It was a Wednesday morning, February 2, 2022, to be exact, and I had just finished making my kids their breakfast when out of the blue I got this nostalgic feeling about a card I used to own. Every now and again a conversation leads me to wonder what came of certain cards I owned and sold or traded during my life.
Sometimes the card is a cheaper one, or other times its a more modern shiny classic that if I had known better I would’ve held onto for another year and had the equivalent of a down payment on a home. Other times it’s cards from some of the best years of my hobby life. In this case, it was a 1998 SP Authentic Randy Moss Rookie Card.
I mentioned this to a friend and he sent me a few listings of Randy Moss SP Authentic rookie cards for sale. Many were slabbed by PSA, but about halfway down there was one slabbed “Gem Mint” by Beckett Grading Services. This intrigued me enough to click the listing. I glanced at the image and thought: “That looks a lot like …”
***
It was a Tuesday night, some 23 years ago. I had plans to meet with my friends at the local bowling alley that offered $1 games one night a week. It was something we often did in my late teens and early 20s after we got off work and school. On this particular evening I first decided to swing by a local card and comic shop (R&K Comics in Sunnyvale, California) to see what they had for sale. At the time I was a collector of three sports (Baseball, Basketball and Football) and football was in full swing. I remember, because the Draft Class that year was smoldering, and I had a hot hand, pulling multiple rookie cards of Randy Moss, the newest wide-out in the league who was destined to become the next Jerry Rice.
Upper Deck made a product called SP Authentic and that year the rookie cards were seeded roughly two per box and they were limited to just 2,000 copies, and they were HOT. Bowman Chrome and Topps Chrome were a thing then and they had a following, but neither of those products offered serial numbered rookie cards. Serious collectors wanted serialized rookie cards, and they decidedly targeted the SP Authentic ones as the top — or one of the top — releases that year.
The packs were not cheap, somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 or $7 each, or at least twice that of any other pack. I believe I purchased four or five that night when I saw that the box on the shelf was full, meaning the contents were likely fresh and not the dregs of multiple blown boxes. In hindsight this was entirely possible, but I knew this shop didn’t get a lot of cards, they were heavy in comics and related items. This was probably the only box of SP they were going to get all year.
I purchased the packs and began opening immediately in a slow fashion, long before this became the norm for social media. In one of the early packs I could see a solid-color card back, which was an immediate indication I’d located a rookie card. The base cards that year were all oriented in a vertical fashion and featured a foil-type front and a back was complete with stats and a softened full-bleed image. So when you pulled a rookie — which was horizontal and a solid color back — you knew you had something. The color was gold, and the face on the front of the card was non-other than Jacksonville Jaguars running back Fred Taylor, the ninth overall draft pick that season. Taylor had been having a solid season and I knew at this point I was already playing with house money.
I opened the remaining packs I purchased, hoping to continue the good luck. Sure enough a few packs later another solid-color backside of a card revealed itself. This time the color was purple and the face on the front was Randy Moss, the 21st overall pick out of Marshall. I flipped the card over to look at the serial number, but the light bounced off a defect in the card. Right below the number “18” in the corner there was a crease that ran about a quarter of an inch, parallel to the edge of the card. I was still pleased with the pull but the factory damage put a damper on things just a tad.
I placed both cards into their own top loaders and headed to the bowling alley (Saratoga Lanes) where I met up with my friends, one of whom was also into cards at the time. I decided to play things modest. I told my friend (Nate) that I had bought some packs before heading to the alley and I told him that I pulled a Fred Taylor rookie. I showed it to him and he was happy for me, but this guy also had some luck of his own. He had purchased some of his own SP Authentic packs at the comic shop in the mall where he worked and he pulled a Ryan Leaf, the second-overall pick that year, news he provided me as he attempted to one up me with a card that was in fairly high demand at the time. At this point I could no longer contain myself — out of my pocket came the Randy Moss. “I also pulled this,” I said through a gigantic smile. This shut him up for the night on the card topic as Moss was blazing hot, and Leaf was regressing a bit after a piss-poor start to a classically bad tale of a bad draft pick. Victory was mine.
The following day I kept staring at the card, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t keep staring at that crease on the reverse of the Moss. The Taylor was a beauty, but the Moss was clearly damaged. I decided to reach out to Upper Deck, wondering if they would fix such a flaw, although I wondered how they might do so given that my card was factory serial numbered in gold foil. I called UD to inquire and they advised that they would send me a new version of the card if I sent them the original and a letter stating the issue. So I took a photo of my card — I swear I still have the Polaroid somewhere — and shipped it off. A few weeks later a new Moss arrived. I flipped the card over immediately to see if the flaw was gone, and it was. However, my eyes locked onto the serial number “1541/2000” which was now written in gold marker pen and not stamped in gold foil like other cards. It was then that I learned how UD rectified such situations where a factory-stamped serial numbered card had to be replaced.
I remember struggling with the idea of not having a factory stamped serial numbered, and how some might think the card was fake. But ultimately I had to let this go because the alternative was owning a stamped one that was creased. Little did I know that the hand-written detail would be my saving grace.
***
The years 1997 through 2001 were easily some of the most important years in my hobby career. This was a time when I was graduating high school, earning my first paycheck; had some adult freedom and was working toward a college degree of some sort — I did not declare a major until my third year of school. While others my age had ditched cards, I decided to stay the course on three sports and the hobby at the time was changing, moving light years away from packs full of base cards and going full-bore into an age with seeded, short-print and serial-numbered rookie cards, as well as the early years of game-used and autograph cards. I had some insane luck for a guy my age, spending as “little” as I was compared to my Silicon Valley collecting cohorts who found riches during the DotCom Boom. The Fred Taylor and Randy Moss rookies were massive pulls for an 18-year-old, but during this time I’d also pulled a Nolan Ryan autograph from 1999 Fleer Greats of the Game; Topps Chrome Rookie Refractors of Tim Duncan and Vince Carter; as well as autographs of Joe Montana and Dan Marino from the same box of SPX Finite; and the piece de resistence, a 2001 Upper Deck Hall of Famers Walter Johnson Cut Signature I unearthed from a pack at a 7-Eleven in San Jose, California.
