Twins Nostalgia: What Is Your All-Time Favorite Twins Baseball Card?

Baseball card collecting has become much more intense than it was in my childhood. Our biggest choice was whether to spend the 75 cents on a standard pack of Topps or spring for the $1.25 pack of glossy, flashy, hologram-y Upper Deck. Or, if we were really feeling fancy, we could go to KB Toys and splurge on a rack pack! 

I am going to sound like some kind of boomer here, but I can't keep up with the refractors, variations, jersey patches, etc... nor can I afford a box of cards from the local hobby shop at this point. So, with that being said, I have shifted my focus to trying to collect each and every Topps base-set Twins card in existence. 

No matter how many team sets I buy, or binders I fill with chronologically-cataloged cardboard Twins, my favorite card remains the same: 

The 1989 Topps Gary Gaetti card. 

Listen, I get it, it's a pretty unremarkable card for most people and it's worth MAYBE ten cents at the present time. 

However, for me it's about the memory associated with the card as opposed to its value. 

I can remember sitting on our rickety metal swing set as a seven-year-old when my dad returned from the store (to which he undoubtedly went to buy some dip). He handed me a pack of baseball cards, and I immediately began rifling through them looking for Jose Canseco, Cal Ripken, Kirby Puckett, and other superstars of the day, but mostly I was most stoked to get a Twins card. 

After flipping past Mike Moore, Jeffrey Leonard and other randoms from that '89 set, I saw it: a Gary Gaetti card. I excitedly showed it to my dad, who exclaimed "Wow! Not bad for a 75-cent pack of cards! Hang onto that one!"

And I have. It's the only card I would never trade or gamble with as a kid. Why Gary Gaetti? I don't know. He is a Twins Hall of Famer, won a World Series ring and has two cool nicknames in "G-Man" and "The Rat!"  Maybe it's some of this too... 

My latest mission has been to find autographed cards of the 1989 Topps set. I have acquired most of them in person, a couple off of Twins fan groups and one off of eBay of questionable quality. My white whale, of course, is a legit signed 1989 Topps Kirby Puckett. 

What is your favorite Twins card and why? What do you collect? Let us know in the comments! 

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