On June 20, 1995, at approximately 5:15 p.m., about 20 million Americans stopped what they were doing, looked up and decided they weren't baseball card collectors any more.
OK, that's not what really happened, but the hobby did experience a serious drop-off around that time. While many people blamed (and still blame) the decline for the 1994-95 strike, i've always attributed it to:
1) Too many damn sets;
2) High pack prices. A 50-cent pack in 1992 was a buck minimum in '95. Were you making twice was much in '95 as you were three years earlier?
(In all fairness, you can make a pretty good argument that thanks to the interwebs, there's never been a better time to be a collector than right here, right now.)
Which brings us to Upper Deck's base-brand 1995 Collector's Choice set. It's a nice little set, but the player selection mostly reflects the fractured 1994 season. If you were sick of the Boys of Butch Hobson and wanted something with the latest trades/rookies/free agent signings, you had to turn to one of the Deck's pricer offerings.
Let's fix that.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the damnedest Red Sox team to ever reach the postseason. You hear about teams practicing rent-a-player? The '95 Sox were rent-a-team. So many former stars and former semi-stars shuffled through town that year, you couldn't keep track of them even with a scorecard. The Sox under then-GM Dan Duquette always had three teams -- one coming, one going and one playing -- but his ways seemed to take on goofy proportions in '95-96.
So here are some blink-and-you'll-miss-em '95 Sox who finally get a Collector's Choice card, plus Tim Wakefield, whose extraordinary 17-year run with the Sox started that year. Chris Donnels, we hardly knew ye.
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