Also during this time in the hobby, third party grading was all the rage. PSA had been slabbing cards for years, and in order to send cards to them you needed to purchase a membership. In 1998/1999 Beckett announced it was opening “Beckett Grading Services” to rival PSA. BGS offered thicker slabs, a grading scale that included half-grades, and every submission included subgrades, or a breakdown of the grade for four specific categories, edges, corners, surface and centering. The kicker? No membership fees. Color me sold.
Among the first cards I submitted were the Taylor and Moss. On August 9, 1999, both cards were graded Mint 9. The Moss came back with subgrades of 10 centering, 9s for edges and surface, and an 8.5 corners — which was mind-blowing since there were no obvious issues. I left the card in that slab for a little more than seven years until I decided to re-submit it in early 2007 with another batch of cards that included a Joe Montana rookie card, and a 2006 Bowman Chrome Draft Refractor Clayton Kershaw autographed card, which I had pulled myself just months earlier at a Wal-Mart in Milpitas, California.
***
I grew up here in the San Francisco Bay Area and had the good fortune to be around for a lot of successful 49ers football teams during my youth. Niner fans have been seeking that sixth Super Bowl since 1995, and whenever the team gets close to the Championship game I break out my Joe Montana rookie card and show it off on Social Media as a way of showing my support for the team. Things were no different this year as the team entered its NFC Championship game against the Los Angeles Rams. On January 30, 2022, I featured on Twitter my Montana as my “Card of the Day.” The image shows the overall grade of 7.5, the killer sub grades except for the centering, and the slab serial-number “0004886812” is emblazoned in the corner. Before posting that image I checked the BGS database to look at the specifics of the card — the card was slabbed February 6, 2007, and I reflected on the idea that it had been 15 years since I submitted the card. I shook my head and made the post, and merely put the card to the side hoping it would bring luck to the Niners. Little did I know this post would be crucial just days later.
Graded cards often get cracked and re-submitted for various reasons. Some owners do it for continuity of their collection, others do it for financial purposes, and sometimes folks do it because they believe the graders made a mistake that hurt. This was the case for me in 2007 when I decided to crack the Randy Moss SP Authentic from his 1999 holder and then re-submit it. When my Moss came back in 2007 it carried a gold BGS label and a Gem Mint 9.5 grade with three 9.5 subgrades, including for the “corners,” the category I felt they mistakenly undergraded the first time.
By 2007 I had already sold most of the football cards I owned. I decided to keep a handful to which I had an attachment, these included the aforementioned Montana rookie, as well as those sweet Taylor and Moss pulls from 1998 SP Authentic.
In May 2008 — just months before I started this blog — my then-wife and I found out we were having our first child. A funny thing happens when you learn you and your partner are going to be first-time parents. As a collector working in a profession (journalism) that offered a fair wage in an area where a spectacular income was needed to own a house I felt the need to sell something large in my collection in order to feel like I was doing right for my family, or to subsidize whatever else I wanted to add to my collection in the future. So I sold the Randy Moss to the highest bidder, and away in a padded envelope I sent a piece of my collecting history.
***
As I clicked the listing, I got a little giddy because at this point in 2022, the BGS legacy had been heavily tarnished for various reasons. Many folks were cracking their BGS slabs and sending the cards to PSA because cards in a PSA holder tend to fetch quite a bit more money than those graded by their counter parts. So to see a Randy Moss still in a BGS case at this point was intriguing. I clicked the close up of the Moss and saw the BGS slab serial numbered “0004886811.” That string of numbers sounded familiar.
“That looks a lot like the serial number I entered for the Montana,” I said to myself, trying to contain my wishful thinking. I then looked at the second image shown in the listing and saw the numbers “1541/2000” written in gold ink and nearly lost my mind.
“Holy shit! That’s MY Moss!” I said, both of my kids asking what the hell I was talking about.
All sorts of thoughts ran through my head, including the fact that I was mistaken. So I ran the Moss serial number through the Beckett database and confirmed it was actually graded on the same day as the Montana. I went and grabbed my Montana rookie and confirmed that the Montana was serialized one after the Moss. I then went to locate two other cards from the BGS batch I submitted in 2007, including the Kershaw card. It was confirmed, the Moss in the listing was mine.
Now, here’s where things get really tense. I immediately tweeted a picture of the listing and proclaimed MY Moss card was available on the secondary market. This was exciting, but also nerve-racking because I then feared that someone would swoop in and grab the card before I could figure out how to make it mine again. I sent a message to the owner, sharing the story about how the card was previously mine, how the card was hand-numbered as a replacement, and so on and so forth. For several hours I waited for a return message, often wondering if tipping my hand about the sentimental value would hurt my chances of securing this card.
As I waited I thought about this card journey of mine and how it started when I was 7 years old as two brothers befriended me when my family moved into a four-story apartment building across from a shopping center that housed Brians Books, a comic shop that was really my first true LCS. I thought about the Junk Wax Era and mass production; I thought about how a connection to sports cards is what brought my friend Nate and I together; I thought about the insane highs I felt in this hobby during that 1997-2001 run and how crazy it was that a teenager like me could walk into a comic and card shop and pull a card like this Randy Moss when there were adults with massive paychecks doing the same but with no such luck. I thought about the moment when my ex-wife told me she was pregnant and how that child of whom she spoke just turned 13 years old less than a month ago. I thought about how insane it is that on this random day in February, almost 15 years to the day after Beckett slabbed this Randy Moss card, that I was sitting at the kitchen table with both of my kids when I discovered that the card to which I have such a connection but set free in the world more than a decade ago had suddenly appeared back in my life.
