If you collect cards in today’s tech savy world you sometimes forget that ebay or trade boards weren’t always around to easily track down your collecting needs. In the pre-internet world, if you wanted a particular card issue you had to hit the local card store (if you were lucky enough to have one), find a card show to attend (they occured maybe once or twice per year), hit up your friends (not many collected) , or pull the card yourself. Sometimes you even had to send away a little cash (for the dealer’s time) and a SASE to dealers who sold cards by mail. Being a collector of a player like Olerud, who most people in my town never heard of, was kind of a mini challenge. I was fortunate enough to have a local dealer who would hold every Olerud card he would run across (who else would want them right?). Unfortunetly for me, that pile was always pretty small since Olerud played several thousand miles away. By the end of 1992, I had all but given up trying to collect Olerud. It was frustrating to ask for Olerud cards at a show or shop and have the dealer say “Who?” or “Why don’t you collect a good player?” or “we only carry star players!” Even though Olerud was a World Champion, he still played in a market most people on my side of the country didn’t follow or care about in the very least, until a certain magical season in 1993 that changed everything.
In 1993, Olerud became the talk of baseball. He went from unknown obscurity to the top of the Baseball world. Olerud was scorching hot on the baseball field and in the hobby. I was no longer having difficulty finding Olerud cards at shows but unfortunetly for me the price went up and up and up. Olerud even made his first and only appearence on the cover of issue #101 of Beckett Baseball Card Monthly in August 1993:
In this issue was one of my favorite quotes I had ever read about Olerud:
“His bat likes to scream at the top of its lungs. In paragraphs, With proper punctuation.”
-Steve Milton
At the time, Olerud was still hitting above 0.400 and even though he wouldn’t be able to keep up the miraculous run, he was still on his way to a batting title and his second championship ring. Olerud had solidified a place in the collecting community and a slew of new cards would soon follow. It was also the year I went away to college and heard about a little product named 1993 Topps Finest. My jaw dropped when I saw the price. I was in shock that any Olerud card could ever reach triple digits. In 1993, I had no idea what a refractor was but the 1993 Topps Finest Refractor had to be mine but that would be years away.
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