Growing up is all about figuring out who you are and what you want to be, but also what your interests are, what you enjoy and what speaks to you.
The first 20 years of your life you’re constantly changing your interests — I don’t think about it much but I know it happened to me and when my daughter was young and a teenager, I saw it happen to her.
When I was 18 and starting college, I decided I wasn’t interested in baseball cards anymore. I was pretty certain of that. I did buy complete sets of 1984 and 1985 Topps (when I was 18 and 19), just because having new baseball cards come to the house was always a thing, even if my interest in going out and buying packs had waned.
That idea of no longer being a card collector continued through almost the entire rest of the ’80s, until when I came back to the hobby like gangbusters in 1989.
Because in 1989 I realized that I thought I knew better — but I really didn’t. And it cost me.
In 1984 all I did was buy the complete Topps flagship set, and grabbed a handful of packs of Fleer and Donruss. But if I had collected the way I did the previous three years, I would have added the 1984 Topps Traded set and the 1984 Fleer Update set as well.
Today I’m still without a complete 1984 Topps Traded set and a 1984 Fleer Update set. The ’84 Fleer Update set is probably now out of the question — I don’t want to pay those prices.
But I’ve gotten more serious about the ’84 Topps Traded set. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had set an ebay watch for a complete ’84 Topps Traded set and how I wasn’t having much success with that.
Soon after I got an alert that was actually on target. I get plenty of notifications for the ’84 flagship set, for the ’84 Topps Super cards, for various ’84 Topps team sets, for ’84 Topps football for crying out loud. But this time it was the real deal, a complete ’84 Topps Traded set.
88T-Jorge Orta. Well-known to a ’70s card collector like me, and also because he was a Dodger in the early ’80s, but he was about to get much more famous in this particular uniform.
39T – George Frazier. His first card after his years with the Yankees, which is how I know him most, thanks to his three losses to the Dodgers in the 1981 World Series.
128T – Frank Williams. Rookie card. And a sad, sad story.
89T – Amos Otis. One of the very best outcomes of Traded sets are cards of established players in new uniforms but the marriage with the new team didn’t last. Otis played in just 40 games for the Pirates in 1984 before being released in early August and so for anyone who was there for the height of Otis’ career — with the Royals when he was in a bunch of postseason series — and maybe, like me, were friends with a Royals fan from Kansas who adored Otis — seeing Otis as a PIRATE is mind-blowing.
Therefore this is the best card of the lot.
131T – Ned Yost. Yost was a Brewer during the Harvey Wallbangers era and also a Royals manager during the 2015 World Series so his brief stay with the Rangers is kind of wild, too.
I also received the Curt Wilkerson rookie card at the top of the post. Wilkerson would go on to appear a bunch of times in junk wax sets but even though he’s probably the most prevalent on cards of these six guys I have the least memories associated with him.
So anyway, thanks to Bo I now have just about half of the 1984 Traded set. That means I’m in an awkward spot. I still have that watch list in place, meaning if I win a full set, I’ll have a bunch of dupes. Or I can just keep piecing together with the next 60-plus cards, including that Gooden card, for however long that takes.
But it all makes sense to me. Because I’m a card collector. That’s who I am and there’s no doubt anymore. It took quitting the hobby, taking it back up, quitting again, and then taking it back up again — a whole lot of thinking I knew better — to figure out what I really want.