I thought about how we only live once and sometimes you just gotta make shit happen.
And so I did.
I made some moves (Thanks to the friend who helped connect the dots on a few things) and sealed the deal. The Moss — MY Moss — was headed back home.
I wish I could say the re-union was seamless. I had plans for a homecoming, a video of me discussing this journey and then a trip back to the location of R&K Comics, which closed many years ago and is now home to a Boba Tea shop. But the journey back home also included one more hurdle – the actual delivery.
The card was In Transit from Missouri to California for about five days, and on February 9, the day the card was set to arrive by FedEx, I logged into my account and made sure that my notifications were set to send me a phone text message when the item was delivered. The sun rose, crested over the country, and then set again, all without a delivery message. Then just after 6:30 pm I got the message that the item had arrived. I drove as fast as I could to the home where I have all of my deliveries made. There was no package.
I asked my sister and her husband. There was no package.
I looked in the mail box, around the backside of the shrubs and the hedges. There was no package
My heart sunk. I was scared that this whole effort was for nothing. I explained to my family what the hell I was looking for, and I vocalized being worried that they delivered the package to the wrong address.
That’s when the neighbor came walking around the corner carrying two packages, including one from Missouri. I thanked the man five times over the course of 8 seconds and inspected the box as the man disppeared. The box was closed, but the tape was loose and it was not clear if the contents were inside. I thought about my plan for a video, but I had to know — was My Moss really back with its rightful owner?
I scooted the poor-tape job to the side, threw the inner packing material on the car seat, and then ripped open one end of the bubble mailer inside the box. I pushed the slab toward the opening, and it was then that I again laid eyes on the color purple just as I had some 23-plus years before when I first unwrapped the original 1998 SP Authentic Randy Moss rookie. And moments later, for the first time in almost 13 years, I laid my hands upon the BGS slab that I sold. Sure, the case has some imperfections, a few scuffs here and there, but it was back in my hands and there are no plans to ever let it leave my collection again. I wish the slab could talk. I wish I knew how many people held it, looked at it in envy. I wish I knew how many people looked at the hand-written serial number on the reverse and opted not to add it their forever-collections.
Whatever the un-told story is, I’m thankful that all roads led back to my collection. I’m super appreciative that I get to share this story on my blog since I’d never written about the Moss. I’m also thrilled that I get to share with my son — with whom I collect these days — how Serious I am about having personal connections to my cards and it reinforces what I’ve been teaching him over the last year or two: When possible we keep the cards that we pull.
From a young age I found that baseball cards in some ways acted as hash marks on the timeline of my life. I can remember certain cards associated with events of my life, both good and bad. And this weekend, they certainly found their way into my timeline as we celebrated the life of my grandmother.
Trips to grandmother’s house, which was about 70 minutes away from where I grew up, almost certainly involved me asking, begging and pleading with my mom to take me to a card shop, or anywhere I could purchase new cards. Sure, I grew up (ages 7-10) directly across the street from a card shop, but trips out of my neighborhood always presented new opportunities to see new shops. And so each trip to Fairfield, California, involved me finding cards somewhere. At times it was packs of 1989 Topps at Target; 1989 Donruss at the local corner store, 1990 Topps at 7-Eleven; packs of 1991 Classic Best Minor League or Donruss from some car shop.
I have lots of memories bringing baseball cards to grandma’s house and spending hours sorting them while the adults talked, argued, and laughed.
Grandma passed away in February of this year due to health reasons, she was 81. Grandma lived in Fairfield from the early 1980s through 2002 when she and her husband uprooted and moved to North Carolina, where pace of life was much more to their liking as they grew older. Since then her trips to California have only been for major events, a few weddings and graduations, but in recent year it was deaths. In 2017 her first husband died; then in 2018 her husband passed — I called both men “grandpa.” She came to visit again in 2019 to see her husband’s tombstone and to celebrate her 80th birthday with family. Then COVID came and stopped all plans for a 2020 visit. I last spoke to her during Christmas of 2020, she was so happy to hear from me. She laughed and cried; as did I as I could tell her memory was starting to fade. The came the call in February that she had been admitted to the hospital and then passed rather suddenly from non-Covid related health issues.
We’ve had a few months to process the passing, but we knew we as a family would gather again here in California when restrictions loosened so that we could have her ashes buried with those of her husband. And that’s how and why we all ended up near Fairfield again this weekend. And as luck or fate would have it, there just so happened to be a card show at Solano Town Center IN Fairfield. I knew I had to make it happen even if it was just for an hour or two with my son.
We went and it was the first real show my son had been to in almost two years; it was my first since March 2020 — literally as the country began to freak out over COVID. I remember it vividly because all autograph guests canceled their appearances over growing health and travel convcerns.
Anyhow, my son and I went to the Fairfield show and I had no expectations other than to find at least one card that I could use to memorialize this weekend; also to watch my son again dig through boxes and find something he enjoyed. I’ll probably post the small haul in a different post because I want to dedicate the rest of this space today to the one card I found.
We dug through a few bargain boxes and in one of the boxes I located this 1991 Score “Bo Breaker” card and it made me stop immediately. I knew I had found THE card for the weekend. Here’s the story.
In 1991 my family took a trip to Fairfield and my cousin and I visited a shop called “Batter Up.” To my recollection this was the second location for the store, but I recall it being larger than the ones I frequented in my hometown. They houses a dozen oshowcases with lots of singles, and for 1991 they seemed to have every pack one could want. During one trip I remember taking a few dollars and buying a fistful of 1991 Score Series 2 packs looking for a certain card — the “Bo Breaker.” The card features black borders and showcases Bo Jackson snapping a bat over his leg after striking out in a game. The reverse shows Bo finishing his swing with a broken bat in his hand. It’s sort of silly, but at the time it was a big deal. Anyhow, as luck would have it I pulled the Bo! But it didn’t leave the card shop with me.
