Loved this piece, which I found via Kottke. I was only 13 years old, but I was working at a baseball card shop when Upper Deck came along and reinvented the baseball card, choosing Ken Griffey Jr. (who Topps didn’t even put in their 1989 set) to be the first card in their final annual edition. Somewhere, I’ve still got about 15 “Griffey Cards,” (as everyone called them then). I remember we sold them for anywhere from $17-22 in the store, and I remember we’d open box after box of Upper Deck packs just to find them. Good memories. I miss you, childhood innocence.
001 // Adam Hobson // 06.04.2008 // 10:17 AM
That certainly does bring back memories…
I never owned that Griffy card, wasn’t all that much of a fan of his. Instead I worked on my Don Mattingly collection. Though it was about the time of his retirement in 1995 that I was forced to give up collecting because I was more or less priced out. Normal packs that averaged $3 for 9 cards, not to mention the “premium” packs that would go as high as $10 a pack were just too much for a kid on an allowance to afford.
I guess a lot of collectors felt that way, because it seems the industry has died since 2000, or maybe just a tad earlier.
I did like this little tid-bit in the article: “It’s probably the most thinking Geideman ever did compiling a checklist, save for the 1992 Upper Deck set when he assigned numbers that ended in 69 to players with porn-star-sounding names. (Dick Schofield at No. 269, Heathcliff Slocumb at No. 569, and Dickie Thon at No. 769.)”