Why Sandy Alomar Jr.?

To be honest, I don't really know.  I was 10 years old when I first started collecting baseball cards.  I became a Red Sox fan with my first pack of baseball cards.  But it took awhile longer before I started my player collection.

My first card of Sandy Alomar Jr. was a 1991 Donruss Series 2 card (I will get to that soon).  That was at least a couple of months after I first started collecting.  I also do not know the circumstances surrounding that first card.  I think I probably got it in a pack, though I don't know when.

At some point I decided to collect a few players.  My rules were simple.  I did not collect Red Sox players because I did not want to separate my Red Sox cards.  Those cards had to stay together.  I have never denied being a little obsessive-compulsive.  I also rarely collected Yankees players.

Anyway, there were a few players early on that I started focusing on, just to have something new to collect.  Part of it was that I wanted to trade with my two brothers and they rarely had Red Sox I needed.  So I needed something else to try to trade for.  The earliest players I remember collecting were Sandy Alomar Jr., Delino DeShields, Tom Glavine, Ryne Sandberg, Barry Larkin, and Craig Biggio.  I remember considering picking just one player and DeShields was one of the players I was strongly considering with Alomar being the other option.  I believe I ultimately picked Alomar because I always liked catchers.

So at some point I decided to focus a single player collection on Sandy Alomar Jr.  I still collected a few other players, but Alomar was unique.  I actually had the collection in a binder.  Only my Red Sox were previously treated this way.  My Alomar collection was also unique because I allowed myself to buy cards of him directly.  Again, I only previously spent money on single card of the Red Sox.  I had a friend who had a single player collection of Jose Canseco and he and I went to card shops together.  At this time, Alomar was something like a primary focus.

At some point around 1993, the Alomar collection lost its luster.  Much of that had to do with the near-constant injuries he faced each year.  Part of it was also that I slowed down my collection in general.  After that I picked up a few cards here and there, but for the most part this was a time when the player collection took a backseat, almost permanently.

For some reason I never really got a lot of cards of Alomar in packs.  So the collection rarely increased until recently.  For the last year I have added a number of cards here and there in trade.  Which brings us to this week.  I decided to resurrect the Sandy Alomar Jr. player collection.