5 Baseball Cards that Made Us Chase Them

Brought to you by today's calendar lie regarding Wally Joyner

Hard as it is to believe, Wally Joyner turns 62 years old today. Wasn’t he just, like, 12 when he took the baseball world by storm as a fresh-faced rookie in 1986?

And wasn’t it just last week when we were all (well, at least all of us here in this room with me) chasing Wally World rookie cards? First via Donruss “The Rookies” and Topps Traded in 1986, then in the millions of wax packs that flooded our dreams and bedrooms in 1987?

Yeah, time flies.

And tells us dirty, lowdown lies, like Joyner is within a bursitis attack or two of becoming a bona fide Senior Citizen. But at least in this case, the grand lies of the old calendar at least make me think of some other cards I’ve tried to track down via “live” wax packs (and other avenues) over the years.

So, here, to be read in a Willie Nelson twang, is an ode “To All the Cards I’ve Chased Before.”

Well, five of them, anyway.

1981 Fleer Craig Nettles (#87)

This one was really tough on me, because the timing didn’t work out in my favor.

Sure, I was opening cards in 1981, but only because my mom made me. “You want a toy, here’s your toy. You need a hobby.”

Or something like that.

But I didn’t pay attention to any of those cards until 1983, when I picked up the hobby for real. That’s when I found out about error cards, and especially the Big Kahuna — or maybe that was the Big Cahuna?

Whatever the case, when I learned that there was a Graig Nettles card out there with his name spelled “Craig” and that people were paying $10 or so for the privilege of owning one and that I had plenty of 1981 Fleers lying around…yes, I chased through all my stacks.

But like Yukon Cornelius, I got nothing.

Then the chase was really on, encompassing several single-pack purchases over the next five years or so. The 1981 Fleers weren’t impossible to find after the fact, but they weren’t everywhere, either. And they came at a premium price, at least 50 cents a pop, sometimes a buck.

But again, nothing.

Finally, as the decade grew long and I had a few dollars’ worth of birthday money saved up, my chase ended. Yeah, I cheated and bought a single from a dealer. I don’t think I paid $10, but I might have.

By then, I probably would have paid $20.

1983 Fleer Ron Kittle (#241)

Now THIS card I chased, and it was the kind of joyful blast that makes you know a thing is for you. Like that first bite of a Reesie cup tells you that this is something you could commit to for the long haul.

Same thing with the Ron Kittle rookie card chase and this hobby of ours.

The first big rookie I remember hearing about in 1983 was Darryl Strawberry, who debuted with the Mets in May and went on to win National League Rookie of the Year honors. He was the next Ted Williams, and he got off to a pretty good start in proving that.

But Straw didn’t have any rookie cards yet.

Meanwhile, no one in my circles knew who Ron Kittle was. But he had 11 home runs by the end of May, and with the White Sox six games up in the American League West, he started to get some national attention.

And as it turned out, Kittle had slammed 50 homers the year before at Triple-A Edmonton before a cup-of-coffee call-up with the ChiSox in September 1982.

So it wasn’t too long until Kittle’s 1983 Fleer card started showing up in dealer showcases at local shows, one of those $3-right-out-of-the-pack 1980s specials. And, with 1983 Fleer wax packs still “live” in drug stores and the like, the whole thing set up like a kids’ lottery system.

And I played the game every chance I got, though Fleer was the least plentiful of the three brands in our area. I kept plugging away, though, and eventually did pull my Kittle RC before the end of the season.

I’m still a little giddy about that pull, and it’s one of those bedrock memories that grounds me if I ever start to bemoan this or that about the hobby.

1987 Fleer Wax Packs

Fleer continued to not be very available in our neck of the woods in the early years of my collectordom, and that all came to a head in 1987.

If you were a hardcore collector back then, you probably remember the scene.

We had Topps, who were intent on breaking the internet 20 years ahead of schedule with their hobby-shaking woodgrain design that turned fathers against sons and sent dogs running into the streets looking for cats to marry.

It was madness of the best sort.

And then we had Donruss and Fleer doing something to make their products super scarce. As it turned out, that something was NOT showing restraint with their print runs, but the early rumblings throughout the hobby were that both brands were about impossible to find.

You heard it at shows, you read about it in Sports Collectors Digest, and your social studies teacher put forth his own conspiracy theories about where all the non-Topps cards were.

After a while, though, pockets of one or the other brand started showing up here and there. Here — Indiana, that is — we had a trickle of the black-borered Donruss cards. One local drugstore even had a veritable avalanche of about 40 boxes.

Soon enough, there were ads in SCD where folks with access to Donruss were willing to trade for Fleer, wax-for-wax, and vice versa. I really wanted to bite into some of those deals because we never did get Fleer wax packs around these parts.

