Sports Card Tour 2018 - Toronto

Oh, Canada! The final leg of our tour features three stops in the great white north. Today we're in Toronto. This is going to be one of the longest SCT posts as I have a lot of personal stories to share. Soarie aboot that. ;-P

Toronto is home to four pro sports teams - and the Hockey Hall of Fame. The Maple Leafs have won 13 Stanley Cups, more than any NHL club except their hated arch-rivals the Montreal Canadiens. However they have not even reached the final since the league was comprised of only six teams.

I have a few Leafs legends in my collection, including defenseman (and donut magnate) Tim Horton, Borje Salming and Darryl Sittler. I flipped over the Frank Mahovilich because I've never seen card text refer to a player as "handsome" before. I'm not disagreeing with Topps, I just found it interesting.

Bill Barilko won four Stanley Cups in five seasons with the Leafs. His overtime game-winner clinched the Cup for Toronto in 1951..and he disappeared that summer. Barilko's story was the subject of a Pro Set hockey card and a Tragically Hip song.

The only slabbed single you will see in this post is this Jacques Plante O-Pee-Chee card.

I had been watching a graded copy on COMC but the price wasn't right, so I searched for ungraded copies and snagged this one for $10.05..then sent it in to PSA. Plante won six Stanley Cups-all with the Canadiens. He was 42 years old when this card was released and played pro hockey until he was 46. 

The Leafs left their historic home arena Maple Leaf Gardens during the 1998-99 season. I happened to be dating an Ontario girl at the time and spent nearly the entire first half of '99 in the Greater Toronto Area.  

She took me to a couple card shops (we might have attended the Toronto Expo but the admission price scared her off), the Hockey Hall of Fame, Wayne Gretzky's restaurant, and a Blue Jays game at SkyDome (I'll get to that.)

She even managed to score tickets to a Leafs-Flyers playoff game at their new home, Air Canada Centre. The game was 1-1 early, and then nothing happened for a while. I remember feeling like the fans were oddly quiet and tense, until Toronto scored in overtime and sent everyone home happy. We exited through a mall or something, and there was a young kid working as a greeter outside a restaurant. He spotted us and asked "Did we win?" Fionna told him "we" did and he pumped his fist in celebration. 

I was actually a little bit of a Leafs fan before I met her. Felix Potvin and Doug Gilmour were two of my favorite players in 1993, when the Leafs reached the Western Conference Finals (you read that right.) I even bought a shark tooth-style Maple Leafs hat (I'm wearing it in the Maple Leaf Gardens picture) in a Bradlees and wore it throughout the playoffs. I sold it a few years ago and the guy who bought it tried to file a claim against me with eBay - even though I clearly stated the had was old and had been worn frequently. Feebay ruled against him because he admitted to altering the item.

Toronto would lose the 1994 Conference Final to the next team on our tour, Vancouver. That prompted the Leafs to shake up their roster by trading popular captain Wendel Clark to Quebec for Mats Sundin.

My ex was a huge Sundin fan and so I became one, too. One of the very first items I bought on eBay was an autographed 8 x 10 of Mats - when he was with the Nordiques. The photo was smudged up pretty bad, but I was too much of a noob to complain. At one point I had a Sundin PC with over 100 cards, a "Suntouchable" poster, and a McFarlane figure. After Fionna and I broke up I pared down the Sundin card collection to a more manageable amount. It now stands at 33 Leafs cards, and probably about 40 overall.

Longtime Leaf Ron Ellis was a member of their last Cup-winning team in 1967. Fionna told me Ellis was her gym teacher (in high school I assume) so I bought two of his cards and gave her one. (I also bought her that Leafs jersey she's wearing in that very dark picture we took at MLG.)

 

I was even a little bit of a Leafs fan after she and I had gone our separate ways. In 2002 the Maple Leafs (rightfully realinged to the NHL's Eastern Conference) had advanced to the conference semi-finals along with two other Canadian teams..and Carolina. Surely a Canadian team would win the East and advance to the Stanley Cup Final..right? Wrong. Toronto beat Ottawa in the second round, then lost to the Canes in the Conference Final. 

The Leafs were dead to me after that.

 

I stopped collecting Upper Deck hockey sets in 2016-and the Maple Leafs are to blame. The Young Guns subset in '16-17 was loaded with Leafs, and I didn't have any interest (or money) to compete with that crazy collector base over $200 Auston Matthews RCs. As a result, these are my only cards of Matthews-and Mitch Marner, who is also part of that rookie class.  

John Tavares became the latest marquee player to sign a free agent contract with his boyhood team. Returning home has been a trend in hockey for a long time - from Tavares, James van Riemsdyk*, and Patrick Maroon this year to Kevin Shattenkirk, Zach Parise, and Ilya Kovalchuk in years past. Auston Matthews is from Arizona. I'm just saying...

 *at least that's how he tells it. The Devils are his hometown team, not Philly. 

The last two Toronto titles belong to the Blue Jays. American League East champions in 1985, the Jays were knocking on the door in the late '80s..and burst it open after moving in to the state-of-the-art SkyDome. Attendance soared, reaching record totals of over 4 million fans per year. The added revenue allowed the team to build a back-to back World Series winner..in the two seasons preceding the strike.

The World Series truly became a World Series when the Blue Jays beat the Braves for the 1992 title. In 1993, John Olerud was chasing .400 well into the summer. (All of my collecting friends were trying to get our hands on his Leaf RC.) He finished the year at .363 and won the batting title. Toronto teammates Paul Molitor and Roberto Alomar finished second and third that year.

Joe Carter's home run off Phillies' closer Mitch Williams was only the second World Series-clinching homer in history. Carter and Alomar arrived from San Diego in a 1990 trade that involved four high-profile players.

