The Man Who Came to Dinner

John Barfield, 1991 Score

Cool mechanics, John Barfield.

"Your mom liked 'em, Internet weirdo." - John Barfield

Touché, John Barfield. Let's move on.

John was brought up from Triple-A Oklahoma City in late May ’90 as a temporary replacement for Gary Mielke

That is the SEXIEST story about opportunity knocking I have ever heard. It’s also, coincidentally, exactly how I started blogging.

But, like the man who came to dinner, John pitched so well in middle and long relief, he just stayed and stayed and stayed.

What

Texas Rangers equipment manager Dizzy Flapperton: STILL HERE, EH BARFIELD? YOU’RE LIKE THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER.

John Barfield: Ha, ha, yeah … what?

Flapperton: THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER, YOU KNOW—THE FAMOUS MOVIE.

Barfield: Uh, I’m not black.

Flapperton: NOT THAT DINNER MOVIE YA’ BIG DUMMY! THE 1942 COMEDY STARRING MONTY WOOLLEY, DUH.

Barfield: I don’t … I just … I am 25.

Flapperton: YOU DANG KIDS DON’T KNOW NOTHIN’ ABOUT CULTURE. YA’ JUST PITCH YOUR BALLS AND HIT YOUR BALLS AND I’M THE ONE WHO’S GOTTA CLEAN UP THE MESS.

Barfield: That sounds gross.

Flapperton: BUT AT LEAST YER HERE. OL' MIELKE IS BACK THERE ON THE TRAINER'S TABLE AGAIN, AND GETTIN' PAID FOR IT TOO, NO LESS. I SWEAR THAT GUY IS LIKE THE THIEF OF BAGDAD ...

Barfield: ...

Flapperton: THE THIEF OF BAGDAD.

Barfield: ...

Flapperton: FER CRYIN' OUT LOUD! THE POINT IS, JUST KEEP PITCHING WELL IN MIDDLE AND LONG RELIEF, AND YA' CAN STAY FOR DINNER AND EAT AS MUCH LASAGNA AS YA’ LIKE, OKAY GARFIELD?

Barfield: It’s “Barfield.” Why are you yelling?

Score one for America

When two things as American as baseball and America combine forces to honor our armed forces, the result is something so glorious it exceeds the combined sum of their American parts.

This is the American flag. But it is also a baseball card. You can tell it’s a baseball card because of all the America on it, not because of the baseball, which is invisible.

Score, the company that created this American flag card—this Ameriflard—was not going to stand idly by and let the flag speak for itself. Nor would it utilize the back of this card to list the statistics of the most American baseball player (this guy, obvs) or of America herself (DID YOU KNOW? America was signed by scout John Hancock after posting a perfect WAR in 1776). No. Score was going to play an active part in the effort.

1991 Score

Score’s mom: Score? Are you asleep in there, honey?

Score: (dressed in pajamas and night cap, kneeling by bed, which is covered in bald eagle sheets) Not yet, Mommy! Just praying for world peace.

Score’s mom: Good boy. I’ll bring up some milk in a minute.

Score: WARM IT UP FIRST THIS TIME, DANG.

Guys, let me make something clear: I love America. Truly I am blessed to have been born here—I doubt I’d be able to have a non-job contributing to a baseball card-based blog in, say, Micronesia—and I revere our armed forces. This is the truth. But also: what is this card?

I had originally written a more serious post attempting to explore this topic—paying homage to our troops in ridiculous, self-serving ways—and ran it past Ben, who shed some light on the history of baseball card companies’ military complex. The dialogue made me feel as though I shouldn’t curtail my first instinct at viewing this card again, which was: make fun of this.

As Ben pointed out, Score could have put some real effort into this, and made cards for soldiers, generals, or anyone on the front lines who could have become an identifiable face of the war effort for young kids. Instead they stuck a flag on the front and, on the back, claimed that they, Score, a subsidiary of Pinnacle Brands, was praying.

I can’t decide if this card is a Veteran’s Day mattress blowout sale—a marketing scheme masked as dignified patriotism (and, in this case, devout spiritualism)—or a moderately genuine but completely lackluster attempt to give a nod to our troops. Either way it sucks. That is all.

Cardboard Fenway: 1993 Score Tony Pena

Cardboard Fenway - #77. 1993 Score Tony Pena

A lot of people wanted to see Pena come aboard this past off-season as the new Red Sox manager. Here he's doing something, possibly directing traffic.

