SLU Display Case

I thought I would do a super quick post today showing one of the cool items that will be up for auction tonight at Cleve's:

Sorry for the poor picture.  It's a retail display case for the 2nd series of Starting Lineup Baseball, complete with figures and a few cards.   I believe this set was released in 1989.  I've got a pretty decent SLU collection, and would love to have this peice.  I just don't have a place for it, and it likely will get out of my price range pretty quickly.

Starting Lineup Saturdays: Devaluation Works In My Favor

Every once in a while, Cleve will have Starting Lineups come through his auctions.  I’m not really interested in expanding my SLU collection, but if I see something cheap, I’ll probably try to get it.  Case in point, several months ago, I got this Pete Rose SLU from one of his auctions for $2 on a write in bid.  I didn’t expect to get it.  It was the only thing I got for that particular auction, and since it wasn’t a baseball card, I never wrote a “Cleve” post about it.  

When these figures first came out, I would have had to pay $5 or $6 bucks for this, or much more on the secondary market.   Pete Rose doesn’t do anything for me, but I never got around to getting this one in 1988, so I went ahead and bid on it.  

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.