Mike Greenwell. Mike Fucking Greenwell. No player is as synonymous with the late 80's baseball card bubble like Mike Greenwell. He is to baseball cards what Global Crossing or Pets.com was to the stock market at the end of the last millennium. All sizzle and no steak. And a fucking Red Sox player to boot. Sure, he had a modestly successful career, and he managed to hoodwink Boston into paying him $21 million from 1990 to 1996. But his 1987 rookie card was among the most overpriced of the decade, topping out at $6. I vividly remember this because I purchased six rookie cards at a bargain basement price of $4.50 each that year. I probably felt just like the same suckers who bought Yahoo! for $100/share in early 2000.The Greenwell story is 1987 in a nutshell. The baseball card market exploded faster than Jose Canseco's biceps. Everybody hopped in and young, foolish collectors like myself started calculating paper gains in their pubescent heads. The crooked pricing catalogs I naively trusted were just leading me down the primrose path.
But we shouldn't let a schlub with a porn stache overshadow what was a pretty entertaining season. In the alleged "juiced ball" year, the upstart Twins, led by a short, fat man, a tall, fat man, an old man who owned the coolest shirt ever (see below), a Johnny Wad impostor and Steve Carlton's corpse, once again made losers of the speedy St. Louis Cardinals in a thrilling seven-game World Series.
(Is this the best shirt ever? Seriously, look at it. And remember that it came a generation before the ironic T-shirts that faux hipsters annoyingly wear all over town these days. The best part is that you can tell by looking at the neck that it's well-worn and beat up. Clearly, this was in the rotation for Bert for quite some time. If this isn't enough to get him into the Hall, I don't know what is.)
And let's not forget those who reaped the rewards of the juiced ball season. Juan Samuel and Wade Boggs each belted over 30 HRs, and the AL home run leaders included neer-do-wells like Mike Pagliarulo, Larry Parrish, Wally Joyner and Matt Nokes. Andre Dawson put up monster stats and George Bell and Jesse Barfield, along with Dawson, propelled the sales of jheri curl in Chicago and Canada.
To recap, here are the rankings to date:#10 - 1986
#9 - 1988
#8 - 1982
#7 - 1980
#6 - 1985
The cards themselves were pretty cool in 1987. The faux wood design looked as cool on the cards as they did on my dad's 1986 maroon Dodge Caravan. The color schemes matched the team uniforms, the logo was cool and there was nothing else to get in the way. Simple stuff. We had a strange crop of rookies this year. Topps was kind of enough to designate the top rookies with a gold chalice, so we knew we were supposed to be excited when we got one of those cards (Danny Tartabull! Sweet!). They made things more confusing by also including a set of "Future Stars" players, and they nailed those players (looking at you, Dave Magadan). Unfortunately, there were manager cards in this set. And manager cards suck.
Surprisingly, this set, which many have called iconic for being the set that lured them into collecting, barely cracks the top half of our ranking for the decade. But too much sizzle and too few quality rookies doom the set. Stay tuned for the top 4 sets, coming at you (hopefully) before the end of the World Series. This year's World Series. Honest. In chronological order, the years left are 1981, 1983, 1984 and 1989. Thrilling stuff, I know.
P.S - Bonus card inclusion to remind Mets fans what a shit-show their franchise has been the last couple years. Sorry I couldn't find a picture of him shirtless, taunting 19 year-old Dominicans.
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