What was your first set?

[deweyinthehall]

Pure nostalgia time.

I knew little to nothing about baseball when, in early 1978, Scholastic Books sent out their annual fishing net to my 4th grade class. I subscribed to Dynamite Magazine, and in their Happy Birthday Mad! edition that spring, I found a panel of baseball cards stapled into the spine: Darrell Porter, Cecil Cooper, Tony Perez and Al Oliver. I'd never heard of any of them or their teams (for decades I would have sworn only 4 cards were in the issue - I must have quickly discarded the dupes), but I was hooked. I quickly found out you could actually buy packs of these things in the store (I sort of new that already - the previous fall a couple older friends gave me all their Star Wars cards because they'd discovered the 1977 Topps Baseball set).

On my way with my mom to a doctor's appointment, she stopped and bought me a wax pack. To this day I still recall some of the cards it contained - Jose Baez (#311 - for some reason I thought it was the Maine Mariners, until my father corrected me), Sparky Lyle Record Breaker (#2), Rick Manning (#11), Luis Tiant (#345) and George Hendrick (#30).

Because it was my first set, and almost all the players and most of the teams were unknown to me (I grew up in Connecticut, so I knew the Red Sox, Yankees, and a bit about the Reds and the Dodgers), each card made an impression - I can still remember anecdotes about so many (got Pete Rose in a pack driving someplace with my dad - "that's a good card to have" he said).

To this day, paging through my album, I can still identify those I got in packs versus those I had to rely on the doubles in friends' collections for. In some odd way, the cards I had to really hunt for still stand out to visually as somehow "different" as I look at the set.

I can remember the first cards I pulled of each team (Yankees - Ken Clay and Ken Holtzman) as well as the last cards I needed to complete each team (Blue Jays - Otto Velez, Alvis Woods).

I ripped through wax, cello and rack packs, but there were still some cards I could never find. My Dirty Dozen, those that were the most tough to find, were:

1. Mariners Team (not the Maine Mariners, remember...)
2. Checklist 485-605
3. Mike Jorgensen
4. Bo McLaughlin
5. Ed Kirkpatrick
6. Reggie Cleveland
7. Bill Virdon
8. Ed Armbrister
9. Glenn Burke
10. Dave Garcia
11. Rookie 2nd Basemen (Perlozzo, Whitaker, Iorg, Oliver)
12. Mike Paxton

Mind you, I had never seen or heard of any of these guys - had no idea what they looked like. The final hold out was the Angels' Gary Ross. Over the course of the summer and into the fall, I managed to find even the dirty dozen from friends but never could lay eyes on Ross.

Then my dad showed me a magazine he got when he went to a Yankees game with a Renata Galasso add - the entire set, in mint condition, for less than $15?? It took me a while to talk them into it but my parents let me order it. After long delays, we received it in early 1979, but they sent the wrong set! They sent me the blasted 1979 set! More delays, but I finally got the right box and I finally got Gary Ross.

Of course, there was the fascination of learning there were older cards out there (you mean this isn't the first set they made?? Why is Mike Torrez with the A's and who's Dick Bosman?) and new cards when the new year rolled around (you mean they do a new set EVERY year? What's Pete Broberg doing on an A's card?!? who's Carney Lansford?).

I was hooked.

I would love to hear others' stories about their first sets - I imagine there's a story like this out there for every Topps set issued.