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Card Review: 9.5
When I was around 8 or 9 years old, probably in about 1989, my mother drew me a detailed replica of the 1988 Topps All-Star card using colored pencils. It was probably about 11'' x 17'' in size, though I remember it to be bigger, and I believe drawn on a heavy stock water color paper. My mother had been a design major at Syracuse and was (is) very talented when it comes to these things. At the time, all the neighborhood kids had discovered a store at Metro Center Mall in Phoenix that sold large posters of MLB stars. Everyone on the block was getting a poster of their favorite player. Even my younger brother got in on the act, proudly pinning a large Mark McGwire poster to our shared bedroom wall.
So while the likes of Don Mattingly, Darryl Strawberry, Will Clark, Eric Davis, and Ryne Sandberg were being displayed across the rooms of kids all over Moon Valley, I was left out in the cold as Tim Wallach was not among the players offered for sale. My mother, taking pity on me, took it upon herself to do the best she could with a homemade effort. Initially, I didn't care for it. I thought it was embarrassing. Reluctantly I hung it on my wall. To my surprise, not only was I not mocked for it, the other kids liked it when they saw it. Liked it so much in fact that my mother received multiple calls from the parents offering to pay her to draw similar ones. She declined, but the homemade poster became a source of pride.
I don't know what happened to that drawing. Its been lost to time, along with my brothers Mark McGwire poster and every other item to ever adorn our bedroom walls in the 1980's. I hadn't thought about it in years, and very well may have never thought of it again, if this Andy Friedman Shoebox Treasures card hadn't appeared on eBay. When I saw it for the first time, the memory of that home drawn "poster" immediately came back to me.
I had no prior knowledge about this set, or Tim Wallach's inclusion in it. When the first one of these popped up on eBay, I impulsively bought it (at an inexcusably high price, as I've gone from paying $6 to $1 for them). I should have done a quick google search, as I sort of assumed it must be an insert, but instead I just said "take my money now." Turns out it's just a normal base card in a set.
The set is comprised of 100 cards, pulled from between 1952 and present, reimagined in water colors by an artist named Andy Friedman. I am extremely pleased that Wallach was included in the checklist, and with the choice of card to recreate. Andy Friedman clearly has good taste.
There also appears to be about 20-30 variations of this card of different individually numbered scarcity and sparkles. I've added a few, but haven't looked into the exact number of variations that are out there. Given the prices I've seen on some of them, I don't think tracking them all down will be a huge priority, unless something changes. I did a search online and saw boxes of this product going for $80, with 7 cards per pack and only 4 packs for box. I'm a stranger to "high end" releases, and I would call those prices high end.
My understanding is that the collector's who like that kind of product also like lots of numbered variations, so it makes sense there would be a lot of variations. Given how much I like the base card, there could be 200 variations and I wouldn't mind. It's cards like this one that remind me why I collect in the first place and why I'm still collecting cards now, nearly 45 years after opening my first packs.
Number of this card in my collection: 6
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