"My love affair with cardboard began in the fall of 1986. I was only in first grade and had a stack of vintage Topps baseball cards that my dad had given to me. While on the bus ride home from school, I learned that another kid had a 1986 Gary Carter Topps All Star card –the catcher and star of the hottest team in N.Y. at the time, the Magic Mets! I told him to take whatever he wanted. He took his time, finally choosing a Craig Nettles, a Willie Randolph and one or two others (he was a Yankees fan), and the Carter was all mine. Now I was hooked!"
"My first real baseball memory was the 1988 World Series when Kirk Gibson hit a game winning home run off of Dennis Eckersley - we all know the story, no need to rehash it yet again! However, I didn't really attach myself as a fan for a specific team until the next year - the "Earthquake Series". The Oakland A's had made it to the World Series for the second year in a row! The tragic events from the earthquake are what anyone does (and should) first think of when they think of the '89 Series, but it also helped pull my attention to a team and player I've yet to let go of.
The A's won the 1989 World Series and I found a nice comfortable bandwagon to jump on and I never hopped off. After becoming more familiar with the team I quickly latched on to Jose Canseco as my favorite player. How could I not? The year before he made history becoming the first member of the 40/40 club, was unamimously voted MVP, and was arguably the best player in the entire sport. I started collecting baseball cards - as seemingly every 9-12 year old did at that time - and pulled together any Canseco card I could find."
The A's won the 1989 World Series and I found a nice comfortable bandwagon to jump on and I never hopped off. After becoming more familiar with the team I quickly latched on to Jose Canseco as my favorite player. How could I not? The year before he made history becoming the first member of the 40/40 club, was unamimously voted MVP, and was arguably the best player in the entire sport. I started collecting baseball cards - as seemingly every 9-12 year old did at that time - and pulled together any Canseco card I could find."
"Jeff Frye? Who? These aren’t uncommon responses when I tell dealers at a card show or shop who I’m looking to trade for or buy. He isn’t a well known name and he wasn’t a star. He played 8 seasons in the majors with the Rangers, Red Sox, Blue Jays, and Rockies primarily as a gritty, league average or so second baseman. This isn’t exactly a profile that gets you out of the commons box at the local card shop but he is still one of my favorite players of all time."
This site is a community of Juan Gonzalez collectors with an extensive checklist, with images, that the community builds collaboratively. It also has a forum for posts, discussions and trades as well as a collection tracking system that has widespread use, with seventeen collectors with more than 1000 unique Juan Gonzalez cards.
With more than 3,000 unique cards - all of which are pictured on the site - the MarkGrace.com collection is the most complete collection assembled featuring the 4 time All-Star and 1990's hits leader Mark Grace. Brad, a life-long Cubs fan, has collected Mark Grace since 1989 and has maintained the website bearing his name since 2002. The website is an excellent resource for 90's collectors to identify many of the era's rarest issues.
A fair amount of cards from my site have ended up in Vince's collection, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to what he has accumulated in his quest to acquire and document all of Mattingly's cards. If you are a Mattingly collector, in all likelihood you have already visited his site. If you haven't, what are you waiting for!
"After Scott made it to the Bigs is when my collection really took off. I used to save up my lunch money so I could hit up the local card shop to see how many Scott Rolen cards I could add to my collection. Back then, it was a pretty slow grind. Fast forward several years with the internet growing in popularity, especially with auction sites like eBay and forums like FreedomCardBoard, and my collection began to take on a life of it's own. I was able to add new cards to my collection on a regular basis and my collection quickly outgrew the binder."