1987 - baseball cards

The year was 1987. I had toyed with baseball cards a little in the past, as I really got into baseball during the Kansas City Royals' 1985 World Series run (little did I know they would not make the playoffs again my entire life -- oh to hold the hand of that impressionable 9 year-old and convince him to be a Cardinals fan). I digress...

Memories of baseball 1987, and in particular baseball cards, are stuck in my brain. There were a ton of rookie cards that year -- Bo Jackson, the "Bash Brothers (Mark McGwire & Jose Canseco), Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, Raphael Palmero, Wally Joyner, and I'm sure others I can't remember. It was the year McGwire broke the rookie record for home runs (a pedestrian 49 in today's numbers).

Topps baseball cards were three for a dollar at Pete's Swap Shop in downtown Nevada. It was a dirty basement pawn shop in town with a man in his 40s (who most people called Pete, though his name was Joe. I heard Pete was his dad, but we might have made that up) whose top sellers were romance novels to old ladies and 1987 Topps baseball cards to kids.

I spent about every dime of my paper route money (less a little for video games -- I'll hit that subject later), one dollar at a time, on three packs of baseball cards and three horrible pieces of chewing gum that left ugly stains on the back of the last card of each pack. I can still remember the smell of the pack, the taste of the gum, and the excitement when I got a Don Mattingly ($2.50), Wade Boggs ($1.00) or George Brett ($.50, but my hometown hero). We would fill pages and pages of books with multiple copies of these cards. It was a sign of power to show a full page (9 cards) of a hot rookie (like Bo or McGwire) or a superstar (like Mattingly, Clemens, or Boggs).