You see, I didn’t get a ton of money for cards as a kid, but I loved opening packs. Every now and again my mom would give me a few dollars, but more times then not I earned my card money by raiding garbage bins for cans and bottles to recycle. So when I pulled this Bo, I asked how much the shop could give me in trade and the guy offered $3, which meant I could rip six more packs of 1991 Score baseball! (Insert eyeroll emoji here)
In the genius state of my 11-year-old mind this deal made total sense so I took it and then walked away with six more packs of Score figuring I’d pull another and just enjoy the extra stuff as well. Of course those new six packs did NOT contain another Bo Breaker and I went home with a stack of commons, which I still enjoyed (I later built the set with them) but certainly didn’t celebrate them the way I did or would have with Bo Breaker in my collection at the time.
I’ve owned a few Bo Breaker cards over the years, and have a few at home at the moment. But this particular copy feels extra special. I realize not everyone gets sentimental over their cards. But for me, it seems certain ones have been placed in front of me, just for me in that moment. And to find this card in the same city where we used to visit grandma, in the same city where the aforementioned transaction occurred 30 years ago, feels like the workings of something from beyond. And now THIS copy is going home with me to mark this occasion, this weekend. Love you, Grandma. Rest easy.
Last week I managed to make it to the first night of the annual GT Sports Marketing show in Santa Clara, California. One of my favorite things to do it dig through the bargain boxes while everyone else is clamoring over the newest, shiny cards in the show cases.
As I dug through one dealer’s dollar box, I stopped dead in my tracks when I came to a stack of Frank Thomas cards because there in my hands was a copy of a card that I honestly called the second best card — second only to my my 1993 Elite Eddie Murray — I had ever pulled to that point in my life.
In 1994, I was a freshman in high school and my parents had been separated for about five years. My father was living with his girlfriend in a city about 15 miles away and on the weekends I would go to his house and spent time fishing and just hanging out. In that small town there was a card shop run by a gentleman who smoked cigars while customers browsed the shelves and showcase.
That year 1994 Score caught my attention because for the first time the brand had created parallel cards (Gold Rush) that were seeded one per pack and at the time that was a big deal. I bought a fair amount of Series One and completed a base set and had a partial set, so when Series Two was released I was excited.
I had no money, but my cousin — who is a year younger than I — had $10 and said I could borrow it if I promised to pay her back. You know I was down for that deal, and so she gave it to me and I plunked the cash down on the counter and asked for nine packs of 1994 Score Series Two — it would have been 10 packs if not for taxes.
I ripped pack after pack and somewhere in the middle of the session came out a 1994 Score “The Cycle” Frank Thomas card. It was one of 20 cards on the checklist, and the cards were seeded 1:72 packs, which was a common ratio for rare inserts of the time. And Frank Thomas was no slouch — his popularity in the hobby was on par with Ken Griffey Jr. at the time; they often traded top positions as the top player on the Beckett Baseball’s monthly hot player list.
When the cards were priced in Beckett, that Thomas — and the Griffey — were listed at $75. The Thomas I owned went right into a four-screw, 1/4-inch screw case for maximum protection — sans penny sleeve of course.
That Thomas stoked a great passion of mine to chase that entire set. I spent much of the fall trading various football rookies — Heath Shuler and Trent Dilfer to be specific — for various cards on the checklist, mostly the lower end guys. Dealers were more than happy to take the hot quarterback rookies for these inserts.
I never did finish the set as a kid, but it is something I have half completed at present time and intend to finish at some point.
Although I already owned a copy of this Frank Thomas card — it’s not available even for $75 — I could not pass on the chance to obtain another at such a low price. It’s not that I needed the card for my collection, but I needed it for my collecting soul and so that I could revisit that story and share it with you.
Today is a special day. Los Angeles Dodgers star pitcher Clayton Kershaw is set to take the mound tonight at Oracle Park, home of the rival San Francisco Giants, and not only will I be there to see the future Hall of Famer take the mound, but so will my kids and my nephew.
The Points are Poop gang will finally get to watch the player whose cards they see all over my home, the player whose game-used items and cards are frequently arriving by mail, and the guy whose picture I took in 2015 and had the image printed on canvas and eventually hung in my hallway.
This will be my fourth time seeing my favorite player pitch. My sister and I saw him in 2015 as he locked down the NL West title in San Francisco in what was scheduled to be a pitchers duel against Madison Bumgarner. Kershaw was masterful that night, allowing just one hit and striking out 13 batters. It was at that game I took the aforementioned photo I had printed on canvas, and it is also the game at which the image used on this 2016 Stadium Club Gold Autograph card was snapped.
I saw Kershaw again last season when the Dodgers came through Oakland; and of course My sister and I saw him at Game 5 of the World Series at Dodger Stadium when my favorite team knocked around my favorite player in order to clinch the World Series Championship.
If this was just me going, I would have ponied up for seats along the first base line, but with three kids going with me, the budget just doesn’t allow for such premium seats. Instead we’ll be taking the game in from the bleachers.
Kershaw may not be the dominant pitcher he was five years ago, and I won’t pretend that he is the best in the game — pretty sure Max Scherzer has that title at the moment — but it’s pretty special for me to bring my kids and my sister’s son to a game that features my favorite active player.
By comparison, I only saw Roger Clemens — my childhood favorite — pitch twice, once on Opening Day 1999, which his first start with New York, and again in 2007 as a member of the Houston Astros. My ex wife was with me on both occasions.
