I was ten years old and obsessed with baseball card collecting in 1989 when Upper Deck debuted a new set of baseball cards. Up to that point there were three card companies: Topps, Donruss, and Fleer. Each set had their iconic cards, who among us can forget the 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco rookie card when Canseco sat in the dugout, wispy mustache and all, staring up at the camera surrounded by a strange blue laser background. Or the Bo Jackson Future Stars card in the 1987 Topps set, the one with the inexplicable wooden margin, where Jackson drops back to field a fly ball, blue Kansas City jersey tight across his chest, "Future star" scrawled along the bottom of the card green to red in color. At some point in this column, perhaps I'll count down the top baseball cards of my youth, but for now this column is about one card, the holy grail of sports cards of my youth, the Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck card, the number freaking one card in the company's history.
Let's be clear the debut of Upper Deck baseball cards was, to baseball cards, the equivalent of vaccination to the medical profession, a truly jawdropping technological accomplishment that revolutionized the industry. The cards had holograms! Vivid photos, crisp printing, they smelled good. In fact, there's probably a definite connection between the kids who sat with the cards underneath their noses inhaling the new baseball card smell and the kids who would later go on to become coke fiends. But most importantly of all, Griffey Jr. belonged to us. He was only 19. With his beaming buckteeth, he looked so young in his picture. Just a few more years, we all thought, until we too could stare out from underneath our own Major League baseball cap, clutching a bat, our dreams were all so close to becoming a reality.
Even if, you know, my own major league dreams were already fading. At ten, I was the fifth or sixth best player on my little league team. That wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't of major league quality. That same summer I'd asked my dad the question that every kid asks their dad at some point, "Why didn't you play in the major leagues?"
After all, my dad was big and strong and could hit fly balls for me to shag high into the sky. What's more, I'd never seen him make an error fielding a ground ball with his ancient brown glove. The kind of ancient glove that we all -- ten year olds who all wished we were older than we were -- aspired to own. The kind of glove that had been through diamond wars, caught line drives for decades, held the dirt of a thousand baseball fields embedded into the cracking leather. Buying a new black glove in 1989 -- with a sewn in palm autograph by Daryl Strawberry back in the days before he found Jesus and declined as a player -- I'd wanted my glove to have the character of my dad's. Fit my hand perfectly, appear to be an extension of my own palm, scoop up ground balls as if the glove had a mind of its own, muscle memory meets leather.
Already my dad had taught me how to season my new glove using flaxseed oil, an old ball tied into the pocket of the glove, all wrapped around with a tight belt and left on the counter overnight, new to old by dawn, the photosynthesis of a baseball glove.
So it was, that I asked my father, sage of the baseball diamond, why he hadn't played in the major leagues.
And he said, "Because I wasn't good enough. You have to be one in a million."
My dad was 44 by then, but he was tall, nearly 6'4" with long arms and legs, a big man larger than all the other dads who my friends called, "The Strongest Man in the World," when we were young. If he couldn't play in the major leagues, why should I think I could? Especially if I was only the fifth or sixth best player on my own little league team. If the odds of making the major leagues were one in a million, what were the odds of five kids from the same little league team in Goodlettsville, Tennessee making the major leagues? (Incidentally, of these four kids who were definitely better than me, one got a college scholarship to Tennessee, the other to Alabama. The kid who went to Alabama went on to pitch in the minor leagues four seasons before an injury ended his career. So two college scholarships and one minor leaguer was pretty amazing given the odds. No wonder we won the little league title that year). The odds were stacked against me and even at ten I could see that my baseball career probably wasn't going to end with great fanfare. Or, perhaps, any fanfare at all.
Which brings me back to the Upper Deck 1989 baseball card set, the transcendent moment when we all opened those shiny packages and realized what baseball cards could be. What we could be, even if most of us already, kind of, in the back of our minds already had niggling doubts about what we really could be. And that Griffey, Jr. card, what a wager, what a reckless and amazing gamble that paid off a billion percent for Upper Deck. To pick one 19 year old, even one as highly touted as Griffey Jr., and have him become the greatest non-steroid using player of his generation. The natural, the pure one in a sea of fakes. For him to be the first card in the first set? The odds against this selection working out were mind-boggling. That Griffey, Jr. whose preternatural gifts all left us jaw-agape in wonder, would become what he would become was nothing more than a fevered dream in the Upper Deck marketing department. Here was a player that impressed our fathers, a player who was better than his own father, a player who would be our own gift, a player that we would grow up alongside, all crystallized in that one frozen image on a paper card when he stares into the camera with his Coming to America jheri curl and buckteeth and turtleneck and gold necklace -- every ballplayer had a gold necklace then and so did you -- all of it with a wide-brimmed hat that looked just a little too small.
As if the hat itself couldn't contain the boundless future that lay ahead. A long row of games where your own glove would become sodden with water and sunflower seeds and sunshine, and the dirt of a thousand fields and eventually the kids would stop building sandcastles in the dirt in the dugout and if the ball went to the outfield it wouldn't always be a hit. Catchnig a fly ball was, of course, in those days the little league equivalent of meeting Alyssa Milano, a half-baked dream that was every bit as likely. But the promise and potential held out by the card was that one tantalizing day we too could be as big as our fathers and as talented and as good and that the dream would go on and on like a baseball game doubleheader on a summer night that never ended.
That was the promise held in the Ken Griffey, Jr. 1989 Upper Deck card.
All you have to do is take yourself back to that moment, that time, when opening a baseball card package was the height of summer's excitement, when there was truly nothing better in the world..
Look at this card.
There is a strong argument to be made that this card is the greatest baseball card of all time. pic.twitter.com/t0N2W67wZA
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) July 24, 2016
It's the window into the soul of my generation of sports fans.
