My Unopened Collection, Part 1

I've shown a few things that I have unopened from time to time, but I want to actually put everything I have unopened on display here.  The impetus is that, as I've said, I'm winding down my purchases, and I recently ordered a bunch of unopened 80s stuff, to complete the unopened part of my collection.  This will be the first post of about 3 or 4, culminating with those most recent purchases.

35 1986 Topps wax packs.

The basic story I tell about my collection is that (a) we always had some baseball cards around the house, with some of my earliest memories being of some 1979 Topps (I was born near the end of 1975), (b) I started seriously collecting in early-to-mid 1987, when my friends and I would ride our bikes to the local 7-Eleven and buy wax packs of 1987 Topps, (c) I stopped collecting around my first year of college, with some 1994 cards being the last in my original collection, and then (d) last year, getting my collection out of my mom's house and into our house, I got the collection organized and started making my first purchases since the 1994 strike.

These 1986 Topps wax packs put the lie to that story, though.  Inbetween 1994 and 2017, I did make one purchase of cards.  When I was in grad school circa 2000, eBay became a thing.  I ordered a 1986 Topps wax box and I opened one pack.  I saved the other 35 unopened, and when I went home (grad school was in NC, about a 6-7 hour drive from my parents' house in DE), I put those 35 packs away with the rest of my collection.  I'm not sure about the one pack I opened.  Maybe I brought them home, too, and filed them away with my other 1986 Topps.  Or, maybe I threw them out.

A 1988 Fleer wax box.

The cards on the back of the 1988 Fleer wax box.

Next up we have a 1988 Fleer wax box.  It has four cards on the bottom, the Tigers logo, Dwight Evans, Ryne Sandberg, and Shane Rawley. 

A 1993 Topps Series 1 unopened box.

A 1993 Score unopened box.

The summer of 1993 is when I graduated high school, and I got a job.  (I had worked a little here and there before that, but not like this where I worked the whole summer before leaving for college.)  I saved my money pretty well so that I would have something to spend at college, but did buy some things of course.  I remember going to a store, Partners, on Main Street in Newark, DE, after I got paid, and asking for a wax box.  I think it was $20, and I gave over a twenty dollar bill.  Very quick transaction.  I took it home and put it on the shelf.  I don't know if that was the Topps or the Score box pictured here.  If you look closely at the picture of the Score box, you see that the wrap is punctured and there's a tear in the box, over the lower seam of the baseball.  That happened just last year, when I dropped the box while we were moving. 

31 wax packs of 1987 Fleer Star Stickers.

Back in the day, I bought a bunch of odd card issues via mail-order, from the ads in Baseball Cards magazine.  I would look all through the ads, and find one that seemed to have a good price on something slightly offbeat.  So I ordered at least one box of Star Stickers.  I have 31 unopened packs, so presumably there were 36 in the box and I opened 5.  I said before that after we moved to our new house at the end of 1988, I was left without any card collecting friends.  It's possible I might have opened the rest of these if I had a community of collectors to show them to and trade with.

4 packs of 1988 Topps Stickers/Superstar cards.

5 packs of 1989 Panini stickers.

I think I must have bought a box of the 1988 Topps stickers, with the Superstar cards on the sticker backs.  Not only do I have these 4 unopened packs, I also have a complete set of the cards and a bunch of doubles.  I am guessing that I opened the packs until I finally got a complete set, and then left the rest, these four, in my unopened stack.  I'm surprised to find that I have five packs of Panini stickers, since I didn't really collect Panini stickers.  They were pretty cheap, though, so maybe I grabbed them at the end of a show when I only had a buck or so left.  Just a guess.

5 1986 Donruss All-Stars/Pop-Ups packs.

5 1987 Donruss All-Stars/Pop-Ups packs.

I know I've shown these unopened Donruss All-Stars/Pop-Ups before.  I bought a whole box of the 1986, and that's why I have a complete set of those that I've featured before.  Like with the Topps Stickers, I probably opened them until I completed the set, and then left the last few packs unopened.  I don't have many of the 1987 All-Stars, so I must have only bought a few packs of them, leaving most of them unopened.

A box of 1989 Topps DoubleHeaders.

2 packs of 1989 Topps DoubleHeaders.

I think I showed this box of 1989 Topps DoubleHeaders before, too.  I thought these were really cool when I was in 8th grade.  I bought a bunch, opened them, and displayed them on my bookshelf.  Either my parents or I must have thrown away the opened ones at some point.  But I have this full box plus two more unopened.

1 1990 Topps Heads Up! pack.

15 packs of 1989 Topps Coins.

These 1990 Topps Heads Up! are surely the stupidest baseball card-related collectible I ever bought.  I only bought three of them, opening two and leaving this one unopened.

I think I bought a couple of boxes of Topps coins.  I thought they were fun.  I have many of the coins opened, but kept these 15 packs unopened for posterity, I guess.

A box of 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders.

I have a lot of 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders.  Did I buy three whole boxes of them?  Maybe it was just two, I don't know.  But I kept this one box unopened.

5 packs of 1987 Topps Mini League Leaders.

10 packs of 1990 Topps Mini League Leaders, with two different wrappers.  Six include a price of 35 cents, and four have no price.

And then here are some more of the Topps Mini League Leaders.  Five packs of the wood-grained 1987's, and ten packs of the colorful-bordered 1990's.  The 1990's have two varieties of wrapper, with some proclaiming that they cost 35 cents, and others agnostic on the price.  It amazes me that anything ever cost as little as 35 cents.

I'll close the post out with two batches of unopened material I've bought in the past year.

34 1980 Topps Burger King Phillies packs.

I bought a box of maybe 48 or so unopened packs of 1980 Burger King Phillies.  I opened more than a dozen of them to get a complete set of the cards, and that left 34 unopened.  I already had a number of the cards from when I was a kid, but not a whole set; also, I was only 4 years old for most of 1980, and the cards didn't make it through in great shape.  It's great to have so many of these cards, in both the complete set and the unopened packs.  Each pack shows one card and the checklist/BK King card.  I don't quite have a complete set showing on the unopened packs, but I think that's ok.

A box of 1987 Topps Mini League Leaders.

Lastly, I showed this recent acquisition the other day.  While I did have 5 of the 1987 Topps Mini League Leader packs already, I like having a whole box.  Maybe I'll open it someday and see if I get a whole set.

Thanks for reading!  Plenty more unopened stuff to come in a future post!

Update:  Looking a little closer, I see that the two additional packs of DoubleHeaders are from 1990, not 1989.  The full box is of the 1989s.  I hadn't remembered that they made these for more than one year.