I don't have nearly as many Carter cards as I should (probably traded 'em all to Mike or Robert) so I added some other Jays faves to this scan - including Edwin Encarnacion taking Edwing for a walk, Eric Lindros taking BP with the Jays (he ended up with his hometown Leafs eventually) and one of my favorite Clemens cards.

Alex Rios, Guillermo Quiroz, and Dustin McGowan played for the New Haven Ravens when they were a Toronto affiliate; the franchise moved closer to its parent club, in New Hampshire, after the 2003 season. I went to the Ravens' last game with a couple friends. The fans were allowed to go onto the field and run the bases. All the memorabilia had been picked clean; we couldn't even find a foul ball.

So..about that Blue Jays game I attended in the spring of 1999. I can't remember who they were playing - thought it was the Devil Rays because I remember Jose Canseco hitting a long home run - and so I checked my stack of ticket stubs. Apparently I went to two Jays games that year. 

There was a promotion going on involving back-to-back home runs or two home runs in the same inning which the Jays didn't do against Tampa, so this much have been the Tigers game. If the home team homered twice, everyone in our section would get a free Blue Jays hat. Toronto hit back-to-back home runs twice in that game, so I don't even remember the inning. I just remember we were going to get a free hat.

How did we acquire said hats? They were not handed to each one of us as we left our seats. They were tossed at us by some dumb college girl (sorry..university girl) in between innings. I reached up for mine at the same time as the man sitting in front of me. Figured I'd be polite and let him have that one (I was in Canada, after all.) He somehow grabbed another one for his little boy..and then the girl ran out of hats to throw at us. An instant later, the man and his boy left the game. Yeah, take off hoser.

I had this Fred McGriff Donruss rookie card when I was a young collector. It was one of those cards I mysteriously lost, like my 1984 Donruss Nolan Ryan and my SI for Kids Kim Zmeskal card. The Crime Dog is back in my collection but the Ryan isn't. I don't have any key rookies from 1984 Fleer Update like Clemens, Puckett, or even Dwight Gooden - but I do have the Jimmy Key. Does anyone remember that SportsCenter commercial where they rushed the young anchor up to the big show before he was ready? Jimmy Key..what's he, like..45? I could hit him!

The best of my Blue Jays hits, including some color-matching refractors. Joey Bats was my dude for a while-but his attitude went south at the same time as his ability. I liked Tulo, too, but the guy is made of glass so I had to demote his base cards back to the binders. Who's ready for Vlad Jr. to debut? I'm not-I only have two of his Bowman prospect cards.

Sorry, guys. I'm keeping those Vlad cards. This is the only Argos card in my collection - Dollar Store Doug sent me one of every CFL team. [Are you guys cool with my short-hand nicknames for bloggers such as "Dollar Store Doug", "Shoebox Shane",  "Dime Box Nick" ..and so on?]

The Raptors made a blockbuster trade last week, sending DeMar DeRozan to San Antonio for Kawhi Leonard. Both players were unhappy with the trade - Leonard didn't want to go to Toronto and DeRozan didn't want to leave. I'm no NBA expert, but it seems awfully risky trading a franchise stalwart for an equal-to-slightly better player who is coming off a major injury and will be a free agent at the end of the year. 

The franchise has only advanced to the conference final once (in 2016) and now that LeBron James has signed with the Lakers, the East is wide open. It could be a small window though - Kawhi will likely leave and Kyle Lowry will be 33 at the end of the season. This Immaculate base card sat on my COMC watch list for a while. I finally bought it for $1.15 in February.

Many of my newest Toronto cards are Raptors; this DeMarre Carroll dual patch came home in my latest COMC order. It only cost $1.75 due to 'top left corner wear.'

This Vince Carter Black Diamond RC was one of the hundred or so basketball cards I saved when I purged most of my collection. When I worked at a card shop there was another guy who came into the store a lot, and one day he grabbed a bunch of packs and started opening them. He was a cop, so I assumed he was going to pay for them all (maybe he had a 'tab' with the owner?) I joined in on the fun and pulled this Carter card. I would have been annoyed if I hadn't, the guy told me to pay for my packs - even though I was the employee!

Vince Carter was the first star I remember who actually embraced playing on a non-US team. "Air Canada" nearly got the Raps to the conference final in 2001-but he missed the final shot  in Game 7.

How long has Carter been an active NBA player? His cousin (and onetime Toronto teammate) Tracy McGrady is younger than him...and he's already in the Hall of Fame.

I don't have any McGrady Raptors cards, but I did buy his Finest RC at a card-and-coin shop back in the day. The proprietors were older gentlemen who didn't follow sports all that much. I found the T-Mac RC in a dime box and couldn't believe my eyes. Not sure what it's worth now but at the time it was $10.

The rest of my Raptors hits, including a Chris Bosh Chrome RC. The Serge Ibaka Certified cost $1.18 on COMC; I probably could have saved a few cents if I waited a while but I didn't want to risk losing or forgetting about it.

I only have 18 Raptors cards in my commons binder. (not including Bosh-he's a star player.) That's the least I have of any NBA team - partially because they're one of the newest NBA franchises (half of my basketball commons are from 1990-93) but also because other bloggers often get dibs on the Raptors cards. 

Favorite Maple Leafs player (current): it might be John Tavares
Favorite Maple Leafs player (all-time): Mats Sundin and Felix Potvin
Favorite Blue Jays player (current): I kind of like Stroman, Granderson, Tulo, and Donaldson..but not enough to have a clear fave
Favorite Blue Jays player (all-time): Jose Bautista
Favorite Raptors player (current): Kyle Lowry or Serge Ibaka
Favorite Raptors player (all-time): Vince Carter..Chris Bosh a close second

Next tour stop: Vancouver


Thanks for reading!


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