1992 Stadium Club Members Only “3” “Pack” “Break”

This post brought to you by my new favorite Tumblr: The Blog of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. Of course, since that’s my number 2 English language pet peeve (behind only unnecessary apostrophes), I won’t be using any quotation marks unnecessarily. I will instead be using them excessively and with a great deal of sarcasm. In this manner I hope to make a statement on the use of quotation marks inappropriately. Enjoy.

You would think that someone at Topps would realize that having a "Members Only" set and a "Members' Choice" subset would cause some confusion. Guess not.

Back when Stadium Club redefined everything anybody knew about baseball cards by kind of sort of copying Upper Deck, they tried to milk collectors for every last penny. And, as a famous jacket company once learned, making someone feel like they were a “member” in exchange a paltry sum of money was a great way to get a bunch of cash. The Stadium Club began as a real life “club” that you could “join” by sending them lots of “money.” No, wait. Not “money” because it was real. So. Money. The first year, so got some special cards (including a gaudy and hideous Nolan Ryan fake gold thing shaped like a card), a keychain and a member card. In 1992, however, you just got the cards. And not really a set. Some packs of unnumbered cards (two packs of baseball and two packs mixed up with some hockey and football players), each recognizing a specific player’s achievement for the year. I think there may have been some “member” “voting” involved but who cares at this point. As Baseballcardpedia (still think it needs an “o” in there) points out, there are 50 cards in the set but I only care about 36 of them because the other 14 are non-baseball. The biggest problem with this stupid set is that each 51card “set” came with only 1 of 3 “#1 Draft Pick” cards. So you had to track those down even if you already paid for a membership. They put them randomly in Series 3 boxes too but still. Stupid. I guess they each came with a Master Photo too, but there were 15 cards in that set so basically being a member got you a stack of cards that almost guaranteed you would only care about 2/3 of, 1/3 of another set and 1/15 of yet another set.

Sorry if I sound bitter, it’s just that Topps is finding a way to foil my plans from the past. 19 years later, I’ve got to find that damn Chipper Jones card and he’s a flippin’ 1st ballot Hall of Famer. That will cost me literally $.18 plus shipping. Bastards. Not to mention that, when Jon and I bought a huge lot last year and I plucked a few of these little boxes from its grips, someone had been nice enough to snag the high dollar cards out of it. By “high dollar” I of course mean the Barry Bonds, the Griffey, the Ryanses (there are 2), the Ozzie Smithses (there are 3), and the… Robin Yount? Plus Jon pilfered the Greg Maddux so I figured I’d just buy a lot of three sets from someone on eBay and I’d fill the gaps. When I opened the boxes, here’s what I saw.

There are worse Cubs to feature at the time this set was released, believe it or not.

I was definitely confused by the way these were packed out. Hockey gets its own pack? And why is Art Monk literally the only card in that middle pack? Oh well, doesn’t matter. I’m not looking for football, just give me my guaranteed draft pick and some of those star cards I’m missing!

Not Chipper. Not Taylor.

Nooooo! Now I’m still stuck trying to find those other two damn draft picks. Whatever, let’s get to the goods. I opened one of the packs on A Pack To Be Named Later to help future generations know which packs don’t contain the cards I was looking for, but here’s the rest.

A Bip from the past.

A Yount from the scoreboard.

So the good news is that I got that Yount and the Griffey (and  a load of hockey cards I can’t imagine anyone wanting).  The bad news is that this “set” was “picked over.” Which means that, somewhere along the line, someone grabbed the cellophane pack with the Bonds card in it and sold it on eBay for a ridiculous price or something. Of course, it seems silly now to consider that sort of thing an option, but to me it’s just annoying (lowest price on SportLots is $.95 for some stupid reason). That pack also had the Bo Jackson and Nolan Ryan cards I need as well as that Maddux that I shouldn’t need (I’m looking at you, Jon!). (Just kidding, Jon. I’m looking at my hands as I type because I never learned my home keys). So I’ve got to track down either that last pack or each of the cards individually. If anyone has them, I’ve got doubles of 3/4 of this set to trade you for 7 measly cards. Any Reggie Savage fans out there?

6 comments to 1992 Stadium Club Members Only “3” “Pack” “Break”

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>