The One-Two Punch

1990 Score and 1991 Topps Stadium Club: it’s come down to these two sets and really neither of them is better than the other. In a perfect world I’d rank them 1 and 1a. But this isn’t a perfect world. People want order, they want debate. They want controversy. And I was ready to give you all of the above and name Score victorious, but then I really started to examine the situation.

I’ve decided that’s there no way Score wins this one. It’s a phenomenal set, no question about it. But is it the best representative for the early Nineties? More so than Stadium Club? No, it’s not. Here’s why.

1990 Score feels like it should have been released a year or two before it was. What I mean is, with its fun subsets (Dream Team, Highlights and those Draft Picks), the event cards scattered across the bloated checklist and the cheap packs, it felt more like a typical set from the late Eighties than a set from the early Nineties. Granted, it was released in 1990, but it followed those sets that came before, not setting precedents for those that followed it.

1991 Stadium Club, on the other hand, set the tone for the rest of the hobby for the rest of the decade. The plain and simple truth is that the early Nineties were about one thing and only one: the evolution of premium cards. And there is no better example than 1991 Stadium Club.

Let’s take a look at these sets, starting with 1990 Score. You don’t need me to tell you that the Bo Jackson football/baseball card was the biggest event card in a time when the hobby was completely awash with them. You also don’t need me to tell you that you probably had three or four of the Sandberg error, if you could remember what the error on the card was. Or how about Dream Team? Or Rookie Dream Team in the factory set? Or the fact that the Draft Picks subset was flat-out awesome, with rookies of Knoblauch, Ben McDonald, Mo Vaughn, Earl Cunningham (who?), Roger Salkeld and Frank Thomas. Or the fact that Thomas and Vaughn became stars after the others showed what they could do, which ensured the set with at least two rookie waves.

While this was technically Score’s third edition, it was really the set that put the company on the map. It had everything: enough superstars to clump at the beginning and spread throughout the remainder of the checklist, enough rookies to choke a horse, winning, inventive subsets and at least two Bo Jackson-related event cards (FB/BB and All Star Game). The cards featured a winning design, the packs were relatively cheap and Eric Lindros was in the Rookie/Traded set. ”He’s an unknown quantity right now because he’s so inexperienced,” said one scout. “But he has all the tools to make it big.”

What more could you want?

Like a handful of other sets from 1991, Stadium Club featured a Jeff Bagwell rookie (though no Chipper Jones or Mike Mussina). Unlike the others, though, the fate of the set did not rest on who was or was not included. That’s because unlike the other sets, the quality of Stadium Club was unbelievable. Full-bleed Kodak photography (Topps was smart to officially enlist Kodak; it gave the set a certain gravitas. Plus, if baseball card collectors are anything they’re brand-conscious to a tee), gold foil at a time when that simply wasn’t done, and Topps rookie cards on the backs.

The other thing that Stadium Club had going for it was that they were perceived to be scarce (though the validity of that perception was never determined). Packs were expensive. The cards were desirable. Nolan Ryan was shown in a tuxedo. I mean, c’mon. If the elder statesman was this excited about the set, comparison with Stadium Club’s contemporaries was completely unfair.

I’m not going to compare the two head to head. They excel in different ways. I will, however reiterate my main point: that while 1990 Score is a tremendous set, it belonged to the previous, pre-Upper Deck era of baseball cards (and were it released in the Eighties, it would rank in the top ten sets of the decade). Stadium Club, with its borderless photography, gold foil, perceived scarcity, Bagwell rookie and UV gloss, was a premium experience, one that exemplified the baseball card hobby in the early Nineties.

1. 1991 Topps Stadium Club
2. 1990 Score

End of story.


And of the 1990 – 1994 Countdown. It almost took a year, but now it’s done. If you’re looking for older Countdown reviews, in the next two weeks I plan on going back and tagging the rest of the relevant posts.

If you can't get enough early Nineties, head over to The Baseball Card Blog's sister site A Pack A Day, where the Cardboard Junkie will be live-blogging packs of both sets ranked here.

