Cleve's Auction Night: 1985 Topps Set

It was a beautiful sunny day, the summer of 1987.  My friend Joey and I were wrapping up a fun afternoon at a card show in Amarillo, Texas and were getting ready to head home.  As we were leaving the show, Joey decided to live on the wild side and bought a pack of 1985 Topps for some ridiculous (at the time) price I don't remember what.  But he was convinced he would pull something great from that pack.  He couldn't wait to get home to rip the pack and opened it right there in his truck in the parking lot.   Lightning struck, and struck big:  he pulled an Eric Davis rookie card.  At the time the Davis rookie booked for some ridiculous amount, like $80 or something if I remember correctly.  We both went berserk,  bouncing and screaming in our seats,  because we were both broke high school kids and this was like winning a small lottery for us.  Plus, well, we were dorks.   But we didn't care what anyone who saw us might have thought and we celebrated vigorously.

For years and years, I coveted that Davis card, plus many of the cards from 1985 Topps.  It was a set I desired for many years but never could afford.

Years later, my day of glory and destiny arrived last week when I won a complete, mint and bound 1985 Topps set at Cleve's Tuesday auction for a measly $15 on a write in bid.   Fifteen bucks.  I mean, fifteen bucks for an almost 30 year old set that has already been placed in 9 pocket pages.  I picked it up Saturday at Cleve's, and the first card I looked for was the glorious Eric Davis rookie:

Listen, do not harsh my buzz and remind me that I could get this card for a quarter on sportlots.com now.  It's still a bad ass card.  In fact, I get that the whole reason I could get this set for next to nothing these days is because the "hot" cards that drove this set years ago are no longer that desirable.  But they're still big deals in my little mind.  Let's stroll down memory lane:

There are several cards that I imagine people first think of when they think of 1985 Topps.  The Mark McGwire rookie surely is one of them.   Yes, I know this star has faded, but I'm still glad to have it.  Speaking of faded stars, here are a couple of pitchers that surely should be Hall of Famers had they not done themselves in for various reasons:

But there is no shortage of HOFers in this set.  One of which is Kirby Puckett's rookie below, a fine looking card.

At worst, 1985 Topps is worth having because it's a great looking set.  It's simple, colorful, and has lots of great names.  I'm thinking of calling Joey and telling him about it.

Grade:

1985 Topps Set $15  A+:  It's a set I've always wanted, the cards are mint, AND someone already went to the trouble to put all 792 cards in pages.  That alone is worth what I paid for it!

Sampler Album Week: 1993 Topps

Whoever is ready for Sampler Album week to be over, raise your hand!  Whatever, I've been at the beach all week and was oblivious to any yawns and/or complaints.

The 1990's section of my Sampler Album is pretty week.  Meaning, I don't have several of the years complete.  1993 was done pretty easily though, and it's a pretty nice page.

The Jr. Griffey card is really sharp, and I've got a good handful of HOFers here.  The 1993 design is pretty basic and understated, but I like that.

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. 

Bandai Coins

During the late 80s and 90s I bought any and everything I could find that even remotely fit under the baseball card category.  Now that I have got back into collecting, it's been fun to dig out the old stuff and take a new look at it.  It's also fun to scan through back issues of Beckett and look not only at old pricing (more on that later), but the ads for products like this one:

I don't remember these coins, but of course I wanted to be a winner too.  At some point I guess I picked up a few:

These are pretty nice, heavy coins with some good detail.  At the time I was a big Mets fan, as well as Andy Van Slyke, so those must have been the coins that were visible in the pack.  Each pack also had a bonus coin you couldn't see, which is the only explanation for me having a Von Hayes coin (I hated the Phillies).  I've become more and more of a Robin Yount fan over the years, so I was glad to see that one in the group.  I would guess I could find some good storage pages from a coin shop.  I also am not seeing much of this on the net (ebay, sportlots, sportsbuy etc.) so maybe these have some value to them.  If anyone knows anything interesting about them let me know.