Recent Acquisitions for My Player Collections: Rickey Henderson

Last month, I bought a bunch of cards for my Rickey Henderson player collection.  I only really collect through 1994, and I'm really especially interested in about through 1991 or so. This means that I have, thus far at least, only focused on the first three periods of Henderson's career: his first run with the A's, his time with the Yankees, and his second run with the A's.

1982 Fleer Rickey Henderson.

I mainly am not looking for base set cards for my expanded players collections, but I've made an exception for early Rickey Henderson cards.  I do have a 1980 Topps Henderson rookie card (blogged about here), but otherwise my early Henderson collection has some gaps.  So, I acquired this 1982 Fleer card to help fill in the early years.

1982 Topps A's Batting and Pitching Leaders.

Also from 1982, we have this A's Team Leaders card, featuring Rickey for his .318 batting average and Steve McCatty for a 2.32 ERA.  McCatty spent his whole career with the A's, from 1977 through 1985, compiling a 63-63 record with 5 saves.

1982 Topps Stolen Base Leaders.

I also picked up this 1982 Topps card featuring two of baseball's best baserunners of all time, Tim Raines and Rickey Henderson.  Raines had 71 stolen bases and Henderson had 56, in the strike-shortened 1981 season.

1983 Topps A's Batting and Pitching Leaders.

Henderson again led the A's in batting in 1982, but this time with only a .267 average.  Rick Langford led the A's pitchers with a 4.21 ERA.  In case these numbers don't make it clear, the 1982 A's were not a good team, finishing 68-94, placing 5th (out of 7 teams) in the AL West, 25 games in back of the Angels.

1985 Topps All-Time Record Holders and 1987 Fleer Baseballs Best Sluggers vs. Pitchers of Rickey Henderson.

The main focus of my player collection acquisitions is oddballs, and here we have two boxed set cards from the 80s, from boxed sets I don't own.  The 1985 All-Time Record Holders set had Henderson as the single-season steals leader.  I don't have any of the Fleer Pitchers vs. Sluggers sets, and instead have just a few cards here and there.  This 1987 card is after his move to the Yankees.

1989 and 1990 Topps Bazooka Shining Star Rickey Henderson.

When I organized my collection for storage earlier this summer, I was a little surprised to find that I didn't have any Bazooka cards at all.  I though my family bought some packages of Bazooka at BJ's, the local warehouse club, and I assumed that we would have done that to get baseball cards that came with the Bazooka.  But I guess not.  So now, with this 1989 and this 1990 card, I now have those Bazooka sets represented in my collection.  These cards, from 1989 and 1990, show his move back to Oakland.

1986 Topps Quaker Chewy Granola Bars and 1987 Fleer Headline Rickey Henderson.

I featured a Quaker Chewy Granola Bars card of Mike Schmidt which I picked up recently on an earlier post; this Henderson is my second such card, then.  I only have one or two other Fleer Headliner cards, and none (until now) from the 1987 set.  These 6 cards featured Henderson, Wade Boggs, Jim Rice, Jose Canseco, Dwight Gooden, and Keith Hernandez.

1989 Sportflics and 1990 Topps K-Mart Super Stars Rickey Henderson.

I've said before that I had a few 1986 Sportflics, a few more 1987 Sportflics, the complete set plus many more 1988 Sportflics, and a bunch of 1990 Sportflics, but no 1989 Sportflics in my collection.  This probably reflects financial difficulties related to Dad's job around 1989.  So, I've picked up a few select 1989 Sportflics (such as a Candelaria blogged about previously) to get them represented in my collection, and this Henderson is one such card.  Finally, we have this 1990 K-Mart card, which indeed looks very 1990 to me.  I have the 1982, 1987, and 1988 K-Mart boxed sets, which I've blogged about before, but I believe this is my first card from the 1990 K-Mart set.