1990 - 1994 Countdown: #7. 1994 Score

You see, this set is a bad mother--
(Shut your mouth)
But I'm talkin' about 94 Score
(Then we can dig it)

Admit it, you were thinking the same thing… and you’ve seen this set the same way since it came out. 1994 Score is a bad mother: it’s strong in the right places, it makes risky moves and they work, it’s classy and suave and no one understands it but its woman (I guess “its collectors” would be more appropriate). If this were 1994 and you lived in a magical world where baseball cards came alive, you definitely didn’t want to run into Score down a dark alley. Unless your name was Fleer or SP, it would beat your ass every time.

It would do this in a number of ways, least of all with its silent-but-deadly, take-no-prisoners blue border. It’s almost impossible to believe that the same company responsible for 1992 Score created this set only two years later. Where the former was card design in puberty—an experimentation of ugly gradients and bright colors—’94 was understated and mature. Look no further than ’93 Score for the initial design shift towards sophistication, and though it’s not a popular set with collectors, that set did most of the heavy lifting for the brand’s later editions, ’94 included.

Also, where ’92 was bloated (893 base cards), ’94 was lean (660 base cards). Granted, we probably should give 1992’s set a pass on its massive checklist, as it was produced a year or so before it became industry custom to strip subsets from base sets and upgrade them into inserts, a practice Score started in 1993. By 1994, formerly traditional base set highlights like Dream Team and The Franchise (represented in ’94 as Gold Stars) had been sequestered to life as hard-to-find inserts, cutting down on the number of base set subsets. The strategy worked. In 1992 it was fun to get a Dream Teamer in your pack. By 1994, getting one was the best thing to happen all week (and yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s how sad my social life was as a 15-year-old).

But this set didn’t just beat you with a flawless base set or good-looking inserts. It beat you with a classy parallel. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: I do hate parallels. But we’re talking about 1994 here, fool, the year the parallel came of age. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if news came out that 1994 Gold Rush was hand-crafted by dwarves burrowed deep beneath the Misty Mountains. Seriously, I think Heaven is missing a baseball card-related angel: Gold Rush is the most perfect parallel set ever created.

And as if that weren’t enough for you, if by some fluke you were still conscious after this pummeling, Score would send you to the hospital with its version of the right-arm wind-up, left-arm knockout. I’m speaking of course of Rookie/Traded.

Sure, it included the awesome Alex Rodriguez rookie “Call Up” redemption card, but the real scene-stealer here was the R/T base card design. It looked, in a word, terrible (though putrid, ugly, forgettable and shitty also fit the bill). But that wasn’t the point. The point was that the cards didn’t look like the regular set.

Thinking forward once again, Score took the opportunity Rookie/Traded created and not only debuted a new company logo but debuted a new card design, one that would—with a few tweaks here and there—carry over into their 1995 product. It was an ingenious move. The set itself, besides the hard-to-find Rodriguez insert, was weak and forgettable. But the idea that it could be an extension of the regular set and be some kind of live testing ground for future sets, well, that’s pretty powerful.

1990 - 1994 Countdown: #21. 1991 Score

Note: Because I caved at the last minute and re-ranked 1994 Upper Deck SP at #17, I've gone back and ranked this set at #21.


I have some good news and some bad news about Score’s set from 1991. Good news first.

I have many fond memories of this set. It was really the first set of the decade with a proliferation of subsets original enough to migrate outside the base set and into standalone inserts, which is exactly what happened with Score as the Nineties progressed and The Hobby expanded. All Stars, Master Blasters, Dream Team, one-offs like ‘Reds October,’ ‘The Griffeys,’ ‘Bo Breaker’ and ‘Man of the Year’ (by the way, you know what would make a great offbeat collection? Collecting cards of players wearing a tuxedo. You’d have at least one card of Nolan Ryan, the Sandberg from this set, Piazza and Bonds from when you bought a box of Ultra Pro pages—I’m not sure Scott Erickson, Ultra Pro’s other spokesman, was ever shown in tux—and a handful of others, like Darrell Walker’s 1991-92 Skybox basketball card. Maybe this is something I should start collecting…), and those hideous border colors. Seriously, where did the designer get the inspiration to use blue, white, yellow, teal and purple? On a trip to the doctor’s office? Bad bad bad. And yet unexpectedly lovable (at least to me), especially since the set ends on such a high note with that last round of black-bordered cards.

But maybe the best part of this set is the ‘oh shit, we forgot…’ moment at the end of the set. After 30 subset cards (the stellar Franchise subset and award winners), the checklisters squeezed Damon Berryhill’s regular card in before the start of the Dream Team cards. Either they were playing a game with us by swapping out Berryhill from the end of the first series with the Canseco ‘Wild Stallion’ Dream Team card or they experienced collective brain freeze and really almost left Damon snacking in the Green Room for the duration.

