Card Spotlight: 10-15-10

1988 Panini Stickers #62 - Harold Baines

Trading cards come in many different forms. Perhaps one of the most fun ways of collecting is stickers.

When I was a kid, I went through many phases. A good number of them revolved around stickers. In fact, a surprise package from Thorzul last year inspired me to share a page out of a recently discovered sticker album from my youth.

I collected every sort of sticker I could get my hands on and stuck them each lovingly into an album. I even did this with Topps and Fleer baseball sticker books. I never completed any of those sticker books, but I enjoyed every single moment trying to. I think the closest I ever came to completing a themed sticker album was a He-Man sticker album I had. I remember finding a ton of sticker packets at a Dominick's supermarket for a ridiculously low price, so I stocked up and found myself a couple stickers short of a full album. I think I was hooked into the series by the gimmick of Skeletor with revolving battle armor and the allure of stickers. What can I say? I was a kid.

I can't recall ever running into any Panini baseball stickers, when both concepts appealed to me. I only remember having Fleer and Topps sticker albums. I guess that would make sense. It appears that Panini came out with their first MLB stickers in 1988, which was one year too late for me.

I probably would have been bored out of my skull with the design as a kid, but who knows. Today, I find the design a calming presence in the middle of crazy eighties designs. Did everything need to be neon pink and green with confetti and triangles in the late eighties? I don't think it had to be that way. I blame Max Headroom and the California Raisins. I blame the odd colors on disciples of Punky Brewster who stared into their Lite Brites for far too long causing permanent damage to their inner color wheel.

Just when you had any doubt as to the validity of stickers, take the advice on the back of the Panini baseball sticker of Harold Baines.
See? Stickers are fun! It says so on the back of a sticker!