I did have loose plans to see him in 1997 when the Blue Jays came through Oakland in May of that year, but I had a medical emergency right around my birthday that prevented that from happening — I wound up watching that game from a hospital bed. And in the early to mid 1990s I really didn’t have the means to see him as the Red Sox ace, which is unfortunate.
April 2001. There is a buzz around Seattle Mariners Spring Training camp about the new player, a baseball veteran who had played in his native Japan for eight years before inking a deal with the MLB club. His name was Ichiro.
The name was like none that many of us followers of baseball in the United States had heard. We were intrigued how this player’s skills would translate. About a half decade earlier, pitcher Hideo Nomo had made the transition to Major League Baseball and he did so with plenty of fanfare and success. And a few years later, another Japanese pitcher, Hideki Irabu, signed on with the New York Yankees and didn’t exactly enjoy loads of success. So there was some excitement with Ichiro — especially since he was an everyday player — but there was some trepidation as there wasn’t anything to which he could really be compared.
Of course as history has shown us, Ichiro was better than any of us could have imagined. In MLB he was a premier batsmen, a speed demon on the base paths, and on defense he possessed everything an outfielder could want, including closing speed and a rocket launcher for an arm.
When he came into the league, I was in my third year in college, about to turn 21. I had a lot going in my life. I had just decided that Journalism was the thing for me and I was spending more time at school working as an editor for the college daily paper. My days were long, which left very little time for cards. But that’s not to say that I wasn’t still buying. And if memory serves me right, one of the first Ichiro cards I was able to obtain was the 2001 Upper Deck.
Unless you collected in 2001, there is very little that can compare to the spark that Ichiro and Albert Pujols brought to our hobby during their fantastic rookie season. In fact, I’d say that level of excitement probably wasn’t broached until Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper hit Bowman products in 2010, and maybe again in 2018 with the triumvirate of Ronald Acuna, Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani hit the scene. But still, in its time, 2001 was a special year.
I digress. I remember that first season for so many reasons. That summer I had my first internship, at the Oakland Tribune in Oakland, Calif., and at a convenience store across the street they had a single box of 2001 Upper Deck Vintage. The set design was a play on the 1963 Topps set, but in the set was a multi-player rookie card of Ichiro. As odd as the floating head design of that rookie card was, I still bought pack after pack during my lunch breaks that summer. In fact, I am pretty sure I ended up buying the entire box. Sadly, I did not pull an Ichiro.
This was also the case for so many other products that summer, although it should be noted that a lot of the releases had serial numbered rookie cards. This didn’t stop me from chasing. In fact, it was not until Bowman Heritage, and Topps Update hit shelves that I started to routinely pull — and sell — Ichiro rookie cards. I even managed to hit one of the Topps Gallery rookies, which if memory serves me right, were redemption cards as they were released with both English and Japanese text versions.
What’s interesting to note is that was also driving the Upper Deck higher-end products at the time as relic cards featuring swatches of his Spring Training uniform were also produced, as were a few autographed cards. And it was right about this time we really started to see a bunch of fake patch cards of Ichiro. The most common was the Sweet Spot plain white or blue swatch that often was manipulated to look as though it contained a piece of the Mariner’s logo. Many were sold for big bucks before people started to wonder just how many of them could contain what looked to be the center of the compass logo.
By 2002, Ichiro was continuing to solidify himself as a major player on the field and in the hobby. And personally, he was the favorite active player of a good friend of mine who was living in Oregon, which is in the television market for the Seattle Mariners. That summer I had my second internship, and it was in the same down and the same newspaper at which my friend lived — the Statesman Journal, Salem, Ore. That summer I got to know so much more about Ichiro through talks with my friend and by watching games that summer. I was also lucky enough to see some of the Mariners’ television commercials, which used Ichiro as a comedic crutch. To say they were epic would be an understatement.
The following summer, 2003, I had my third and final internship. Anyone want to guess where? In Seattle, at The Seattle Times. That summer I was immersed in the Mariner’s culture. And if I had the financial means I would have been at Safeco Field every night watching the Mariners — they were a fun team to watch in this era. I did manage to catch two games that summer, one on Aug. 11 — a game in which Ichiro collected three hits and a stolen base (his 615th, 616th, and 617th hits of his career, and his career 115th stolen base). And then five days later, on Aug., 16, I saw Ichiro in person again when he collected his 625th career base hit, and was struck by a Pedro Martinez pitch, the 19th HBP of Ichiro’s career. (Side note, that HBP ball would be amazing to own given that I collect HBP game-used baseballs.)
In the following years, Ichiro was a guy whom I enjoyed watching and from time to time would be the player for whom I would trade. And I would have drafted and traded for him in fantasy leagues save for the fact that one of my good friends — the same mentioned above — had pretty much secured his services from 2002 through the end of his regular playing time as a Mariner.
Ichiro’s signature — as loopy and unreadable as it is — was something I only dreamed about owning. That is until the summer of 2008 when I managed to sell enough other items to afford a 2004 Sweet Spot, a card that I managed to purchase during the infancy of this blog. In fact, the card actually arrived at my home during the first week I began writing here. I was out of town at the time so the card sat for two days in a padded envelope in an unsecured mailbox. Thankfully the card was there when I arrived home. It’s still in my collection to this day.
I’d be a liar if I could tell you I followed or collected Ichiro with the same voracity in which I chased Roger Clemens, or even various rookie cards that eventually came to make up my Hall of Fame rookie card collection. But over the time I managed to acquire a slabbed copy of his 1993 BBM Japanese rookie card, as well as a raw copy of the much-coveted 2001 Bowman Chrome rookie card — note, all of these rookies have a refractor finish — and even a few others, including a 2001 Keebler Mariners card graded a BGS 9.5 that hits on a nostalgic point for me since it somewhat resembles the old Mother’s Cookies cards from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
And while I do not own a Ichiro Hit By Pitch game-used baseball, I do own an Ichiro foul ball that I bought directly from the Miami Marlins last year, used during his career 2,627th game. The ball was used for three pitches during his 9,873rd career at-bat (10,669th career plate appearance) in the sixth inning of the 9/19/17 contest against the New York Mets. Josh Smoker blew a 93.5 mph four-seam fastball past Ichiro for strike one, and then threw a 81.5 mph slider for a ball. Smoker then hurled a 94.4 mph four-seam fastball toward the plate and Ichiro fouled it off, sending the ball back into the mask of catcher Travis d’Arnaud — the ball wound up with two lines on it, presumably from striking the catcher’s mask as the ball went out of play.
