SLU Showcase #5 - The Snider Cut

In my last SLU Showcase post, I showed a trio of Red Sox Starting Lineup figures. The Roger Clemens piece was included in a lot of eleven that I recently purchased. That lot also included another star of the Springfield Nuclear Plant Softball Team:

source: Baseball Card Breakdown

Steve Sax was a Yankee at the time of that episode, but he's a Dodger on this 1988 Starting Lineup figure:

He's got the same follow-through pose as several other pieces in my collection, but he doesn't stand up as well. The Sax figure seems a bit shorter than these guys. Did Kenner do that on purpose? It's not like he was noticeably shorter than most big leaguers at the time.

Because the base is a little less sturdy I've put Sax in the Dodgers section of my display rather than the hitters lineup:

You've seen the worn-out Fernando Valenzuela figure before. In between them is a Duke Snider figure from the 1997 Cooperstown Collection. These figures were slightly larger than the flagship SLUs. I remember seeing dozens of Cooperstown Collection pieces in retail stores in the mid-'90s and wondered if they were less popular because kids my age and younger weren't as familiar with the history of the game as I was.

When my aunt passed away in 2015, my mom and cousin organized her belongings and found this figure, sealed, with a price tag from a yard sale we had around the year 2000. Apparently I sold it to my aunt (who was a Dodgers fan in the '50s) for $5. Not sure what I needed the money for, but it was nice of her to keep this figure in the family.

My mother gave it back to me, I took it home to Jersey... and immediately dropped it. The packaging actually opened on one side from the force of the accident, so I finished the job.

Here's the card that was included:

I've never seen this image anywhere else, though I'm sure a true blue Dodger fan would recognize the source. Duke was always one of my favorite All-Time Greats. When our nearby LCS wasn't nearby and my wife and I didn't have kids, we participated in a Pack Wars event and won an autographed Duke Snider baseball:

Autographed baseballs aren't something I normally collect but I do have a few meaningful souvenirs.

Say... is that a Starting Lineup baseball? Topic for a future SLU Showcase, perhaps 😁

Thanks for reading!



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