The Voice of the Hobby Column by Jeff Clow February, 2019
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The Voice of the Hobby column by Jeff Clow February, 2019 ---------------------------------------------------------- It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the launch of the next great phase of Starting Lineups. When I was approached by Hank Reed, the founder of this new website, I felt a sense of dé·jà vu. It took me back to 1989 when the editor of Tuff Stuff magazine asked me to write a column about Starting Lineups. Back then, I was living in Cincinnati and had written him asking why he didn’t have any coverage of an emerging hobby - the collecting of the Starting Lineup brand of sports figurines. That request in 1989 came out of the blue. But the more I pondered it, the more I thought it felt like something worth doing. I had developed a passion for collecting SLU figures by that time, and in my professional career I knew that passion was an integral part of any venture. Fast forward to 2019 and once again the opportunity to help relight the fire of SLU collecting is offered to me. The same thought process once again crosses my mind. Is it worth the effort? Is it realistic? Is there a path to success? And then I had a long conversation with Hank Reed. And without putting words in his mouth, I can say unequivocally that I heard the same passion in his plan to launch SLU Authority and help usher in the rebirth of a dedicated place for SLU fans worldwide. The word that came to mind for me almost immediately was dormant. Webster’s dictionary defines dormant as “marked by a suspension of activity: such as a: temporarily devoid of external activity - a dormant volcano b: temporarily in abeyance yet capable of being activated - seeds will remain dormant until spring” And that seemed like the perfect metaphor for the state of the hobby today. Not dead and definitely capable of being activated. 2019 is a long way from 1988 when Kenner launched the Starting Lineup brand of sports figurines. The brainchild of then Cincinnati Bengals football player Pat McInally. He had sold his condo to a Kenner executive and was asked for his ideas for a new addition to the Kenner lineup of toys. McInally - the only person among NFL players that has been verified to have gotten a perfect score on the NFL’s Wonderlic Test - famously said that the action figures of that era were based solely on fantasy. Why not action figures showing the real life players of the MLB, NFL and NBA. Why not? And thus from those first observations from a very smart football player, the Starting Lineup journey began. Originally targeted at kids - within a year the market morphed almost immediately to collectors of all ages and the hobby grew quickly to become a worldwide phenomenon. And I was fortunate to be involved as a member of that first band of collectors to realize the universal appeal of these relatively inexpensive sports action figures. This brief history recap is probably well known to many of you who are reading this column. However, in the intervening years a lot of water has passed under the bridge. The hobby exploded in the 1990’s and that decade is often referred to as the golden era of Starting Lineups. Tuff Stuff magazine and then Beckett and several other magazines began covering Starting Lineup collecting and had price lists showing the mostly increasing values of SLUs. Then there was the first ever Starting Lineup convention in Dover, Delaware and the first fist fights in the aisles of Toys R Us among overzealous collectors and dealers. In fact, the hobby exploded to such a large extent that the Wall Street Journal had an article about the phenomenon of Starting Lineups. Fast forward to today. The hobby is still alive and well, but the numbers of collectors is a fraction of what it was back in the first golden era. Why that occurred is likely the result of many factors and perhaps the biggest one is Hasbro’s decision to stop producing new Starting Lineups in 2001. Without a steady stream of figurines of new professional players, many collectors decided to stop their collecting efforts. They didn’t all leave the hobby - but many became dormant collectors. But then 15 years later, something magical occurred. In October of 2016, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers released a Starting Lineup figure of QB Jameis Winston. In November and December of that same year, two other pro teams released SLU type figurines - and a whole new generation of collectors decided to join the hobby. So how does a dormant brand come back to life? The same way it started life - featuring sports stars in action figure poses and having a limited number of copies of each figure. In any collectible there has always been those two aspects. The product itself and the relative scarcity of the product. Sometimes it was regional scarcity and sometimes it was overall scarcity. Perhaps the most famous sports collectible of the last 75 years is the iconic Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card. A unique player and a small number of copies of the card made this item famous to the world in general. Here’s a not so hypothetical question. If you read online or in the local newspaper that there’s an upcoming professional sports game that will be giving away 15,000 copies of a figurine of one of their players - would you go? Would you take a buddy or two and offer to pay their way in if they will give you the figurines they get? Sure you would. I know I would. And that’s the seed that has been long planted inside all of us that’s just waiting to sprout. And not just in us, but in thousands of other people who never experienced the thrill of the hunt when Starting Lineups first were released. Collecting Starting Lineups for many of us has been a labor of love. Before the rise of the internet, the only way to get regional SLUs was to barter for them. I distinctly remember offering up five local SLU figures from southern Ohio in the hopes of getting the scarce Nolan Ryan from a Texas collector. And then the SLU dealer community emerged - which allowed all of us to acquire rare figures if we were willing to pay a premium price for them. We’ve hung on to those figures from 1988 or 1991 or 1999 for two or more decades. They’ve followed us in boxes or cases as we’ve moved from one home to another. As I write this, there are a dozen of them sitting on the top shelf of my desk looking down on me. My life has undergone massive changes since 1988, as it has for many of you reading this column. Yet the appeal of these four inch figurines has remained inside us all along. Why is that? Seriously. Why? My guess is that we all have a personal reason why Starting Lineups still resonate with us after all these years. For some, the challenge of collecting all the SLU figures for a particular team, or a particular sport is something we really enjoyed doing back in the day. For others, it was the acquisition of a few rare figures that we know were released in very small quantities. And for others, it is the great memories that flood back into our consciousness when we remember going to the stores with our child, or our parent in search of the elusive SLU figure. That’s why the hobby is on the verge of a rebirth. Because those same opportunities still exist in 2019. And even as the regional and national toy stores have gone away, a new avenue has opened up for Starting Lineup figurines. Whether it be at a stadium giveaway or a special promotional release - the fact is there that Starting Lineups still are a sought after item and that the brand still has strong legs as the journey continues. Welcome to the spring thaw of a wonderful hobby. Glad you are here to see the new buds poking through the surface. It was a heck of a ride in the past. And it is going to be a heck of a ride into the future. -END- (Jeff Clow was the first national columnist to write extensively about Starting Lineups. His monthly column in Tuff Stuff magazine ran from 1989 until 2006. The Wall Street Journal called him “The Voice of the Hobby” and he was a featured speaker at SLU conventions across the USA in the 1990’s. He now writes exclusively for the SLU Authority website) .