A trip down memory lane with those old Upper Deck baseball cards
It was 1989 and the word was out that the new hot baseball card was being produced in Orange County.
Upper Deck, a glossy, sharp looking card with beautiful crisp photos, had the card industry abuzz with anticipation. This was not the old Topps cards of my youth, the ones with those awful pink bubble gum sticks.
No, this was it. Modern cards that were sure to be worth dugouts of cash.
I could hardly wait.
I had been re-introduced to card collecting a few years earlier when I met Will Davis, who owned a baseball card shop in downtown Fullerton where I lived at the time. This new Upper Deck Card Company was in Yorba Linda, next to Fullerton.
I knew a guy who knew a guy and we were able to go to the warehouse after closing hours and load up a few cases. Cases! Baseball card Gold. What color did I want the new Corvette to be?
Now, here we are a few decades later and I still have some of those Upper Deck cards in the garage. OK, more than a few. I really don’t want to look.
Is there a Griffey Jr. rookie card? That would be worthwhile to search for. It could go for maybe $2,000 and maybe even up to $4,000. Wait, wait, I’ll be right back.
Other rookie cards that might have some value included Dale Murphy, Gary Sheffield. It would help if they were Hall of Famers, but alas, they are not.
But mostly the industry cooled off after ’89 and the cases of cards remain unopened, stored next to my old golf clubs and other once cherished items.
Baseball card collecting can be addictive. I bet there are plenty of Valley residents who collected them as kids, stored them in the top of their closets or under their bed only to have mom throw them out when you went to college.
Oh, I just wish I had that Mickey Mantle rookie card that I swear I had back when I was more interested in baseball than girls.
We collected cards in those days not for any financial value, only for trade value. “I’ll give you three Jerry Priddys for one Yogi Berra”.
No, the cards were not supposed to be put in a vault for our retirement (little did we know). They were only to bring us joy when we completed the whole starting lineup of the Brooklyn Dodgers or opened up a pack and the first card was Ted Williams or Stan Musial.
And there’s this: The cards, of course, depicted the stars of the era. They were all young, full of promise and excitement long before injuries and age forced their skills to slowly vanish. And their baseball cards seemingly disappeared, too, not even worth the price of that lost pink bubble gum.
Well, I could be wrong, of course, about how valuable some of those cards became. That ’51 Mantle rookie card was auctioned off last year for $12.5 million. Gulp. Back to the garage.
Pete Donovan is a Palm Desert resident and former Los Angeles Times sports reporter. He can be reached at pwdonovan22@yahoo.com
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Upper Deck baseball cards: A trip down memory lane
