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.

Top 19 -- "Weird Al" Yankovic: Polka Party

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

I can't be 100% certain of this, but if you grew up in the 1980s; there's a good chance you had a "Weird Al" Yankovic phase. I know that I did. I got Al's biggest album "In 3-D" (the one with "Eat It") back in 1984 and I listened to that tape a lot. In a lot of ways, it was a primer on classic rock due to his "Polka on 45s" medley. He mashed "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix, "LA Woman" by the Doors and "Hey Jude" by the Beatles, among other songs, into one really hyper polka. It was a strange experience to hear one of those songs year later for the first time and think, "I know this song, but where do I know it from?"

So for me, Al is the source for my pop culture deja vu. 

My best friend at the time, had Al's follow-up to "In 3-D", called "Dare to Be Stupid". Even though I didn't own the cassette at the time, we listened to it a lot. And laughed a lot. That was the thing about Weird Al tapes, the musicianship was really good, but the lyrics were also really funny. For a guy that's labelled only as a "parodist", I am certain that Al and his band don't get a lot of credit for how well they play their instruments*, nor for how well Yankovic writes his songs. 

* I've read someone make the claim that Yankovic's band has to be the best touring bands ever due to the different types of music that they have to master. From hip hop to pop to country to metal to grunge to doo wop to punk, they need to be able to play these genres and make sure that they sound great. I don't know, this guy made a really good argument. 

For Christmas of 1986, I really wanted Al's follow up to "DtbS", entitled "Polka Party". I saw  the James Brown/Rocky IV parody video, "Living with a Hernia" all over MTV and needed to hear what other tricks Al had up his sleeve. December 25 came and under the tree was "Polka Party". I'm sure that I busted out the tape player and gave that bad boy a listen as I put together my He-Man and M.A.S.K. toys or while I was reading comics and looking at baseball cards--the 1986 Topps Traded Set, dontchaknow. 

I did a very brief bit of research on this album and found that it was one of Yankovic's worst selling albums ever. The release was met with commercial and critical silence. But I didn't care, I loved this album so much. At the time I owned probably about six tapes, two of them were Weird Al, two were Men at Work, one was a Billy Joel's "Piano Man" (I wanted "An Innocent Man" but I got this instead) and I'm not sure what the other album was. The only two that I ever listened to were from Weird Al. 

The influence that this tape had on me was pretty big. My favorite song was the El Debarge "Who's Johnny" parody, "Here's Johnny", which was about Johnny Carson's sidekick Ed McMahon. In 1986, I was 12-years-old and I doubt that I ever stayed up later than 10:00, but I laughed at that song like I've been watching Carson for 25 years. The only thing that I knew about McMahon was that he and Dick Clark used to host, "Foul Ups, Bleeps and Blunders" and he used to give away big checks once a year for Publisher's Clearing House. Al's song made me want to learn more about McMahon and his full-time job so that vacation, I stayed up to watch the Tonight Show. Since it was during the dead time between Christmas and New Year's, I was shocked to find a rerun. And if I remember right, I don't think that my hero Ed McMahon was even on the show that night. 

I can't tell you how long my Weird Al infatuation lasted. It probably wasn't much longer after that I decided that him and his music was "kids stuff" and that I needed to listen to more adult music like Poison or Mötley Crüe. You know, songs with real meaning in them. 

But a funny thing happened, people kept trying to bury him in the late 80s, but Weird Al Yankovic is still pretty popular. He has his ebbs and flows, but there are a lot of comedians that I respect who cite him as an early influence. And from what I've read, he's one of the nicest people in showbiz. 

My daughter's first music obsession was Weird Al and that was her first concert too. Al was great, he put on an awesome show and my daughter had a blast. It was really cool to be able to pass that down from one generation to the next and I know that it stuck. My daughter doesn't love Weird Al as much as she used to, but she can be as goofy as he can be. We still talk about "Christmas at Ground Zero" (first released on "Polka Party") and not a week goes by without one of us referencing "Just One of Those Days" (another "Polka Party" jam). It's like our own secret language and one that I love speaking. 

I never would have guessed that the first time that I listened to "Polka Party" under the Christmas tree that I'd be sharing a love of Weird Al 34 years later with my daughter. But it happened and that's good. 

The Wax Pack: a Review

Up until my sixth grade summer there were a few things that were incredibly important to me: comic books, candy and soda. Maybe my computer too. But I had to rely on my parents to a. get me that computer and b. get me games and software to make it do cool stuff. The other three things were stuff that if I had a few bucks and my bike, I could go to the corner store and get without them. 

