds are 1:19,710
The odds for the Nomar are 1:545
Getting one of the cards is phenomenal, especially the Bonds. Both in the same box is ridiculous. I listed them both on Ebay. I got almost $1,100 for the Bonds and $200-$300 for the Nomar. I don't remember the exact amount. The same guy bought both.
Are there cards not in my collection that I love?
Yes, even if they were only there for just a week. These are the best combination of cards that I have ever pulled from the same box. Every once in awhile I search these two cards out on Ebay. I am not going to buy copies of them. I'd be sleeping on the porch. Just kind of an ongoing curiosity.
Upper Deck came out in 1989 with foil packaging and glossy cards. I was still on Topps, Donruss, and Fleer. I dabbled with Upper Deck during the early 1990s, but really did not appreciate the brand until the mid 1990s. Maybe even later than that. At a $1 per pack, it cut down on the quantity of cards that I could buy if I stuck with my usual brands.
I was in middle school when the Upper Deck card craze kicked in. The two most important things in my life at the time were baseball cards, and pick up basketball games. There were plenty of neighborhood kids with Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck cards, and all it would cost me was a large stack of all the other rookie cards that I cared about. Barry Bonds, Will Clark, Tony Gwynn, Barry Larkin, Ryne Sandberg, Eric Davis, Darryl Strawberry, and Greg Maddux all probably would have left my collection if I had traded for a Griffey rookie.
To me, at the point in my life, Ken Griffey Jr. was a flashy player on SportsCenter.
All of those players listed above, I actually got to watch them in person. They played against the Cardinals. They had some sort of meaning outside of being a player with highlights on television. Although, truth be told, I was the only kid in my neighborhood who had actually seen Ken Griffey Jr. in person.
The full box score is here. This was on vacation. The bottom of the box score says the weather conditions at the time of the game were unknown. It was hotter than hot, and the Rangers had metal bleachers in their stadium. Back to the card.
I did not trade for an Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card.
For years, the most important Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card in my collection was his 1990 Topps card. I still love this card, and was more than happy with this being best Griffey card.
Fast forward about 15 years into the future. There was a brief window during my life when I did not teach. It was something along the lines of six months. I left St. Louis, moved to a small town in southeast Missouri, worked a job or two including managing meeting and convention space for a hotel and restaurant holding company. I took some historical preservation classes on the side. More into old buildings than old paintings.
So, one of the buildings I managed meeting and convention space was recently demolished, so this is the only picture of the building that I can find on the internet.
This had really large rooms inside. Large weddings, large corporate meetings, things with multiple hundreds of people showing up at an event. I also had an office inside of the building, along with the office staff that actually worked on selling the dates for the meeting rooms. There were really busy days with lots of meetings and things to set up, and other days where you were just hanging out. You know, managing stuff.
One of the slower days, the office staff decided to clean out a box of random items that had been left behind at weddings and meetings. All sorts of odds and ends. Umbrellas, flasks, clipboards, mini bottles of liquor, notebooks, fountain pens, keys, centerpieces, candles, and one baseball card complete with a massive screw down holder.
The card was a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. It was in great condition.
Front of the card. So iconic.
Back of the card.
Man, I loved that job. It took me 15 years to find a copy of this card, but I landed one for nothing. Actually, I was not really looking for it when I found it.
I ended up getting a teach job that I was not really looking for a few weeks later. There is a good parallel to the card. I packed up my stuff and moved to North Carolina. Long story how that happened. Anyway, I love this card, because it reminds me of the brief time I was not a teacher. Not for long, but I had a good time working in the business world.
I have never tried to total up the number of Cardinals games I attended during high school and college, but at a minimum I probably went to a game nearly every weekend they were home between late May and August for eight years. During that entire time, the Cardinals were good for exactly one year, which was 1996. They went to the NLCS that season, and came within one game of the World Series.
Name a Hall of Famer or good player from the 1990s who played in the National League, and there is a really good chance that I got to see them play a few times.
The Cardinals had some name players, but the teams always had some sort of flaw. The years McGwire was there were exciting, but the team did not have any pitching. Early in the decade, the team was an odd group of cheap older players, young prospects that were always supposedly going to be the next big thing, and Ozzie Smith.
Out of the group of young players, several went on to have decent careers, but Ray Lankford was the best of the group. He hit for power, stole bases, and ran down balls in center. Complete player. He once ran over Darren Daulton to score the winning run in a game....
He also hit for the cycle, but I have already mentioned that in the last two weeks. Moving on.
I have shared several different Ray Lankford cards over the past for weeks on my thread of Cards That I Love. Just like yesterday's Pujols post, my Ray Lankford collection had a starting point. The first Lankford card that I remember in my collection was his 1990 Upper Deck.
He was in a few other sets that year too, and those cards are in my collection, but I am betting this was the first. I have a box in my card closet that has all sorts of serial numbered, short printed, and autographed Ray Lankford cards that I have found over the years. The first card in the box is this 1990 Upper Deck. It has been there for years. I cannot remember when it was not the first Ray Lankford card in the box of Ray Lankford cards.
Here is the back.
I am never quite sure which way to turn these 1990 Upper Deck card backs. The stats and blurb go one way, the picture goes another direction. My favorite Upper Deck rookie card from this era (Griffey who?), and a card that I love having in my collection.
During the 2000 season, Albert Pujols had played the majority of the season with the Cardinals A-Ball team in Peoria. He hit well enough to get a Spring Training invite, where he hit well enough to catch the attention of the other players, media members, and fans. He seemed likely to go back down to the Minors though.
From a February 15th interview with Tony LaRussa during Spring Training:
"Pujols shouldn't make the club," He paused. "But," La Russa added, "I didn't think McGwire was going to make the club in 1987."
Many thought that Pujols would be sent somewhere in the Minors to start the season, but then Bobby Bonilla pulled a hamstring at the end of Spring Training. It was Bobby Bonilla's last season in the Majors, and he ended up doing almost nothing with the team. He ended the year with a .213/.308/.339 slash line that included 5 home runs. Yet, Bobby Bonilla getting hurt during Spring Training is one of the most important events in Cardinals history over the past two decades.
The Cardinals response to Bonilla getting hurt: Call up Pujols.
There were no 2000 baseball cards of Pujols, because I do not think he was on anyone's radar. The Cardinals picked him in the 13th Round out of a junior college in Kansas City. So, no Bowman cards of any sort. He was not on a Major League roster of any sort, not on the 40 man, so Topps, Upper Deck, Fleer, and whatever Donruss was at this point, could also not touch him.
His first card? At least the first I remember getting, was out of Fleer Premium. It was not even clear that it was a Pujols card at the time. Just a bland looking exchange card that simply promised you a rookie card. No names attached. Sort of a mystery redemption. I wish I could find a copy of the redemption card somewhere, but I cannot.
I ended up with two of them. The first was a Wilson Betimet, who was a good prospect at the time. He would later go on to disappoint me by a failing a drug test while playing for the Durham Bulls. In 2001, that was a cool card, and Betimet was a very highly regarded prospect.
My second exchange was the Albert Pujols rookie card:
This card was the first Pujols card in my collection. There are half a dozen other Pujols rookies that are roughly the same thing as this card, but being first counts for something. In this case, I have always had a soft spot for this card. Even if it is a pretty emblematic baseball card of the 2000s, and there is very little that is unique or special about this card. I love this card, and it will always be in my collection.
