My First Baseball Card

I was five years old and breakfast cereal was amazing. I'm not sure where this card came from, exactly. I know it was out of a box of some kind of cereal. For awhile I thought that this was a special cereal card, an oddball, if you will, but I discovered that it wasn't. They apparently inserted regular old 1981 Topps cards into some kind of cereal that I ate decades ago.

I didn't know who Yount was. I remember a particular baseball announcer's call would get stuck in my head, because it rhymed. "Three and two's the count to Robin Yount." It could have been Vin Scully. All of my earliest baseball broadcast memories came from Scully or Al Michaels. The Brewers went onto the World Series in 1982 and I actually rooted for them. I didn't know any better. My favorite team was the Yankees, because of my dad, and he always rooted for the AL if the Yankees weren't in it (they would not be in it again until after he passed away in 1995.) My best friend at the time was pulling hard for the Cardinals and eventually I fell for them by 1985.

The card itself was dog-eared, tattered, creased and generally very round everywhere. And that would be very awesome right now, except that I have no idea where it is. I'm pretty sure it's gone. I threw away a ton of cards that I deemed to be damaged beyond repair at some point in my life, but I'm wishing now that I hung onto the Yount card. I ended up buying a rack pack of '81 Topps on eBay recently because Yount was showing on the front. Typically, it's fairly off-center and has a slightly dinged corner. But in my opinion, it's still worth considerably less than the original Yount was worth to me.

I did a write-up on the entire pack for A Pack A Day if your curiosity has been peaked.