Hobby History: The Great Kevin Maas Chase of 1990
From a collecting perspective, the 1989 season had it all: the debut of Upper Deck; rookie cards of Ken Griffey, Jr., Todd Zeile, and Jerome Walton; and of course F*ck Face! In fact, I'm going to go ahead and declare 1989 the single most fun year to collect baseball cards in the history of the Hobby. Granted almost none of the cards held their value into the present day, but we sure had a blast chasing them!
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Come 1990, the only thing collectors could be certain of was a letdown. As with most movies, there was just no chance the sequel could compare. I'm not saying Ben McDonald and Frank Thomas were no-names (okay, so maybe Frank Thomas was a no-name!), and I suppose there was that one silly card of a football player, but they just didn't generate the same buzz as the previous year's top cards. Then something crazy happened.
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A Rob Lowe lookalike in pinstripes appeared out of nowhere to become baseball's greatest slugger. Ever. His first career bomb came appropriately enough on July 4, but the fireworks hardly stopped there. Just 77 at bats into his major league career, he had a record 10 home runs. Pro-rated to 600 at bats, that would be 78 home runs! Carry that out 15 seasons, and we're looking at 1,170 career home runs, drug-free! These projections being certainties, there was only one question mark when it came to this home run cheat code: Did he have cards?!
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Fortunately for collectors, the answer was a resounding YES. Even better, he had ROOKIE CARDS...lots of them! Kevin Maas rookies could be found on the cheap in the year's low-end offerings from Fleer and Score or at a premium in the more exclusive Upper Deck and Leaf releases. Sadly, both Topps and Donruss managed to whiff on the Yankee slugger, the result being that you couldn't give their packs away in August 1990. (UPDATE: You still can't.)
Saying this as someone who'd ripped a lot of packs in my day, the summer of 1990 made the rest of my collecting career look amateur in comparison. It seemed like every other day I was splitting a box of Upper Deck with my roommate, never mind that I barely had money for rent. But that's what credit cards were for, right? Plus, these packs were basically free money, at least as long as Maas kept hitting dingers. Not to mention, don't most players get even better after their first month or two?
Well, by now you know the ending. I more or less lost my shirt faster than a "Maas Top" in the right field bleachers. I spent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on these cards, and today I have almost nothing to show for it. Even still, I'm going to call it a huge win. After all, think about it. When you spend a fortune on an awesome vacation, nobody asks you how much you made. When you go to a fancy restaurant and enjoy a fine steak, nobody asks you what it's worth 35 years later.
Somehow in this Hobby we have become conditioned to think about our card purchases as investments, the result being we define success by whether our collections went up or down in value. Why not instead look at them more like vacations or steak? If we thoroughly enjoyed the experience, we did fantastic. Full stop. For my part, I had an absolute blast pulling each and every one of my Kevin Maas cards, so much so that while I still consider 1989 the GOAT collecting year, I have no doubt 1990 brought us collecting's greatest summer.
Jason A. Schwartz is a collectibles expert whose work can be found regularly at SABR Baseball Cards, Hobby News Daily, and 1939Bruins.com. His collection of Hank Aaron baseball cards and memorabilia is currently on exhibit at the Atlanta History Center, and his collectibles-themed artwork is on display at the Honus Wagner Museum and PNC Park.