1988 Topps Big Card #79 Willie McGee

I loved Willie McGee and he was a great player and one of the rare non-power hitters of that era who could change the momentum of a game. He got clutch hits and could run the bases. Given that everyone he was playing against was on steroids, he maybe should be a Hall of Famer. I believe he won a couple of batting titles. He played for the Red Sox for a year or two, I was glad they picked him up. 

The best thing about him though was his facial expression, he always looked like he'd just smelled something bad.  

Burpsi Cola Poster Wacky Packages

Number 14 Burpsi Cola, get 48 belches to the ounce!

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #71 Willie McGee

I loved Willie McGee as a player. He was fast and could hit and field like an all-star. What I loved most about him though was that his facial expression always looked as if he smelled something really, really bad. Loved this guy.

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #72 Ozzie Smith

Ozzie Smith, The Wizard, really was an amazing baseball player to watch. You may not ever see a better shortstop than Ozzie Smith in his prime.

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #53 Orel Hershiser

Orel Hershiser was a great pitcher and is a decent broadcaster and has one of the best baseball names in the last 50 years in my humble opinion.

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #31 Mark McGwire

Here's a controversial one! Mark McGwire, the year before this card came out, set the American League rookie home run record. He and Jose Canseco were "The Bash Brothers." Then McGwire was hurt all the time, and then in late 1990s he became the most feared power hitter in the history of the game, until Barry Bonds became The Hulk and all the home run records fell.

McGwire and Sosa still piss me off. I remember waking up in the fall of 1998 with all kinds of things going on in my life, but wondering if McGwire and Sosa had homered the night before. I was excited for the home run duel going on. Baseball was awesome again. The Roger Maris single-season home run record fell that year to, what we later learned was these cheating, lying douchebags.

To be fair, when they started juicing, Major League Baseball wasn't doing anything about it. None of us knew what steroids could do for player performance. But they denied and denied and denied that they had taken anything to help them hit baseballs so far. I trusted them and they were lying to me.

"Lying, cheating, hurting, that's all you seem to do." -Led Zeppelin, Your Time is Gonna Come. 

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #37 George Bell

Jorge Antonio Bell Mathey, better known as George Bell, is a Dominican former left fielder and American League MVP in Major League Baseball who played 12 seasons for the Toronto Blue Jays, Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox.

1988 Topps Big Card #27 Ozzie Guillen

Ozzie Guillen was always a firey player and he was even more interesting as a manager. In this ultra PC era it will be interesting to see if anyone ever gives in another change to manage! (He last managed, the Marlins, in 2012). 

Under his leadership the White Sox won the World Series in 2005, their first pennant since 1959 and their first World Series win since 1917.

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #47 John Franco

Franco had a long career as a relief pitcher for the Reds and Mets and maybe someone else. He was a good pitcher.

I believe he got into some trouble for some alleged ties to organized crime, but then again, our current President has those also and can't pitch nearly as well.

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #4 DeWayne Buice

I mentioned this a while ago when I started scanning this stack of cards and posting them here- I love "Leaders" and "Future Stars" sets and "Diamond Kings" type card sets because you look at them thirty years later (these cards are thirty years old!) and wonder "Who the Heck was DeWayne Buice?"

So I googled him. He only played 2 and a half seasons in the majors, BUT he happened to be at the right place at the right time and literally walked into a deal where he became a partner in the Upper Deck Baseball Card company at the peak of the baseball card craze in the late 1980s. 

He made WAY more money not really doing much for them than he ever made in baseball. The world we live in is just crazy. 

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #16 Danny Tartabull

Danny Tartabull. Son of a major leaguer and dead beat Dad. He once called the police because his car was broken into and was arrested. He was a fugitive at the time because he owed $270,000 in child support according to this article

1988 Topps Big Cards #57 Kevin Mitchell

Here's another Topps Big Card. I really like the graphics on the back. This is another set where Topps didn't even try to include all the players, just the "stars" and the players who might soon become stars.

I always liked Kevin Mitchell as a player, and thinking back on his career I remembered a barehanded catch he made in the outfield. I googled him, and that catch is one of the things specifically mentioned in his Wikipedia!

1988 Topps Minis #14 Bret Saberhagen

1988 Topps Minis #14 Bret Saberhagen.

“Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip-over jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racingyacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.” -Ernest Hemingway, the Sun Also Rises.

Sorry, wrong Bret. That one had two T's.

This one pitched for the Royals. New York Mets, Colorado Rockies, and Boston Red Sox from 1984 through 1999, and a comeback in 2001.

1988 Topps Big Cards #35 Candy Maldonado

I like this particular set of baseball cards because of the little cartoons on the back. They were colorful and fun. The cards are called "big" because they were slightly larger than normal sized baseball cards.

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #56 Andres Galarraga

This is a 1988 Topps Mini Leaders #56 Andres Galarraga. As I think I said a while ago I had a whole stack of odd cards that don't really fit anywhere, (literally in this case, this is a set of "mini" baseball cards. They were hanging out in a shoe box in my closet.

I like this card because the team Andres "Big Cat" Galarraga played for here no longer exists. The Montreal Expos became (I think) the Washington Nationals. I was lucky enough to go to a couple of games in Montreal before they moved. 

1989 Topps Stickers

Here's another of Topps stickers. On the front (the sticker) we have Detroit Tigers great Lou Whitaker and on the back Seattle Mariner Harold Reynolds.

1990 Topps Mini Leaders #70 Barry Bonds

How this skinny young Pittsburgh Pirate became the bulked-up fearsome home run king is one of the key stories in the sport from the "Steroid Era."

Love him or hate him, the guy could hit.

1990 Topps Stickers

Topps stickers were an interesting thing. I don't know if they ever became popular, maybe they are still around. The idea was that you collect all these stickers and then stick them in the right place in a baseball yearbook you could buy. Then, with the stickers gone, the backing of the card that formerly held the stickers is still a collectible card. Surely whoever came up with this at Topps got a promotion.

Here's an example;
The stickers are Kevin Elster of the New York Mets and Tom Gordon of the Kansas City Royals. The card on the back is Carlton Fisk, Hall of Famer with the Chicago White Sox at the time.

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #29 Dave Righetti

Here's the front and back of another Topps mini card from 1988. Dave "Rags" Righetti. I don't know if the scanner needed a wipe down or if the card itself has some issues, but it looked pretty good to the naked eye and yet looks like it has some issues in the scan.

1988 Topps Mini Leaders #67 Mike Schmidt

#metoo

I hope his wife cuts him off from sex for a year for calling her "his dishwasher" on national television. Or better yet, takes half his $$$$ and leaves.

Actually, that's not true, I really don't give a Schmidt about this guy, and depending on his relationship with his wife what he said was probably no big deal, but I know my friends in Philly love this guy so I like to poke them. :-)

In case you want more of the Mike Schmidt Me Too story, here it is.