Now for the bad news: I never really actively collected this set; I bought the factory set from the drugstore. Sure, I got the Cooperstown Collection factory set inserts, but in hindsight I feel shamed for never having experienced the joy (and pain) of fruitlessly opening hundreds of packs to complete this endless set. Which reminds me: have I used the term ‘bloated mess’ in this countdown before? I have? Well, then it should come as no surprise that more than one set qualifies for that description. It’s not that 1991 Score is so much of a mess—it’s more that it’s bloated beyond belief. I think there were over 7,000 cards in the checklist (actually 900 or so). The reason this set stands out is because of a handful of excellent cards, like Chipper Jones’s and Mike Mussina’s rookies, the aforementioned ‘Wild Stallion’ or ‘Steroid Stallion’ shirtless Jose Canseco Dream Team card, and others like Doug Jones’s Dream Team card (the best of the bunch, and the best card of Sam Elliott, if you ask me), Bob Welch’s shadowed split-finger, the big-headed All Stars (funny how life imitates art, huh?) and a few others.

This set could easily have been 100 or even 200 cards less and would’ve been better. I know that bloat was hip in the early Nineties, but… I had this set in pages for a few years there, but I felt like I was on seek-n-scan to find the cards I liked, or fast forward to the end for The Franchise and Dream Team. You don’t do that with great sets. You do that with bloated, watered-down ones.

1990 - 1994 Countdown: #19. 1993 Score

The Baseball Card Blog would like you to welcome our first major hobby advertiser, Dave & Adam's Card World, to the Blog.

Now, back to the 1990 - 1994 Countdown.


If not for the following year's soaring, majestic rhapsody in blue, 1993 Score might be remembered as the brand's most mature design. Instead it was lost in a sea of premiums, The Set That 1993 Forgot.

And though equipped with a strong checklist, gorgeous design and striking inserts, Score shook up its distribution blueprint in 1993 by not doing a factory set. I've always wondered the reason they didn't do factory sets in 1993 and 1994. By paring down the base set and re-purposing many of the most memorable subsets from 1990 through 1992 as harder-to-find inserts--and not releasing factory sets, as they did for those same three years--the company, while trying to reincarnate itself as more sophisticated brand, essentially lowered its profile with collectors.

As was the case with the flagship template in 1992, Score's 1993 design took visual cues from its sister set Pinnacle: a large, unobstructed action shot complemented by a thin frame (Pinnacle, black; Score, white). Following 1992's lead, the backs were vertical, featured a full-color headshot and full career statistics (and looked a helluva lot like the backs of Fleer's flagship from the next year, 1994). Finally, 1993 Score was the last company issue free of any type of gloss coating, UV or otherwise. (And as a sidebar, yave you noticed that those sets with a thin uniform gloss are actually hindered by it, and that because of it the cards block up and stick together? I've noticed that when I'm finally able to pry them apart(usually with the aid of a stick of butter), they feel much cheaper (and more buttery) than I remember. I wonder what kind of half-life the gloss coating has... That's something you always forget about: cards were made out of cardboard not only because it was something sturdy for cigarette and gum packaging, but because it was cheap and disposable. Nothing really changed the overall quality of cards until Kellogg's came along in the Seventies, Sportflics in 1986, Score brought full color to both front and back in 1988, Upper Deck upped the ante with large front and back full color photography in '89 and Topps Stadium Club brought its glossy A-game in 1991...)

I've always liked this set. And while this time period saw just about every brand make a conscious effort to gussy up and cater to a more discerning collector, I could never quite take Score seriously in its pursuit, no matter how many gold foil-encrusted Dream Teamers (like this one of Pudge in his trendy hoodie sweatshirt... is that B.U.M. Equipment? Tres chic, Ivan) I sent away for.

1990 - 1994 Countdown: #24. 1992 Score

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but lately I’ve been writing up a storm. There’s a reason: I’m moving and will have only limited access to a computer next week. Besides, I’ve made you wait long enough for more of the Nineties Countdown, right?


I should come right and say it: I was a Score Man in the early Nineties. After what I thought were ugly 1988 and 1989 sets, there was little the flagship could do wrong over the next five years (divided into two distinct parts: the free wheeling, massive mass-consumption trilogy from 1990 to 1992, and the more refined, scaled-back and grown-up sets from 1993 and 1994). That’s quite remarkable, especially for an era when the best description for the majority of sets was ‘treacherous.’

