The Beginning Of My Obsession
I have been collecting sports cards since the big boom of baseball cards in the late 1980’s. I would religiously attend weekly sports card shows. Back in the day, Beckett’s Baseball Cards magazine (and there was only Beckett’s Baseball Card magazine before the other Beckett magazines) would list all the shows in my area and I would try to attend as many as possible. My hobby was hand-collating sets through buying boxes of cards and breaking them down. When I had originally started collecting cards, there were three companies – Topps, Donruss and Fleer and mostly baseball. Fleer did have one basketball set and Topps did have one football and one hockey set other than baseball sets. With the emergence of Upper Deck and other companies (some failing financially and do not presently exist), an increased interest in sports other than baseball and finally multiple sets by the same companies (i.e., Topps, Topps Finest, Topps Stadium Club, etc.), there was a plethora of cards being produced. Yes folks, there was a time when there was only one rookie card for a player!
While attending sports card shows, I had noticed a lot of autographed sports memorabilia. I remember collecting autographs on game programs and baseball caps as a child at Fenway Park and McCoy Stadium (home of the Pawtucket Red Sox) and how much fun that was!
One day back in the early 1990’s, while trying to make some sort of organization with all of the 1,000s of cards I had, I took out a couple of 1988 Topps Chet Lemon cards. Mr. Lemon wasn’t a major star with the Detroit Tigers but was a consistent day-to-day baseball player and I had seen him play at Fenway Park a few times.
I drafted a letter to him and sought out the Detroit Tigers’ team address. The letter, a couple of cards and a SASE were sent off. After a few weeks, one of the cards came back autographed and the thrill of collecting autographs came back! Unfortunately, the Fall Classic was beginning and the baseball season was winding down and I didn’t think that the teams would forward mail to player’s off-season addresses.
Over the next couple of years, I would send out a few autograph requests to a handful of players each year. I received a few back here and there but never really considering it as a hobby as I was still trying to complete hand-collated sets. Finally, I knew it was hopeless in trying to keep up with all of the companies, sets and different sports. I ended up with a bunch of cards but never able to complete sets. Some of my friends had decided to give up the hobby completely.
In the fall of 1994, after reading several baseball card magazine articles about collecting autographs through the mail, I decided to send out a few more than I usually did and to different sports. By sending out to different sports, there was no real “downtime” since different sports start up at different times of the year. The most important aspect to my collecting started in that I had begun to keep track of my collection. With a bit of computer skills, I was able to keep track of everything that I sent, everything that I received and even some statistics! Hence, the beginning of The Autographed Sports Cards Connection!
