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.

The Doom That Went on Forever!

For the most part, super heroes are dumb. Maybe not Bat Man, but in order to move the plot along, super heroes have to do stupid things. It adds to the adventure, it ups the stakes and it forces the bad guy to change his/her devious scheme. I guess there is some sort of correlation between abject stupidity and courageousness. Like the hero is going to save the world so hard, he/she doesn’t care about his/her own life.

That being said, the Champions are filled with some very dumb heroes.

Black Goliath is at the bottom of the Champions Tower where he sees the skies exploding in a Kirby Crackle. Since he’s a black guy first and a brilliant scientist second, writer Bill Mantlo has him exclaim, “Holeee CRUD!” as he stares up at the building. He climbs up the building hoping to save his friends, but he gets sucked into a vortex. He doesn’t meet his teammates, but he happens upon the Stranger who is trying to hold the world together so that the Null-Life Bomb doesn’t explode.

Where are the Champions? In the realm of a blind guy named Kamo Tharn. He tangled with Hercules before and is still pissed at him because Herc, Thor and Thor’s Asgard girlfriend Sif stole his Runestaff. The Runestaff is what the Stranger needs to defuse the Null-Life Bomb. The Champions were sent to this hell scape to get the staff, but guess what? Hercules remembers that it’s back on Earth.

(D’oh!)

Kamo, Kamo, Kamo Chameleon is happy that he doesn’t have to hunt Hercules down and kill him (he was totally about to do that, you guys), so he sends a bunch of monkey men to fight the Scion of Zeus and the rest of the Champions. The battle is a typical super hero battle with mindless drones. It looks like the good guys are going to lose, but then they rally to win. The one cool part of the fight is that a monkey man has Ghost Rider by the waist. Instead of trying to turn around and punch the creature, Ghost Rider tilts his head back and with his flaming skull sets the monkey dude on fire.

I’ve never seen that before.

New best friend, Darkstar, realizes that these monkey men aren’t ever going to stop coming. Every time a Champion kicks their ass, she says 12 new ones pop up. She notices that there’s a sliver of a portal and using her darkfield power opens it up. She hops out, hoping that this is the way home.

Ice Man, aka Bobby Drake, has barely spoken to Darkstar but he LOVES her. He knows in his heart that Darkstar is the girl for him and makes this creepily obvious to everyone at the most inopportune time. BTW, Darkstar has not given him the time of day. Ever. She barely responds to him. Remember how Jessica Lovejoy (played by Meryl Streep!) reacted to Bart when Bart had a crush on her in the Simpsons episode, “Bart’s Girlfriend”? “I think I’m going to stand over there.” That’s how Darkstar treats Bobby. Except worse.

(That's cold, baby)

He’s in the middle of fighting monkey dudes and freaks the fuck out when Darkstar goes into the rift. “Something’s got her – but it keeps her only over Ice Man’s dead body!” He has no clue what he’s doing, but he jumps in right after her. Because he loves her. Or wants to fuck her. Or wants to settle down and have DarkIce babies (which sounds like a beer that came out in the 90s).

Guess where he ends up? Outer space. Like hey, Jupiter is over there and here comes Mars right now! You want to know what there isn’t a lot of in space? Air, yes. Of course. But also, there’s not a lot of water either. So in order for Bobby to survive, he syphons the water of his own body and creates a sphere to protect him. Only now he’s totally dehydrated.

You know what sucks even worse? Darkstar has no idea he’s there. She’s in her own sphere and it’s probably not slowly killing her. Guess what, Ice Man? Women don’t always need a guy’s help. They can do pretty much anything they want by themselves. So you pretty much have killed yourself because you’re a sexist pig who thinks that woman are made to be saved.

Spoiler alert: Ice man wins the gold for doing the dumbest thing in this issue. But coming in second, is Black Goliath who is talking with the Stranger and he says, “Anybody just try smashing this thing?”

He’s talking about the Null-Life Bomb. Yeah, just smash that bomb. That’s how people usually defuse all types of bombs, science guy. Instead of exploding, the NLB has a security system robot that protects it. It beats the crap out of Black Goliath. I guess nobody is smashing anything.

The remaining four Champions are in Kamo’s world looking for a way home. Ghost Rider says to Black Widow what we were all thinking, in regards to his frosty teammate, “But Drake may just have killed himself by following her (Darkstar), a defector! Stupid!”

First off, Ghost Rider sounds like a Donald Trump tweet. If Trump didn’t obviously love Russians. Secondly, Black Widow is also a defector. Remember that adventure that you and your teammates went on a few issues back? It was all about Black Widow and the guy who trained her? That’s not a good look to have, dude.

Anyway, they fight their way through the land but each Champion thinks that his/her teammate died. Turns out they didn’t, it just looked like they did. I didn’t really understand this at all. It was kind of just a hand-wavey thing. Yeah, yeah, they’re fine. Totally fine.

But in a very unhand-wavey thing, the Angel goes shithouse on Kamo Tharn and kicks the ever-loving crap out of him. He grabs him by the throat and just rains blows down upon him. Just like Frank Costanza rained blows down on the mother who wanted the last doll in the store for her daughter that his son George wanted. That vicious beat-down begat Festivus. This beat-down just allowed the Angel to beat the piss out of a blind guy.

While this is going on, it turns out Darkstar was right; that rift led them through space and her and Bobby end up at the feet of the Stranger. Again she totally ignores Ice Man, which makes him whine, “Can hardly … move! Feel like I’ve been through a wringer! Laynia (Darkstar)? Laynia! You’re not even listening I – I came after you – risked my life – and  you act like you don’t even care!!”

A few things: no one asked you to go after her, Bobby. She was perfectly fine without you. Secondly, she has an idea for stopping the Null-Life Bomb, sorry that she hasn’t dropped everything to give you a thank you handie so you can feel better for yourself. Jesus, he’s fucking pathetic.

Darkstar tells the Stranger that if they can find the Runestaff of Kamo Tharn, the Stranger could run his power through her to make the bomb grow larger and larger. Which sounds crazy, but if the bomb grows smaller, it explodes. But if it keeps exponentially growing larger, the bomb will short circuit. Which, okay. Seems like a logical solution.

Do you know where the Runestaff is? Of course, you don’t. It was in the broom closet of a New York City hospital. Of course, it is.

(Right next to the mops!)

That’s where everyone keeps these things. To make an awfully long story short, the Champions win the day.

A couple of things:

• Dave Cockrum does another great job on the cover. Aside from the first page of dialogue, Mantlo did a nice job with the script too. It was a weird issue. I like weird.
• The one thing that people hold against John Byrne is that he appears to not like drawing background at all. I never really understood that charge, because I never noticed it. But holy shit, is it evident here. These guys are fighting on a white background more than half the time. They look good, but it’s not that detailed.
• For a hero whose introduction way back in X-Men 1 was putting snow on a piece of pie and calling it “pie a la mode”, Bobby Drake did an incredibly dumb thing in this issue. If he had died, that would have been fitting. You could even chisel his epitaph on his grave, “He Died, Like He Lived: Stupidly. And He Also Thought Snow Tasted Like Vanilla Ice Cream.”

All-in-all: three out of five vested Angels.