Score put the behemoths to bed in style: a futuristic base card design complemented by a handful of subsets (including the benchmark ‘Dream Team’), plus decent inserts, special factory set cards and a checklist of roughly six billion (alright, that’s a stretch, but I’m not off by much). And the best part of it all? It was easy to collect. Packs were cheap and if by 1992 putting together a set through packs wasn’t really your thing (and who can blame you, what with all the high-dollar inserts making pack buying more of a lavish exercise rather than a necessity), you could saunter down to your local drugstore and buy the whole factory set.

And the trick of it was that Score knew their sets were gigantic and that collectors would want a factory set option. Hell, they even encouraged such thinking amongst the rank and file (I bought the factory set from 1990 to 1992). Why else would they have included all those attractive factory set inserts (Cooperstown, DiMaggio, Yaz, World Series)? It was as if they were saying that the only thing you’d get from buying packs (besides possibly completing the set) was pack fatigue.

But the thing about buying the factory set that sort of ruined the experience was that you couldn't enjoy each card. A lot of kids I knew didn't even take the cards out of the box once they got it home. Not me. I dumped the set out and fully incorporated it with the rest of my collection. Today I still I have the empty factory set box, but damned if I know where its contents are.

And this was a set that was meant to be thumbed through, you know? Out of 893 base cards, there were 60 denoted subset cards (including the crazy, Cool World-esque mind-bending cartoons-in-the-real-world All Stars) and at least 141 rookies and top prospect cards. That's a quarter of the set right there. That most of them didn't pan out (or their 1992 Score incarnation wasn't their real rookie) hardly mattered in the end. Overall, a glorious, gluttonous set.

1990 - 1994 Countdown: #36. 1993 Pinnacle

Black borders and a single white hairline surround crisp photography. Player name along the bottom, team name along the top. Thinly glossed. And a full-color back (de rigueur by 1993), featuring a simple, elegant headshot on what looks like a sponge-painted, GlamorShots backdrop. The only faults may be the choice of body copy font, the little dots that separate the information on front and back, and the Pinnacle logo itself. Otherwise, it’s one of the most striking designs of the early Nineties, and possibly one of the simplest.

You could characterize 1993 Pinnacle as a ‘sophomore slump’ set. The brand’s 1992 debut was a hard act to follow, and the by-then classic Score mindset took over for 1993’s checklist: choke ’em to death with subsets. Of the 620 cards in the base set, only 437 had no extraneous logos, and weren’t part of a subset. But it wasn’t only subsets that killed this checklist—it was an overkill of inserts. Though some of them were good, even great, and all of them of flawless design, there were just so many of them: 195 in all. That’s practically enough for a third series of cards!

Collectors harp on sets with a glut of inserts, not because we don’t like getting them in packs (we do). It’s because it’s a daunting proposition, as if the manufacturer understands neither the collector nor the climate of the hobby. A collector may like your product, even so much so that he or she decides to collect your set. But inevitably they will like other sets as well, so if you overwhelm them with inserts, you will most likely end up with a number of beleaguered collectors turned off by your product. This same thing happened to Topps recently with the Generation Now and Home Run History inserts. There were so many (seemingly) different inserts that collectors (or at least this one) were turned off to the product. But I digress.

Like 1992, this set was released in two series. Like 1992, the black borders and backs set off the clear, somewhat washed-out colors of the photos. The highlight of the set is without a doubt the “Now & Then” subset, horizontal cards featuring a slew of veterans shown in two photos: one taken in 1992, the other in their respective rookie years (like this one of Robin Yount doing his best early Larry Bird impression). It makes for a classy card, and I don’t think I’m too far off base by naming it one of the early decade’s best subsets.

I want to like this set more, but I just can’t. The rookie class is weak beyond Jeter, the Expansion Draft subset has a chokehold on much of the checklist, and the inserts, despite their overall quality, outweigh the base set. It’s really the Now & Then subset that keeps me coming back, and really only–you guessed it–now and then.

The Goudey Trade-away That Time Forgot

I just found this post in my drafts folder... Not sure why it was never posted. Originally from October 17, 2007.

Goudey Trade-away #46: Tekulve and Bottalico for Mulder and Vidro

This trade comes in from Nic in Wausau, Wisconsin.

