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