1988
Early in the year, for no reason, I badly wanted to buy a pack of baseball
cards. It wasn't even baseball season, so I have no idea why this desire occurred.
My Dad took me to a drugstore in Castroville, California (Artichoke capital
of the world) and I got a 1988 Topps rack pack. I cherry picked one with a
Tony LaRussa card showing, since the A's were (and are) my favorite team.
I consider this to be my "first card". All through the year me and
my best friend Gabriel bought pack after pack of '88 Topps looking for the
holy grail: Jose Canseco. My friend was the first to get one, but I eventually
got one, as well. Sadly, the excitement of that year was somewhat dampened
by Kirk Gibson. I still hate him.
1989
The previous year I had only bought Topps cards, since that is what my Dad
remembered buying when he was a kid. In 1989 I expanded my collecting horizons
to include other brands. I went to my first card show at the Ramada Inn in
Salinas, California, and bought my first complete set, 1989 Topps. I also
bought my first Beckett at Star Market in Salinas, the February issue with
Mike Greenwell on the cover. Throughout the year my friend Gabriel and I continued
to chase Canseco and McGwire cards. The highlight of 1989 was going to the
huge Labor Day weekend show at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The lowlight
was not buying a single pack of Upper Deck because I thought they were a rip-off
at $1.
1990
1990 was a fairly uneventful year. I had a job as a paperboy early in the
year and overloaded on that years cards. When you only buy four brands, they
get old real fast. I continued to stay away from higher-end stuff like Upper
Deck and Leaf, and lost a lot of interest in cards towards the end of the
year. My family moved from Salinas to Madera (near Fresno) in November, so
I lost a lot of my friends that collected, as well. Late 1990/early 1991 was
the time that I came the closest to giving up on cards.
1991
My interest in cards picked up a little when I bought some 1991 Topps cards
at a show in a Fresno mall and liked the design. Still, with no real focus
on what I collected and no desire to buy the more pricey brands, my interest
remained pretty low. Instead of focusing on one player, I decided to expand
my horizons. I bought cards from football, basketball, and even hockey during
the year. Finally towards the end of the year I decided to collect Frank Thomas.
He was the first player that I really heavily collected, and even though I
no longer buy his cards, what I began in late 1991 continued later with my
other player collections.
1992
Now that I had a goal, collecting cards was once again a whole lot of fun.
I went to several card shows, and even started buying the more expensive brands
like Stadium Club and Ultra. Trent Dilfer's first full season with the Fresno
State Bulldogs ended with a win over USC in the Freedom Bowl, and my interest
in college football was very high. However, this didn't carry over to the
NFL, and I bought very few football cards that year. This is the year I started
organizing my cards of players I considered "good" but were worth
less than 50 cents in alphabetical order within a 3200-count box. I now have
8 of these boxes in baseball, 4 in football.
1993
This was a pretty boring year in my collecting life. Insert cards really came
into their own, and I chased them just like everybody else.....didn't get
anything good, though. I continued to collect Frank Thomas cards, but since
I had a limited budget and his cards were the most expensive around, I didn't
buy anything better than regular issue cards. I was impressed with the new
super-premium brands like Finest and Flair, but I still really valued quantity
over quality. Trent Dilfer finished his career at Fresno State, and my football
interest switched from college to the pros on draft day 1994.
1994
1994 was one of the most influential years for my collection, joining 1988
and 1997 in that respect. My main focus was still on Frank Thomas, but with
the combination of Dilfer going to the pros and the baseball strike, I gradually
shifted my attention to football. I bought my first Trent Dilfer card (a 1994
Upper Deck, pictured above) at a small card shop in the tiny Sierra Nevada
town of Oakhurst. Sadly, I was still a bandwagon jumper, and most of my early
football collecting focused on Barry Sanders. I was a huge Dilfer fan, and
liked getting his cards, but didn't actively pursue them for some reason.
It wasn't until 1996 that I really started going after Dilfer cards. In better
news, I did start going after higher quality cards. I made a cash and trade
deal with my friend down the street for a 1994 Collector's Choice Team Checklist
Gold Frank Thomas, which was a $60 card at the time.....more than double the
value of any card I had previously owned. Current Beckett value: $7.50.
1995
1995 was a pretty big letdown after the big events of the previous year. I
bought football and baseball cards in roughly equal numbers, which was the
last year that would happen. Sadly this was not the last year that my main
focus was Frank Thomas, but at least I was going after primarily insert and
high-end singles of him by this time. My interest in Barry Sanders cards gradually
declined, but heavily collecting Dilfer cards was still another year off.
My football card collection was pretty much suffering from the same stagnation
experienced by my baseball collection in 1990, before Frank Thomas came along.
1996
The year started off much the same as 1995, with my main focus in baseball
being Frank Thomas and my main focus in football being.....pretty much nothing.
Shortly after moving back to Salinas, CA, I went to the Labor Day show in
San Francisco with $150 to spend. This was a huge sum of money for me, and
I intended to spend most of it on packs and Frank Thomas cards. However, the
big turning point of my collection occurred at the show, and I ended up buying
mostly Trent Dilfer cards. It sure was a lot more fun buying Dilfer cards,
I could get some really cool stuff for the same price as a boring Frank Thomas
card. My favorite pick-ups at that show were '95 and '96 Dilfer Finest Refractors.....the
first Refractors I ever bought. I still collected Thomas for another year
and a half, but my heart just wasn't in it. I was now a Dilfer collector.
