30-Day Baseball Card Challenge: Day 3

Today I'm back with the third day of my baseball card challenge. The topic for the day is 'a card from the first set I tried to complete'. In the early days of my collecting history, my cards were sourced by my brother. He gave me dupes of stuff he had. However, in 1989 I began hearing the buzz about the Fleer Billy Ripken error. That just so happened to coincide with my local convenience store putting boxes of cards on their shelves for the first time. I used a lot of allowance and birthday money on packs of 1989 Fleer in hopes of finding that 'other' Ripken with the curse word on it. I also bought a few packs of Upper Deck that year. While I liked the design and the 'premium' feel of those cards, I often opted for the Fleer packs because they were less expensive. Sadly, I hadn't heard as much about the Ken Griffey Jr RC. If I had, perhaps I would have bought more UD packs. At some point, I actually began sorting all of the Fleer cards I had and started a list of the numbers I needed. One day, my family drove out to a flea market and I somehow convinced my dad to buy me a Fleer factory set thinking it was the guaranteed way to finally get my hands on that Ripken error(I was a kid and didn't know how those things worked). Obviously, I got home and flipped through each card in that set and was disappointed to find a black box over the bat knob when I came to that card. At that point, I gave up my chase with somewhere around only 20 or so cards to go to complete my hand collated set. To this day, I still have that opened factory set sitting on a shelf in my closet. There are some interesting cards in the 1989 Fleer set. Here is one of my favorites:

Though I've always been a Yankee fan, I really loved watching the A's in the late '80's and early '90's. During that time, Jose Canseco was probably my favorite MLB player not named Don Mattingly. I love this card because it's a reminder of an incredible achievement by an exciting player prior to his name and legacy being ruined by PED use and whistle blowing. Thanks for reading.