Giving: Mark Mulder, #75; Jose Vidro, #187 (red back)
Getting: Ricky Bottalico, 1997 Collector's Choice; Kent Tekulve, 1988 Score

These two cards I'm getting in this trade are really out there. Hey! Which way to the beach? Also, that background on the Tekulve card is freaking me out. Is he pitching inside a kaleidoscope?

Or is his windup so powerful that he's about to fall backwards off a bridge into the Delaware River at sunset? Gotta love any pitcher whose games played stat line reads like an NBA starter. Teke was pretty tall, too (6'4"). He probably could been a backup shooting guard for the Sixers if Andrew Toney got injured. Kent would come prepared: He could provide his own striped knee-highs.

A Few Notes on Donruss Diamond Kings

I just finished reading a rough draft treatment I wrote last year about how the explosion of card production in the early Nineties pretty much set the table for the implosion at the end of the decade. To illustrate this, I had singled out 1991. My thesis was that this year more than any other should be recognized as the true starting point for the premium card era, and that combining perceived value with vast over-production allowed for card companies to claim limited availability while cranking out the crap.

Highlighting this point seems obvious to me; I’m glad that I didn’t publish it on the blog. But there was something in there that I'd like to talk about.

The Evolution of the Donruss Diamond King
The Diamond King subset cards in 1982 Donruss were the first cards to feature out-and-out paintings since 1956 Topps. For nine years, 1982 to 1990, the subset featured the previous season’s stars, one from each team, in goofy headshots on colored backgrounds, each year more outrageous than the last (culminating in the bizarre Alexander Calder-esque background explosions of 1990).

Then, in a move that can only be explained as a Donruss executive realizing the 1990 Diamond Kings kind of resembled dried vomit—albeit in a totally awesome, Tron’n’Skittles way—the brand moved towards a more serious outlook for 1991 with stoic portraits (usually reserved for the oak-paneled walls of an early century gentlemen’s study) replacing the tried-and-true toothy grins and action painting. It was an interesting move, not only because it reflected the collective distance the hobby was putting between itself and the posed, close-cropped sideline portrait photography that had been featured on at least 90% of cards since the dawn of time, but because it essentially robbed Donruss of one of its trademarks: the humanized hero. Without the warm-toned close-ups and headshots, the Diamond Kings felt cold and distant, a meaningless element of a meaningless set.

It’s also interesting to note that while Donruss was busy pushing the camera back, Score was eagerly pulling it closer. 1990 saw the pastel introduction of Score’s Dream Team subset, and while the subset became the Oddly Homoerotic Dream Team in 1991 (at least three cards featured shirtless torsos: Jose Canseco, Rickey Henderson, Kirby Puckett), the factory-set-only Cooperstown insert set took the pastels to their soft focus, ethereal pinnacle. It was almost like Score had out-Diamond King'd Donruss.

It's been almost sixteen years and I still don’t understand why Donruss pulled the Diamond Kings out of the base set for 1992, and I’m not entirely sure it was a good idea. I mean, I get that they were trying to compete in an out-of-control marketplace lovesick on inserts. But isn’t that why they had Donruss Elite? If they really needed a more tangible insert that anyone had a chance of getting in a pack, couldn’t they have put their heads together and created something new? By pulling the Diamond Kings from the base set, Donruss effectively killed their own product.

Goudey Trade-away #13: Bo Breaker for Sizemore

This trade comes in from Zach from Kokomo, Indiana.

Giving: Grady Sizemore, #43 (red back)
Getting: Bo Breaker, 1991 Score

I hope Zach and Brandon (Trade-away #12) are friends. I remember one of the best parts of collecting as a kid was that my friend Michael collected, too. I got some of my best cards from trades with him (1979 Topps Alan Trammell, I'm thinking of you), and as we got older, and our collecting obsessions took different roots, it was he who turned me from a price guide-oriented collector into someone who truly appreciated the cards for what they were, not the riches they promised.

So here's to The Card Collecting Buddy, the one who'll try to out-gun you for a card at a show, but marvel with you at that one out of both of your grasps.

By the way, thanks for the Bo Breaker card. 1991 Score is one of my favorite sets, the very epitome of the over-stuffed early Nineties. I think that set had 10,000 cards in it, right?


The Trade-away is in full swing, but it's not too late to get in on the fun! Email me if you're interested in participating.