1997
By this time I was buying way more football than baseball cards. I still thought
of myself as more of a Frank Thomas collector than a Dilfer collector, but
when presented with the opportunity, I always picked Dilfer cards over those
of Thomas. My collecting habits were forever changed when my family got AOL
in July. Shortly after getting online I found the Grandstand sports cards
area on AOL, and began trading on their message boards. Sure, my first trades
were for Thomas cards (the very first was a 1996 Leaf Signature Silver Autograph
Rey Ordonez and a cheap Griffey insert for a 1995 Ultra Power Plus Frank Thomas),
but I soon switched to going after Dilfer cards. I even changed my screen
name to Dilferules, then later to Dilferulez after that account got cancelled
by my sister's dumb actions. It felt good to have an identity as "that
guy who collects Dilfer" instead of being one of the zillions of people
collecting Griffey or Thomas or some other huge superstar. My collection began
to grow by leaps and bounds, and by the end of the year I was well on my way
to owning every regular-issue Dilfer card, plus a ton of inserts. I even got
my first $100 card, a 1996 Select Certified Mirror Blue Dilfer. It's now worth
half of the $32 I paid for it, but let's not talk about that.
1998
During early 1998 I finally stopped collecting Frank Thomas cards. By the
time that I signed up for eBay in April my interest in him was to the point
where I never did a single search for his cards on the auction site. My first
purchase on eBay was a 1997 Certified Mirror Red Trent Dilfer for $17.50.
Yes, people actually used to pay close to $20 for unlisted star '97 Mirror
Reds. As the year went on, I also started collecting cards of other Fresno
State alumni in football and baseball, especially Bobby Jones and Tom Goodwin.
The ancestor of this site was born when I created an AOL members page using
their easy pagemaking feature. Yeah, it sucked, but the football and baseball
tradelists were the same as you see them today.....of course with a few cards
added and subtracted. My site gradually started looking better and better
as I advanced from AOL's pagemaker to Netscape Composer to Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Having a girlfriend that can make nice banners helped a lot, too.
1999
1999 saw me continue to expand my focus in football and baseball card collecting.
This was a necessity because I had gotten so many different Dilfer cards that
it was getting tough to find anything I didn't already have. I started more
heavily collecting Fresno State alumni in both sports, and started going after
Oakland A's cards. I had always kind of collected A's in the background, but
now A's inserts rose higher on my wantlists. Today I collect Fresno State
and A's cards with equal intensity. As my feedback on eBay grew, I started
to sell cards as well as buy them. 1999 was also perhaps my luckiest year,
with the Star Cards Superfind (detailed on the Best Pack Pulls page), a Couch/Manning
Cosigner that I sold for $200, and a Kordell Stewart Precious Metal Gems Green
numbered to only 15.
2000
2000 was a fairly boring year card-wise, but seeing Trent Dilfer lead the
Ravens to the Super Bowl title more than made up for it. I moved to Las Cruces,
New Mexico in late summer, and left comprehensive card shops behind. There
are a couple of small shops here, but none with the wide selection of current
packs that good ol' Star Cards in Salinas had. This came at a bad time, because
with so few Dilfer cards in 2000 products I shifted my money towards buying
more packs. I had to buy most of my packs at Target, and with all the stupid
pack searchers around (yeah, if you are a pack searcher reading this, you
suck), great pulls never really materialized. The year closed on a bad note
when I didn't get any cards worth more than $10 from all the packs and boxes
I got for Christmas. The bright spot was the movement of my AOL members page
to the newly created Dilfer.com.
2001
The year started off and ended good sports-wise with the Super Bowl win and
Trent Dilfer's continuing win streak, but it was another boring year for cards.
With the move to Seattle, very few Dilfer cards were made for the second straight
year. I picked up as much as I could, and continued collecting other players
and buying packs with little luck.
2002
Trent Dilfer had a very uneventful season. More Dilfer cards were issued than
the previous year, but it was getting boring just buying everything on eBay.
It was once again time to expand my collecting focus. I had already started
collecting A's cards a couple of years before, but it really intensified in
2002 because for the first time in years I was once again a bigger baseball
fan than football fan. 2002 was the first year since 1994 that I bought more
baseball cards than football cards, and it was by a wide margin.
2003
Very few Trent Dilfer cards were released, and since I rarely found any from
previous years that I needed, almost all of my collecting focus went towards
A's cards. I bought very few packs of football cards. I started going to El
Paso Diablos games when the Midland Rockhounds (A's AA affiliate) visited,
and got a lot of autographs. I started selling at card shows in El Paso, and
even though the shows were small and I didn't make much money, it was a lot
of fun. I also discovered the beckett.com collector forums, and was involved
in a lot of sports card discussion for the first time since I left the AOL
boards in 1998.
2004
Absolutely no Dilfer cards were made, which meant 100% of my focus was on
baseball. The El Paso card shows stopped at the beginning of the year, but
I was still having fun posting on the Beckett forums and getting autographs
at minor league games. Late in the year my interest waned due to several factors.
The minor league team in El Paso announced it was leaving after the 2004 season,
which meant no more autographs in the future. The A's missed the playoffs
then traded away two of my favorite players. Beckett cut pretty much all of
the prices (except RC's) out of their monthly magazine and I stopped buying
it. Most importantly, money was tight. This led to my first little hiatus
from the hobby since late 1990. I was pretty much just checking eBay for Dilfer
cards once or twice a week and buying a pack here or there. But 2005 is looking
better, with some new young A's to collect and a new job that will give me
a little more money.
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