Sunday, March 4, 2012

Starting Lineup Sundays


Before I started this silly little blog a year ago I spent a fair amount of time deciding if I had enough topics to write about to keep my blog churning.  I didn’t want to write a handful of posts and then run out of things to talk about and fade away.   I knew I had a couple of safety nets to fall back on if I got desperate for material.  One was eTopps, and the other was my Starting Lineup Collection.  eTopps was a great material source because they had new card offerings almost every week.  I’ve also managed to find enough other things to talk about that I was able to keep my Starting Lineups on the bench.
    
However, with eTopps basically shutting down and becoming a non-source of material for me it might be time to call on my SLUs.  And why not?  These things are so cool.  I don’t understand why there isn’t a greater demand for them anymore.  That used to not be the case.  In fact, there used to be conventions centered on Starting Lineup figures.   

They’ve been out of production for years now, and replaced by the larger, more detailed McFarlane figures.  I find the SLUs a far superior collectible.  Maybe it’s because they are similar in size and function to the Star Wars figures that shaped my childhood.   Anyway, my SLUs are all in boxes at the moment.  I tried to get the lovely wife to let me “wallpaper” one of our bedroom walls with the ones I kept in the blister packs, but shockingly she didn’t go for it.  I guess pictures of our children and paintings are OK, but beautiful blister packs of toy baseball players don’t meet some arbitrary standard of taste.   Oh well, she can’t stop me from showing them off on my blog:
 Daarryyyllll...... Daaarrryyyllll..... Daaaaarryyyylllll...

This was the first figure I bought.  The first issue of Starting Lineups came out in 1988 and was mostly regionally distributed.  Some players had a national distribution, and luckily for me I was able to find all of the Mets that were made in 1988 (I can't find my the Howard Johnson, but I have it somewhere).  That was my team back then.    

I had no interest in keeping these in the blister pack, and wanted to display them out of the package in my room.  I had about 20 of these things lined up along my dresser.    I also had a huge cardboard stand up movie poster of “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3” in my room as well.  Man, I was a loser. 

6 comments:

Dennis said...

When I was a kid in the late 80s I had a bunch of these too and I also opened them up (crazy!) and played with them, which was lots of fun at the time, and I don't regret it. I still have all of them somewhere, so I should do a post just like yours.

The Lost Collector said...

Nice! I have that Gary Carter. I think I still have a show box of my old ones at my parents house...Mattingly, Brett, Henderson, Rice.

Offy said...

I opened my SLUs when I was a kid, but since there wasn't much detail to them and absolutely zero pose-ability, I ended up leaving most of them in the packages. I did have a wall that was covered in SLU packages. Mostly Piazza stuff, but there were also some Celtics and Juan Gonzalez items.

McFarlanes are little little statues so I open all of those up and display them. I still like my SLUs and still have all of them. I just wish that I had space to hang some pegboard to display them. To me, it's the presentation of the SLU with the figure and the card together that made them great.

Fuji said...

Kenner SLU's are awesome! It's nice to see another blogger who appreciates these 30 year old pieces of plastic.

The Angels In Order said...

I had a HUGE collection of all 4 sports, even a few soccer ones! Most are gone now but I kept all the Angels. Now I try to collect just the cards here and there. They take up much less space!

Wes Moore the former JBF said...

Love SLU's. Hope to pick up the Gary Redus someday!!