The Ichiro game-used ball was the last piece of his that I acquired. And even at the time I struck the deal, I was surprised that I was able to own such an item, given that I figured Ichiro was effectively retired. As it turned out, he wound up playing in 15 games in 2018, and then then returned for the Opening Series in Japan earlier this week.
This has been a rough week for me in terms of dealing with home life and getting sleep, and this Opening Series in Japan certain didn’t make things easier for me as I was determined to catch all or some of these games. I caught the final two innings of the first game, but during the second game I watched along with the world as Ichiro struck out in what looked to be his last at-bat in the seventh inning, only to cheer on the Mariners so that we could see him swing the bat one more time. And in the eighth inning after he grounded out to shortstop, I am not ashamed to admit that I teared up as Ichiro waved goodbye as he was removed from the game in ceremonious fashion, especially when he embraced rookie pitcher and fellow countryman Yusei Kikuchi, whose Topps Opening Day rookie card I happened to pull a day earlier.
We all knew Ichiro had a great skillset, and a was building a fantastic Cooperstown resume. But his style of play wasn’t the type that was going to stoke the flames of baseball passion for everyone, especially not in an era when power hitting and pitching were the name of the game. The one stat about Ichiro that continues to amaze me is that he collected 200-plus hits in each of his first 10 seasons in MLB. That’s an entire decade of consistency; death by paper cuts for opposing pitchers, made more painful by the fact that he was averaging almost 40 stolen bases a season during that same time.
At times it seems as though the last 18 seasons have passed in the blink of an eye. Ichiro’s MLB career started when I was a college kid, and between the time he first donned his Mariner’s uniform to the last time he doffed it as a player earlier this week, I had lots of ups and downs: I graduated college; had three Internships; lived in three states; got married (and divorced a decade later); had two kids; owned a Mustang; started and ended one career and then began another; had a side gig for almost two years as a columnist for Beckett Baseball, the magazine I read religiously as a kid; attended two National Sports Collector’s Conventions (2012 and 2014); and have started this blog, which has now been around for nearly 11 years; watched my team win four World Series, the most-recent of which I managed to watch the clinching game in person, and much more.
Ichiro’s MLB career pretty much encompasses much of my adult life to this point, and it’s going to be weird going forward not seeing him on the field, or as a regular member of our annual baseball card sets.
cardboardicons.com 
Cardboard Connections more valuable than Cash: A personal pull return after being gone for a decade
Posted in Commentary, Dad Life with tags football cards, Heirloom, memories, nostalgia, Randy Moss, SP Authentic, sports cards on February 20, 2022 by Cardboard IconsIt was a Wednesday morning, February 2, 2022, to be exact, and I had just finished making my kids their breakfast when out of the blue I got this nostalgic feeling about a card I used to own. Every now and again a conversation leads me to wonder what came of certain cards I owned and sold or traded during my life.
Sometimes the card is a cheaper one, or other times its a more modern shiny classic that if I had known better I would’ve held onto for another year and had the equivalent of a down payment on a home. Other times it’s cards from some of the best years of my hobby life. In this case, it was a 1998 SP Authentic Randy Moss Rookie Card.
I mentioned this to a friend and he sent me a few listings of Randy Moss SP Authentic rookie cards for sale. Many were slabbed by PSA, but about halfway down there was one slabbed “Gem Mint” by Beckett Grading Services. This intrigued me enough to click the listing. I glanced at the image and thought: “That looks a lot like …”
***
It was a Tuesday night, some 23 years ago. I had plans to meet with my friends at the local bowling alley that offered $1 games one night a week. It was something we often did in my late teens and early 20s after we got off work and school. On this particular evening I first decided to swing by a local card and comic shop (R&K Comics in Sunnyvale, California) to see what they had for sale. At the time I was a collector of three sports (Baseball, Basketball and Football) and football was in full swing. I remember, because the Draft Class that year was smoldering, and I had a hot hand, pulling multiple rookie cards of Randy Moss, the newest wide-out in the league who was destined to become the next Jerry Rice.
Upper Deck made a product called SP Authentic and that year the rookie cards were seeded roughly two per box and they were limited to just 2,000 copies, and they were HOT. Bowman Chrome and Topps Chrome were a thing then and they had a following, but neither of those products offered serial numbered rookie cards. Serious collectors wanted serialized rookie cards, and they decidedly targeted the SP Authentic ones as the top — or one of the top — releases that year.
The packs were not cheap, somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 or $7 each, or at least twice that of any other pack. I believe I purchased four or five that night when I saw that the box on the shelf was full, meaning the contents were likely fresh and not the dregs of multiple blown boxes. In hindsight this was entirely possible, but I knew this shop didn’t get a lot of cards, they were heavy in comics and related items. This was probably the only box of SP they were going to get all year.
I purchased the packs and began opening immediately in a slow fashion, long before this became the norm for social media. In one of the early packs I could see a solid-color card back, which was an immediate indication I’d located a rookie card. The base cards that year were all oriented in a vertical fashion and featured a foil-type front and a back was complete with stats and a softened full-bleed image. So when you pulled a rookie — which was horizontal and a solid color back — you knew you had something. The color was gold, and the face on the front of the card was non-other than Jacksonville Jaguars running back Fred Taylor, the ninth overall draft pick that season. Taylor had been having a solid season and I knew at this point I was already playing with house money.
