Rookie Card of the Week: Bo Jackson for $1.75

This feature can't be just Twins.  I'd run out of good rookie cards to buy within a few weeks.  If I want to maintain the 25 or so pageviews this feature brings, then it is time to branch out a bit.  One of my all-time favorite non-Twins is Bo Jackson.  Everyone loved Bo Jackson.  He was a monster athlete and he was humble too.  He famously dominated baseball and football and his name is 80 grade.  I don't own his rookie card, so here we go:

Bo Jackson was amazing.  This card is amazing.  Look at his body!  Look at how bored he looks!  He was probably a bit bored with professional sports, considering his dominance.  Those Royals uniforms are excellent too.  This card is the total package.  Jackson's physique, his air of bored dominance, the uni, and the rated rookie stamp, more than anything.

Anyone who collected baseball cards in the late-80s and early 90s is familiar with Rated Rookies.  Donruss used that label for just about any rookie, but that blue-lettered label made every rookie card just a tad more special.  Right now, rookie cards have an RC home plate logo.  It's nice to know who the rookies are, but the rated rookie logo is the tops.  You could have slapped that Rated Rookie stamp on a J.T. Bruett card and I would have wanted 400 hundred of them.

Back to Jackson, everyone remembers his brief career.  He ran up the wall, he blasted monster home runs, and even after his extremely serious hip injury, he returned with a bang and hit a home run in his first at bat.  My favorite memory is "the throw."  For the youngsters:



The actual throw is at about the 1:30 mark, but the whole two-minute video is worth watching.  I like to think that Jackson found Harold Reynolds' anti-sabermetric slant was wearing thin, so he decided to humiliate him with this sick throw.  In fact, every time Reynolds makes a loud, arrogant point on the MLB Network, Jackson should just appear in the background, looming and intimidating.

Finally, there was the "Bo Knows" campaign where Jackson was immortalized as a super athlete capable of domination in every sport.  I always thought the Twins marketing folks missed a real opportunity to create a "Joe Knows" campaign for Joe Mauer.  They could show him knowing how to eat all the food on his plate, how to keep his temporary internet files clean and how to properly tend to a terrace garden.  It could be tongue-in-cheek or completely earnest and no one would be able to tell the difference.

Join me next week as I buy another rookie card that I don't need and has no value.