I couldn’t make the economics of those cross-country trades work as a 15-year-old kid, but I sure did chase 1987 Fleer wax packs. Checked in every gas station, mom-and-pop grocery store, and candy aisle I could find.

Eventually, I copped out, much as with the Nettles — only this time, I asked Santa to help out. Fat man came through.

1987 Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Eric Davis (#10)

The hobby boom was in full bloom in 1987, with baseball cards gaining some mainstream attention and also showing up in a toy store, five-and-dime, gas station, or grocery aisle near you.

And when they started showing up on boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, my family’s fate was sealed: we would be eating fake-cheese elbows by the truckload.

Since these were issued in the summer, that meant I was on weekly food-shopping duty with mom…and that meant I was on the hunt for just the right players.

The first order of business was to try and assemble the complete 48-card run of “Home Plate Heroes,” which I eventually did. Then, on weeks when there were nothing but doubles among the two-card panels, I rifled through every box looking for something good.

Pete Rose, Don Mattingly, Mike Schmidt, and Jose Canseco were all frequent targets, while Jeff Reardon and Mike Witt were to be avoided at all costs.

For me, though, the big score was Eric Davis, who frequently came attached at the cardboard hip to Mr. Joyner himself. It all comes full circle.

I can’t tell you for sure how many boxes of these babies we went through that summer, but I can tell you that my wife always asks me about the light-as-air moving boxes we’ve carted around from house to house during our marriage. Empty mac & cheese boxes take up a lot of room, but at least they don’t weigh much.

1991 Donruss Studio David Justice (#10)

In 1991, my first dalliance with the hobby was waning as my young head flexed and strained to reconcile the competing inputs it was receiving on a daily basis: multivariable calculus, long-dead-guy political theories, chemical chirality, late-night episodes of Studs and Richard Bey, thin packs of baseball cards with a multi-dollar MSRP.

It was quite a stew, as life usually is, and the hobby side of things was getting confusing. What I knew for sure was that people were spending and making (card companies, mainly) a lot of money on “premium” cards, and that everyone wanted some.

I also knew that the 1991 Fleer and Donruss base issues weren’t just overproduced, they were hot garbage. Or maybe cold garbage in the case of Big D, given their color turndown from blood red in 1990 to seafoam dreck in ‘91.

But then the hobby started buzzing about Donruss and one of their upcoming attempts to enter the high-end market. “Studio,” they called the issue, and it was to feature players in artsy black-and-white studio (see what they did there?) shots.

That inaugural set ended up with a whopping 264 cards on the checklist.

To promote their upcoming humdinger-hopeful beforehand, Donruss (technically Leaf) produced a “Preview” version of the cards, featuring 17 players and a header card. The player cards were numbered 1-17, and some featured different photos from what would end up in the full Studio set.

The kicker was that Donruss then inserted cellophane-wrapped packs of four Preview cards (three players and the header) in each retail factory set, which regaled the general public at outlets like Walmart and … well, Walmart, as far as I can remember. They would definitely be Target fodder today, though.

Soon enough, collectors were busting open those factory sets, plucking the Studio preview, and selling the singles. If you got the right one, you’d basically hit the lottery.

David Justice was the key to the little promo set, and his “scarce” card was soon trading for $5, $10, and up. Other cards were on their way up the hobby ladder, too.

So, with my interest just starting to wane and facing an uncertain hobby future, I decided to take on one last (ha!) chase. I drove to Walmart in our town, then the neighboring town and finally found what I was looking for — the Donruss factory sets with the gold “Studio Preview” sticker stuck on the top.

I picked my poison, plopped down my $20, and raced out to the card to eyeball my treasure. There were more sets just waiting for me to pluck them, and the whole thing felt like a money machine

My haul from that gamble?

The Studio header card.

Doug Drabek.

Tom Foley(!).

Juan Bell.

Andujar Cedeño.

So, naturally, I drove home and became an instant rooter/supporter/daydreamer for Cedeño’s good fortunes in the majors. As hobby gambles go, it was a good reminder that cardboard is just, well, cardboard.

But hey, at least I left plenty of opportunities for the next sucker collector.

—

There have been plenty of other cards I’ve chased over the years in some fashion or another. I have some miles on my hobby chassis, after all, and almost every set that’s ever seen the inside of a wax pack has something worth stalking.

So how about you? What are some cards that you have chased over the years? And were you successful in your hunt?

I’d love to hear your stories!

Thanks for reading.

—Adam

Last week in the daily newsletter…

• Ken Singleton at the Plate Was for the Birds

• Living Well with 1988 Topps Traded Mike Davis

• Behold! The Historic 1981 Topps Dave Skaggs Baseball Card

• How Dick Williams Figured in a Home Run Record

• The Wholly Unnecessary Mess of 1987 Topps Mike Laga