[BillyCoxDodgers3B]

Doug,

As I've written elsewhere, I was always a "completest" collector: I wanted an autograph of every man to ever play in the Majors. While a complete collection is an impossible undertaking, I made very strong headway.

By the 1990's, the new players' signatures were becoming truly disgusting. Not as bad as the garbage from today's kids, but horrid enough that I finally said "Enough!". Sometime during that decade, I made the decision to stop wanting the modern autographs altogether and set a target end date with all the year 2000 debuts. That year had a very defining "The End" feeling, so a perfect finishing point. Coincidentally, I also lost any and all interest in following baseball around the same time the autographs started getting too nasty to enjoy. The 1994 strike was the nail in the coffin there.