So, where have I been all week? Fair question. It is March, but I'm usually more consistent than this. A week ago Thursday I was getting a workout in during the early afternoon when I heard an unbelievable crash out in the driveway. From the kitchen windows, I could see ice falling and I knew it wasn't good immediately. A giant sheet of ice slid off the roof and dropped two stories onto my vehicle. Windshield shattered, tail light gone, huge dents everywhere and $3,300-plus in damage. God love ya, March. I've lived in this house close to 30 years and nothing even close to that has happened. For the past week, every single day, I've been chatting up either the insurance company, body shops, the tow-truck operator or whoever else deals in vehicle mayhem. Also, I've been working on a story for my newspaper. Every time I do one of those in-person, multi-person interview stories, it eliminates any other kind of writing (i.e. blog writing) from my schedule. That...
Twelve years ago I wrote a post about the return of the Topps Future Star(s) label and my lack of appreciation for it when Topps first broke it out in the late 1980s (although it also used "Future Stars" to describe its three-player prospect cards at the start of the decade). Since first returning in 2014 -- actually its second return as the Future Stars went on hiatus for 1992 and 1993 before coming back in 1994 -- the Future Star has continued strong for every Topps flagship set except for one. It's so much a standard part of the base set now that I don't think anyone even notices it anymore, at least certainly not like collectors did in the late 1980s. There's a reason for that, I think, outside of showing up every year. I went through the last 12 years and broke down the Future Stars for each. The idea for this post began as a dissection of the Future Star(s) logo, but I found totaling Future Stars for each year more interesting. Let's start with ...