This story starts when I was 10 years old (and just about to turn 11) and my parents took me and my brother to Florida. We went to Walt Disney World. We went to the Everglades. We went to Thomas Edison's House. We learned that Americans had donuts for breakfast (!)
And we bought baseball cards. Topps Baseball 1987 to be precise.
I've always loved that set and would often look at the stack of cards we brought home. Over the years I added to that stack as I found 1987 cards in joblots and so on. A few years ago I bought a large number off Facebook Marketplace, and I've been filling in my remaining cards ever since.
My completion story started about 10 days ago when Brian from the UK baseball card collectors Facebook group, advertised a stack of Topps cards from 1984. I like the design of the 1984 cards but they are a bit thin on the ground in the UK. They date from just before the junk wax explosion, which really took off at the end of the 80s.
Brian described the cards as a 'starter' stack and it only took me a few minutes to decide that I would like them. He then asked if there was anything else I collected. I said Tony Gwynn and he sent me a picture of Tony's base card from 1987 - the first card I ever featured on this blog! I explained how I had been collecting the 1987 cards since, well, 1987, and how I was one card away from completing the set.
He asked which card that was, and I told him it was Pete Rose's card, number 200 in the set. Then Brian sent me a picture of the card and said he would include it!
He also then messaged me a few hours later with another card featuring Tony that I didn't have, and offered to include it in the package too - that was the All Star card of Tony and Albert Belle that I blogged about a week ago.
The cards arrived securely packed inside a Kellogg's Pop Tarts box (not shown).
There is a connection between Pete Rose and Tony Gwynn. On the night Tony Gwynn made his debut, Pete Rose was playing first base for the Phillies. Tony's first hit was a double so he ran right past Pete and onto second. But Tony's second hit that night was a single and after he reached first base, Pete shook his hand and said "Don't go catching me up all in one night!"
But here's the twist in my collecting tale. After a couple of days celebrating completing the set, including telling my mum all about it when we had one of our regular phone chats, I started to put the set into card pages. And then I discovered somewhere I had made a mistake. The set wasn't complete! I was still missing one card - #486, Otis Nixon.
I put an appeal out on the Facebook group and Brian said he also had a copy of Otis's card and would send it to me. (I was able to help him out with some dupe 1987 cards for his set-build in return.) A few days later an envelope plopped through the letterbox, and inside was Otis.
I don't have a story to connect Otis with Tony Gwynn. And I don't have any Topps cards of Tony from 1987 to blog. But I do have some cards from 1987 that haven't featured on the blog yet. This has been a super-long post, so I'm going to wait and post them tomorrow.
In the meantime I'm still feeling incredibly happy to have completed this set 33 years after that family holiday!
Total: 515 cards (none added to the total today!)
