I collected baseball and basketball cards back in the ’90s, and Beckett Baseball Card Monthly was the best price guide to check the value of your cards. The magazine also featured great photos and articles about my favorite players. Beckett produced monthly price guides for baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. They also produced a special guide for minor league and college players called Future Stars.
I don’t have many of the Future Stars magazines, and I definitely wish I’d had a subscription back then. This particular issue featured the Raptors’ Damon Stoudamire on the cover back in February of 1996. There are some great photos of Stoudamire in the classic purple Toronto jerseys. The Suns’ Michael Finley was also featured, along with a very young Ray Allen and budding LA star Eddie Jones.
I would spend hours going through these magazines, reading the articles, and checking the values of some of the cards I owned. It’s crazy to look back at rookies that were included, like Derek Jeter, Larry Johnson, and even Michael Jordan in a White Sox jersey.
It was a simple time back then, when the Internet was just barely getting off the ground. As a kid, I loved collecting cards because you never knew what you’d find when you bought a pack. And there were tons of baseball card shows in our local malls. Plus, every summer I’d go to the Jersey Shore with my family and there were several card shops down there. I looked forward to stopping by those shops all summer to pick up a few more expensive cards.
The majority of the baseball card shops are long gone, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a baseball card show at a mall, so it’s fun to flip through the pages of Future Stars and remember the players that were just starting out their stellar careers back then.