I opened the remaining packs I purchased, hoping to continue the good luck. Sure enough a few packs later another solid-color backside of a card revealed itself. This time the color was purple and the face on the front was Randy Moss, the 21st overall pick out of Marshall. I flipped the card over to look at the serial number, but the light bounced off a defect in the card. Right below the number “18” in the corner there was a crease that ran about a quarter of an inch, parallel to the edge of the card. I was still pleased with the pull but the factory damage put a damper on things just a tad.
I placed both cards into their own top loaders and headed to the bowling alley (Saratoga Lanes) where I met up with my friends, one of whom was also into cards at the time. I decided to play things modest. I told my friend (Nate) that I had bought some packs before heading to the alley and I told him that I pulled a Fred Taylor rookie. I showed it to him and he was happy for me, but this guy also had some luck of his own. He had purchased some of his own SP Authentic packs at the comic shop in the mall where he worked and he pulled a Ryan Leaf, the second-overall pick that year, news he provided me as he attempted to one up me with a card that was in fairly high demand at the time. At this point I could no longer contain myself — out of my pocket came the Randy Moss. “I also pulled this,” I said through a gigantic smile. This shut him up for the night on the card topic as Moss was blazing hot, and Leaf was regressing a bit after a piss-poor start to a classically bad tale of a bad draft pick. Victory was mine.
The following day I kept staring at the card, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t keep staring at that crease on the reverse of the Moss. The Taylor was a beauty, but the Moss was clearly damaged. I decided to reach out to Upper Deck, wondering if they would fix such a flaw, although I wondered how they might do so given that my card was factory serial numbered in gold foil. I called UD to inquire and they advised that they would send me a new version of the card if I sent them the original and a letter stating the issue. So I took a photo of my card — I swear I still have the Polaroid somewhere — and shipped it off. A few weeks later a new Moss arrived. I flipped the card over immediately to see if the flaw was gone, and it was. However, my eyes locked onto the serial number “1541/2000” which was now written in gold marker pen and not stamped in gold foil like other cards. It was then that I learned how UD rectified such situations where a factory-stamped serial numbered card had to be replaced.
I remember struggling with the idea of not having a factory stamped serial numbered, and how some might think the card was fake. But ultimately I had to let this go because the alternative was owning a stamped one that was creased. Little did I know that the hand-written detail would be my saving grace.
***
The years 1997 through 2001 were easily some of the most important years in my hobby career. This was a time when I was graduating high school, earning my first paycheck; had some adult freedom and was working toward a college degree of some sort — I did not declare a major until my third year of school. While others my age had ditched cards, I decided to stay the course on three sports and the hobby at the time was changing, moving light years away from packs full of base cards and going full-bore into an age with seeded, short-print and serial-numbered rookie cards, as well as the early years of game-used and autograph cards. I had some insane luck for a guy my age, spending as “little” as I was compared to my Silicon Valley collecting cohorts who found riches during the DotCom Boom. The Fred Taylor and Randy Moss rookies were massive pulls for an 18-year-old, but during this time I’d also pulled a Nolan Ryan autograph from 1999 Fleer Greats of the Game; Topps Chrome Rookie Refractors of Tim Duncan and Vince Carter; as well as autographs of Joe Montana and Dan Marino from the same box of SPX Finite; and the piece de resistence, a 2001 Upper Deck Hall of Famers Walter Johnson Cut Signature I unearthed from a pack at a 7-Eleven in San Jose, California.
Also during this time in the hobby, third party grading was all the rage. PSA had been slabbing cards for years, and in order to send cards to them you needed to purchase a membership. In 1998/1999 Beckett announced it was opening “Beckett Grading Services” to rival PSA. BGS offered thicker slabs, a grading scale that included half-grades, and every submission included subgrades, or a breakdown of the grade for four specific categories, edges, corners, surface and centering. The kicker? No membership fees. Color me sold.
Among the first cards I submitted were the Taylor and Moss. On August 9, 1999, both cards were graded Mint 9. The Moss came back with subgrades of 10 centering, 9s for edges and surface, and an 8.5 corners — which was mind-blowing since there were no obvious issues. I left the card in that slab for a little more than seven years until I decided to re-submit it in early 2007 with another batch of cards that included a Joe Montana rookie card, and a 2006 Bowman Chrome Draft Refractor Clayton Kershaw autographed card, which I had pulled myself just months earlier at a Wal-Mart in Milpitas, California.
***
I grew up here in the San Francisco Bay Area and had the good fortune to be around for a lot of successful 49ers football teams during my youth. Niner fans have been seeking that sixth Super Bowl since 1995, and whenever the team gets close to the Championship game I break out my Joe Montana rookie card and show it off on Social Media as a way of showing my support for the team. Things were no different this year as the team entered its NFC Championship game against the Los Angeles Rams. On January 30, 2022, I featured on Twitter my Montana as my “Card of the Day.” The image shows the overall grade of 7.5, the killer sub grades except for the centering, and the slab serial-number “0004886812” is emblazoned in the corner. Before posting that image I checked the BGS database to look at the specifics of the card — the card was slabbed February 6, 2007, and I reflected on the idea that it had been 15 years since I submitted the card. I shook my head and made the post, and merely put the card to the side hoping it would bring luck to the Niners. Little did I know this post would be crucial just days later.
Graded cards often get cracked and re-submitted for various reasons. Some owners do it for continuity of their collection, others do it for financial purposes, and sometimes folks do it because they believe the graders made a mistake that hurt. This was the case for me in 2007 when I decided to crack the Randy Moss SP Authentic from his 1999 holder and then re-submit it. When my Moss came back in 2007 it carried a gold BGS label and a Gem Mint 9.5 grade with three 9.5 subgrades, including for the “corners,” the category I felt they mistakenly undergraded the first time.
