Arkansas Times

A Boy Named Sooie

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I'll Trade you a Plastic Baggie Full of Captain Crunch for a Bo Jackson Future Star

http://www.mentalfloss.com/quiz/uploads/1207660347623.jpg
Heartbreaking, and not only for the unrealized potential.

Remember those big plastic clear things that screwed together over your treasured Bash Brothers baseball card?  Ah, lost innocence.  I used to run a regular racket on my fellow middle schoolers--a Becket under my arm and a mouthful of stale bubble gum, flipping through my over-stuffed binder like a king--but I never managed to get that coveted Ken Griffey, Jr.  Upper Deck rookie card.  Little did we know then, gushing over the slick-looking upstart that made the '87 Topps woodgrain set look oh-so-quaint, that the birth of Upper Deck was the beginning of the end for baseball card collectors. 

A young kid at Pecanland Mall down in Monroe, LA parlayed a dinky kiosk call Cards, Coins, & Collectibles into a real-deal walk-in storefront in little over a year, I slobbered over every new ultra-collectible, gold-trimmed, puffy card, and adults began slowly and methodically screwing everything up.  (I recently saw a good friend--a brilliant, fifty-something professor of literature--try to unload five complete sets of '91 Upper Decks at a garage sale.  He couldn't give those things away.)  What has me on this jaunt down a memory lane littered with creased cardboard rectangles?  Because I noticed an article the subject of which is so intuitive and resonant that I wrote this entry before even reading it.  Now, let's see what Slate has to say.

UPDATE: This guy lost me right here:

Despite Griffey's illustrious career—some might call it disappointing relative to all the hype....

Sure, this is just a throwaway line, almost literally a parenthetical, but he's way off base.  Ken Griffey, Jr.'s career is nothing less than a tragedy.

___

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