Rather than post some of the 200+ 1989 Upper Deck cards that I received from my brother while on hiatus, I’m going to post the one card that I probably would have gotten even if I hadn’t needed it.
William Hayward Wilson. “Mookie” to his friends and fans. Torment to me.
One day when I was little and trading cards with my brother, he decided that Mookie would be one of my favorite players. If I needed a Mookie for my set, my brother would ask if I was just mking it up to get more Mookie. If he needed a Mookie that I had, he’d pretend that I’d never trade it away. He would throw in a Mookie to “sweeten” a trade.
As a six or seven year old, it was very aggravating, and looking back now I’m not sure why. And rather than engage some of the more obvious defenses (pick out a player like Mookie to taunt him with, claim his infatuation with Mookie showed his love for him more than me), I would get frustrated and angry. And the funny thing is, looking back, Mookie wasn’t all that bad of a player.
Mookie turned out to be a career .274 hitter with 67 home runs and over 300 stolen bases. He even held the Mets record for most triples until Jose Reyes came along. But Mookie’s probably best known for hitting a ball that Bill Buckner just could not handle in the 1986 World Series.
World Champ Mookie Wilson. I never thought to use that one, either.
Nowadays, I can only look at a Mookie Wilson card and smile. But please don’t look at this as a call for Mookie cards. My brother has hooked me up with enough of them already.
Leave a Reply