By 2007 I had already sold most of the football cards I owned. I decided to keep a handful to which I had an attachment, these included the aforementioned Montana rookie, as well as those sweet Taylor and Moss pulls from 1998 SP Authentic.
In May 2008 — just months before I started this blog — my then-wife and I found out we were having our first child. A funny thing happens when you learn you and your partner are going to be first-time parents. As a collector working in a profession (journalism) that offered a fair wage in an area where a spectacular income was needed to own a house I felt the need to sell something large in my collection in order to feel like I was doing right for my family, or to subsidize whatever else I wanted to add to my collection in the future. So I sold the Randy Moss to the highest bidder, and away in a padded envelope I sent a piece of my collecting history.
***
As I clicked the listing, I got a little giddy because at this point in 2022, the BGS legacy had been heavily tarnished for various reasons. Many folks were cracking their BGS slabs and sending the cards to PSA because cards in a PSA holder tend to fetch quite a bit more money than those graded by their counter parts. So to see a Randy Moss still in a BGS case at this point was intriguing. I clicked the close up of the Moss and saw the BGS slab serial numbered “0004886811.” That string of numbers sounded familiar.
“That looks a lot like the serial number I entered for the Montana,” I said to myself, trying to contain my wishful thinking. I then looked at the second image shown in the listing and saw the numbers “1541/2000” written in gold ink and nearly lost my mind.
“Holy shit! That’s MY Moss!” I said, both of my kids asking what the hell I was talking about.
All sorts of thoughts ran through my head, including the fact that I was mistaken. So I ran the Moss serial number through the Beckett database and confirmed it was actually graded on the same day as the Montana. I went and grabbed my Montana rookie and confirmed that the Montana was serialized one after the Moss. I then went to locate two other cards from the BGS batch I submitted in 2007, including the Kershaw card. It was confirmed, the Moss in the listing was mine.
Now, here’s where things get really tense. I immediately tweeted a picture of the listing and proclaimed MY Moss card was available on the secondary market. This was exciting, but also nerve-racking because I then feared that someone would swoop in and grab the card before I could figure out how to make it mine again. I sent a message to the owner, sharing the story about how the card was previously mine, how the card was hand-numbered as a replacement, and so on and so forth. For several hours I waited for a return message, often wondering if tipping my hand about the sentimental value would hurt my chances of securing this card.
As I waited I thought about this card journey of mine and how it started when I was 7 years old as two brothers befriended me when my family moved into a four-story apartment building across from a shopping center that housed Brians Books, a comic shop that was really my first true LCS. I thought about the Junk Wax Era and mass production; I thought about how a connection to sports cards is what brought my friend Nate and I together; I thought about the insane highs I felt in this hobby during that 1997-2001 run and how crazy it was that a teenager like me could walk into a comic and card shop and pull a card like this Randy Moss when there were adults with massive paychecks doing the same but with no such luck. I thought about the moment when my ex-wife told me she was pregnant and how that child of whom she spoke just turned 13 years old less than a month ago. I thought about how insane it is that on this random day in February, almost 15 years to the day after Beckett slabbed this Randy Moss card, that I was sitting at the kitchen table with both of my kids when I discovered that the card to which I have such a connection but set free in the world more than a decade ago had suddenly appeared back in my life.
I thought about how we only live once and sometimes you just gotta make shit happen.
And so I did.
I made some moves (Thanks to the friend who helped connect the dots on a few things) and sealed the deal. The Moss — MY Moss — was headed back home.
I wish I could say the re-union was seamless. I had plans for a homecoming, a video of me discussing this journey and then a trip back to the location of R&K Comics, which closed many years ago and is now home to a Boba Tea shop. But the journey back home also included one more hurdle – the actual delivery.
The card was In Transit from Missouri to California for about five days, and on February 9, the day the card was set to arrive by FedEx, I logged into my account and made sure that my notifications were set to send me a phone text message when the item was delivered. The sun rose, crested over the country, and then set again, all without a delivery message. Then just after 6:30 pm I got the message that the item had arrived. I drove as fast as I could to the home where I have all of my deliveries made. There was no package.
I asked my sister and her husband. There was no package.
I looked in the mail box, around the backside of the shrubs and the hedges. There was no package
My heart sunk. I was scared that this whole effort was for nothing. I explained to my family what the hell I was looking for, and I vocalized being worried that they delivered the package to the wrong address.
That’s when the neighbor came walking around the corner carrying two packages, including one from Missouri. I thanked the man five times over the course of 8 seconds and inspected the box as the man disppeared. The box was closed, but the tape was loose and it was not clear if the contents were inside. I thought about my plan for a video, but I had to know — was My Moss really back with its rightful owner?
I scooted the poor-tape job to the side, threw the inner packing material on the car seat, and then ripped open one end of the bubble mailer inside the box. I pushed the slab toward the opening, and it was then that I again laid eyes on the color purple just as I had some 23-plus years before when I first unwrapped the original 1998 SP Authentic Randy Moss rookie. And moments later, for the first time in almost 13 years, I laid my hands upon the BGS slab that I sold. Sure, the case has some imperfections, a few scuffs here and there, but it was back in my hands and there are no plans to ever let it leave my collection again. I wish the slab could talk. I wish I knew how many people held it, looked at it in envy. I wish I knew how many people looked at the hand-written serial number on the reverse and opted not to add it their forever-collections.
Whatever the un-told story is, I’m thankful that all roads led back to my collection. I’m super appreciative that I get to share this story on my blog since I’d never written about the Moss. I’m also thrilled that I get to share with my son — with whom I collect these days — how Serious I am about having personal connections to my cards and it reinforces what I’ve been teaching him over the last year or two: When possible we keep the cards that we pull.
Leave a comment »