The summer of 1986 was a transformative few months for me. The Red Sox were really good that year and one star in particular captured the region's imagination like no athlete since a young Larry Bird. His name was Roger Clemens and beginning on that cold April night when he set a Major League record by striking out 20 Seattle Mariners, he was my guy. Even though I've lived in Massachusetts my entire life, on that night, the Red Sox really became my team. Up until then I liked baseball, but that was the summer that I fell head-over-heals in love with baseball. 

The cool thing about baseball--and sports in general--was that even in the mid 80s, you could find more and more information about the game everywhere. The newespapers had daily coverage of the Sox. Magazines had weekly coverage. Local sports anchors were LIVE! from Fenway Park practically every night the Sox were home previewing the game at 6:00 and recapping it at 11:00. Every game was on TV or the radio--there were even stations devoted specifically to sports! Not only that but the library had shelves and shelves of books devoted specifically to the sport. 

 

There was a lot of ways to get immersed in the sport, that summer I practically drowned in baseball. And I did it happily.  

But for a kid with a dollar or two in his pocket, baseball cards were the best way to find out about today's players and ultimately the game. The first baseball cards that I ever bought was a pack from Cumberland Farms, a convenience store only a short ride from my house in Amesbury, MA. Topps was my brand. I remember the electric blue wrapper, the way that word "BASEBALL" was in bright red and the yellow sunburst advertising a contest where the winner gets a free trip to Florida to check out next year's spring training*. 

Even before you got to the cards, you had the hard, pink gum. It tasted awful and it cut up the insides of your mouth, but what kid is going to throw away free gum? After you popped that stick in your mouth, it was time to rifle through the cards and see if you got one of your favorites. Most of the time you didn't--how many Roger Clemens did Topps make anyway--but even the commons (the non-star) players had their own dignity. It was though the commons that you learned about the game. 

* Did anyone ever find out whether someone won that trip? Topps never seemed to publicize it. That seems like something that they'd want to do. Alas. 

The above paragraphs were a very long walk to what I wanted to write about today. Writer Brad Balukjian and I are around the same age and it appears that his first card set was the same as mine too. He wrote a terrific book called "The Wax Pack" which revolves around him buying a pack of 1986 cards recently, going through the cards and then jumping in the car and tracking down the random assortment of players whose cardboard likenesses he had found. 

 

This book was made for people like me. 

From Randy Ready to Jamie Cocanower to Gary Templeton to Don Carmen to Rance Mulliniks and more, Balukjian tracked them down and was able to spend time and talk to the men that were once just names and statistics. Most of the players that he contacted were glad to be remembered. Cocanower* was particularly psyched to talk and invited Balukjian to his home to celebrate the Fourth of July with him and his family. 

* Despite playing less than a handful of years in the Bigs and with a team that was largely anonymous to me (the Milwaukee Brewers) and not having great number, when I was a kid, Jaime Cocanower left a big impression on me and my friends. It was the name. It just seemed so exotic and strange. Did he own cocaine or cocoa? Was his named pronounced JAY-me or HY-may? But we really just loved saying his name, it was so musical. Anyway this book answered a lot of the questions that I carried around with me about Jaime Cocanower. 

The pack isn't just filled with nice guys like the ones named above, but some legit stars like Carlton Fisk and Dwight Gooden didn't comply with repeated requests from Balukjian. And while they're mostly complete assholes, they all have their reasons. These are the chapters that I found fascinating because of how dogged, without being a jerk, Balukjian is about tracking these players down and how incredibly interesting how he writes about the misses. As a former reporter, I could completely sympathize with Balukjian when he wonders why someone like Vince Coleman or Gary Pettis won't return a phone call.

This book is mostly a memoir and Balukjian does a great job of weaving his backstory in with the stories of the ballplayers. There are a couple of clunkers here there--the story about approaching Fisk in Cooperstown is a bit cringe-y and I don't think that the reason why he and his girlfriend broke up is quite as significant as he teases it over the first few chapters--but at 260 plus pages, not every anecdote is going to be a home run. 
 

I know that the cliche says, "You can't judge a book by it's cover" but I did. I had a stack of books that I was going to read before this one, but this book's cover that looked exactly like the 1986 Topps wax pack wrapper and it jumped out at me. The cover filled me with a nostalgic warmth that I haven't felt in such a long time. I couldn't wait to read what this book was about and be transported back to being 11-years-old when discovering who was in a wax pack was my primary concern. As soon as I finished the book that I was currently reading, I immediately started reading this one. 

And I'm glad that I did, because The Wax Pack is an awesome read and it brought me back to 1986 when the men who played Major League Baseball were gods in polyester. In 2020, that's a special gift.

I was sent The Wax Pack free to review and comment on. This did not have any effect on my review.