Wednesday, January 18, 2023

1993 is not yet complete

The Colorado Rockies joined Major League Baseball in 1993. I was nine years old, and I was growing up in a city that finally had a big league team.

Everyone was excited. There was memorabilia everywhere. Pennants, souvenir guidebooks, apparel, lapel pins, pocket schedules, and of course baseball cards.

I embraced it fully and without reservation.

There was another wave of enthusiasm when Coors Field opened two years later, another round of pennants and guidebooks and card sets and clipboards and little metal pails, mostly with the Coors Field logo.

The thing is, the novelty has worn off quite a bit, at least according to my fellow citizens. The Avalanche and the Broncos were the ones who won the championships, and the Rockies descended into mediocrity. Other than some brief periods of excitement, like the magical World Series run in 2007 and a pair of All-Star Games, the Rockies are more or less an afterthought in this city. The joke is that Coors Field is one of the best sports bars in Denver.

Be that as it may, what it does mean is that a majority of the Rockies memorabilia I see to this day dates back to that early period. I'm one of the few who still follows the Rockies, and my friends, family, and acquaintances know this. So when they run across some old Rockies object in their travels, they know I'm the guy who would appreciate it. And I do. But it's been a lot of seeing the same guidebooks, the same lapel pins, and very often the same baseball cards over the years. Not to say I don't enjoy it. I do. Nostalgia is a powerful force, no matter how many times you experience it.

Which makes it all the more curious when something new comes my way.

Most weeks, my fiancée and her dad will go to an overflow site for Arc Thrift Stores, a local thrift chain. They're mainly on the lookout for surplus books to share with underserved communities and Little Free Libraries, but once in a while they unearth a gem or two I'd like. A birding guidebook, a vintage Apollo-era book about space, etc.... Recently, she found a small white baseball card album hiding in one of the crates and snagged it for my collection.

You may have seen albums like this. It's significantly smaller than a binder; about 6" x 8", with eight or ten pages inside. Each page only has room for four cards, arranged in a square.

This particular album had a cover printed with the Rockies logo, the 1993 Donruss and Leaf logos, and the Rocky Mountain News logo, a defunct Denver-area daily newspaper. I had seen similar albums, but never one with that exact combination of promotional logos. The album itself was beyond saving, as the clear plastic pages (really more of a vinyl) had started to yellow. 

It did have about forty cards inside from three sets. 1993 Rockies Team Stadium Club, which is one of the more common relics from that era, 1991 Topps, which had no particular connection to the Rockies, and 1993 Donruss, matching the album cover.

As luck would have it, two of the Donruss cards are new to my collection.

1993 Donruss #38 Daryl Boston

Collectors in 1993 had to wait for Series 2 before they got Rockies and Marlins cards. But lots of players that were selected in the expansion draft appeared in Series 1 with their pre-draft teams. That went for Daryl Boston, selected by the Rockies from the New York Mets. He played a single season on the inaugural Rockies as a platoon outfielder, but before that he was a member of the White Sox and then the Mets. He was one of many players whose career ended with the Strike.

As a Met in 1992, he wore a black "S" memorial patch on his left sleeve, which we can see here. This was for the 1991 death of William Shea, the New York lawyer who tried to form a third Major League in the late 1950s. The Continental League was over before it began, ultimately leading to MLB expansion and the formation of the New York Mets. Shea Stadium was named for him.

1993 Donruss #341 Jim Tatum (RC)

The other new quasi-Rockies card in the album was of Jim Tatum, another expansion draftee from the Milwaukee Brewers, who were then in the American League. His position is listed as "IF", as he was a journeyman corner infielder during his career. He'd probably be a guy I wouldn't remember too well, except that he played on the inaugural Rockies, a team I watched and listened to as much as possible.

Tatum was no stranger to Mile High Stadium upon his arrival in 1993, as the Denver Zephyrs were the Triple-A affiliate of the Brewers. Other than his five-game call-up in September, he spent his 1992 season as one of the last Minor League players in Denver. He was a promising enough prospect to earn the coveted Rated Rookie logo on his Donruss card.

Also tucked away in a clear pocket on the inside cover were a pair of ticket stubs. These were for July 8th, 1993, a day game against the Florida Marlins, the expansion brethren of the Rockies. The holders of these season tickets got to sit in the rows behind the Rockies dugout on the first base side, watching the Rockies win 3-2. Dante Bichette had all three RBIs that game, putting on a winning performance in front of 56,807 fans.

Yes, 56,807 fans for a Thursday afternoon game. That's how you get to nearly 4.5 million fans in a season.

You're going to pay a lot more than $14 for a ticket like this today, but there is a coupon on the back for a $9.99 large 1-topping pizza at Domino's.

Not everything goes up in price.

It's getting more and more difficult to find cards new to my collection, especially from the overproduction era. I reached a point of diminishing returns a while ago, but it's not approaching zero just yet!


5 comments:

  1. I love finding ticket stubs tucked away among cards. It's fun to go back and see what happened on that day.

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  2. Me too. I have a lot of my old ones from before the Ticketmaster printout days.

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  3. I've only recently started to be interested in old tickets, the only problem is, apparently so has everyone else!

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