I played baseball for almost 8 years (I really can’t recall the exact time frame but I did end my time on the fast pitch field my softmore year in HS). During that time I, like many baseball fans collected numerous baseball cards. They are all stacked up in storage at the rents collecting dust, critters, mold and what ever else is up in the attic destroying my youthful passion.
Collecting cars kept me interested in the sport,understanding the stats but I never got into the value perception each card carried. Is Jose Canseco’s rookie card worth more than Todd Worrell… I have 3 Wally Joyners you want to trade one for a Rodger Clemens? blah blah… I started collecting private sets as well like the True Value superstars set, or the full box set of Donruss Rookies.
The whole thing soured from me when a fellow baseball player, Jimmy, I traded cards with got upset because he felt I took him in a favorable trade. I think I traded some mint Dan Quisenberrys and Mattinglys for his mint Dwight Goodens and rookie Mark McGwires… what ever at the time just cards… but he went through my sets and either stole one of the cards out of each set or bent them to unfavorable value. This and a few other events lead to the dismiss of our friendship but ultimately I realized they’re just cards and fawning over packs of cards for that one defect or rookie card that will be worth hundreds SOMEDAY just didn’t seem like a worthwhile use of my time.
Topps is printing cards in their 08 deck of “Future Stars” and one such listing is that of Japanese high school pitching phenom named Kazuo “The Uzi” Uzuki. Reportedly he can throw an 104 MPH fastball at 18 and on his way to becoming the first Japan-based high-schooler to jump straight to professional baseball in America.
I know when I came to these type of cards in the deck they went on the stack of gum and trash that never really were kept. This card, as it turns out, is a fake: Kazuo Uzuki means “the first son of April” in Japanese. The placement of this card is intentional by Topps to generate buzz and played on the consumer as an April Fools ruse. To me this is just bull shit and I hope it backfires. A true collector will probably figure out that this was a faked card from the beginning – if no stats are searchable but the act of playing this joke for publicity doesn’t bode well for the true fan that really just wants to participate in the sport.
Upper Deck is apparently adding presidential cards this year, which also should have been cut on the production floor. Who cares–
