Boston Red Sox Leaders 1989 Topps

 

Sometime in the last two or three months, I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

 

 

 

 

Back in the day baseball cards were just pieces of cardboard that had pictures of your favorite baseball players on them. They weren’t worth much more than the paper that they were printed on. I mean you wanted some players more than you wanted others, I’d take a Willie Mays over a Walt Droppo any day, but aside from the playground, no one over ten gave a shit about cards.

 

In the 70s and especially the 80s, that changed. Boomers aged and as this generation is wont to do, began fantasizing and fetishizing their childhood*. They’d do anything to bring them back to that garden, even for a fraction of a second. They thought that their key back were their old baseball cards. 

 

* I understand the irony of me calling out one generation’s nostalgia while spilling an ocean of ink on my own.

 

Thousands of Boomer boys made their way back to their homes to find out that Mom (it was ALWAYS Mom, low-key misogyny) threw away their precious cards when they were shipped to Vietnam or when they went to college or when they skipped off to Canada until the mid 70s. Anyway once they found out that their garden keys were thrown away, they had to what any group of people with access to disposable income would do: they bought it back. At any cost.

 

Suddenly a lot of people over ten-years-old started to give a very big shit about baseball cards. Man children were spending small fortunes trying to rebuild their collections, which got the few baseball card dealers in the country crazy rich. “Oh? This 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie? It’s $10,000. Yup. Very valuable. Can't possibly ever find another one like this one!” And those whose Mom didn’t chuck their collection sold whatever they could and bought an ugly-ass Porsche and a small mountain of cocaine—it was the 80s after all.

 

Seemingly overnight baseball cards turned into a very profitable way to make money. The next generation of kids (like me) who loved baseball not only bought cards because we wanted to know more about our heroes, but we were fixing to get rich like our uncles and Dads. It wasn't just card collectors that got the bug, the whole hobby caught on and the major card manufacturers (Topps, Fleer, Donruss and Score) flooded the market due to the demand. 

 

And rookie cards were the crème de la crème.Those are the ones that you needed.

 

But kids aren’t economists and didn’t understand simple economics: the more of a supply, the less of a demand. So your 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco Rated Rookie? Junk. Your 1985 Topps Roger Clemens? Nada. How about your 1983 Fleer Tony Gwynn? Maybe $10. if you found the right person. There was just too many cards and everyone was holding on to them. Bart Simpson had it right when he said that Generation X needed “another Vietnam to thin out their ranks”, at least in terms of baseball cards because maybe some Moms would chuck all the cards in the trash.

 

No, our cards never turned into gold. I’m not selling my 1987 Topps Ruben Sierra rookie to send my kid to college. My 1985 Topps Cory Synder Olympic card was used as a down payment for my house. And I never turned my 1987 Mark McGwire Rated Rookie into a Porsche. They’re just cardboard pictures of dudes that were once really fucking great at baseball. 

 

* The only 1980s card that this hasn't happened is the 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie. I mean, if you have one it's not going to push you to a higher tax bracket, but if you sold it, I bet you could take a family of four to McDonald's no problem.

 

What does this have to do with the card above? It shows Jody Reed about to swing at a ball at the Oakland Alameda Country Colosseum with A’s catcher Terry Steinbach behind the dish. Are either of these guys rookies? Nope. And that's sorta the point. 

 

The Leader Cards were originally some of my favorite cards when I first started out collecting. It was a great opportunity to get another photo of your hero* and not only that but it will tell you who was good on that team. 

 

* The 1986 Boston Red Sox Leaders card had a cool shot of Dwight Evans and that year, the person on front of the cards were "Deans of the Team" meaning that those guys were on the team the longest. I thought that was cool as hell for some reason. 

 

The ”leader” part of the Leaders card meant that Topps would list the players who lead the team in about 15 different pitching and hitting categories. So if you weren’t familiar with the Mariners, you could look on the back of the Seattle Leaders card and see that Alvin Davis lead the team in batting average, hits and doubles. And Mark Langston lead the squad in wins and strikeouts. Maybe these are two guys that you should pay attention to when you get them in packs. Maybe they’re both actually pretty good.

 

Once I started really getting into baseball, the Leader cards were kind of superfluous. I knew who lead the Mariners in batting average last year. I know who lead Seattle in wins and guess what, he might have been good for that dogshit Mariners team but in context, he sucked. I was mad that a Leader card took the place of a rookie card. We could have gotten 26 more rookies instead of those stupid cards. That’s 26 more chances to strike it rich!

 

So that’s where I stood in 1990 when I stopped collecting cards: Leader cards were dumb and cost me money. I think that most of the hobby felt the same way because Leader cards eventually disappeared without industry protest. This is the part of the blog where I write about how we may have lost a little something when Topps—they were the only company that printed Leader cards—discontinued these pieces of cardboard. Like maybe we gave up a little bit of the love of the game in pursuit of the almighty dollar in searching for the next rookie.

 

But I’m not sure that’s 100% correct. Leader cards were fine for what they were, they were useful training wheels when it came to understanding baseball and finding out about some decent players. All of that stuff is, and was, available pretty readily. It was a nice little gimmick, but it’s okay that it was put out to pasture.

 

Just because you really enjoyed and needed something when you were younger doesn’t mean that you need it the same way now.Thank you Leader cards for helping me understand baseball a bit better, but your service is no longer needed.