1987 Topps BJ Surhoff
I'm going to start by telling you that 1987 is vintage so this is a legitimate Baseball Card Memory. If you're old like me, you may not want to believe that this card is more than 30 years old. But alas, it is the truth. So deal with it!
BJ Surhoff was the first and only overall number one draft pick the Brewers even had. At the time, I was an obsessive Brewers' fan living in New Jersey. This was exciting to me to finally follow a team with the overall number one pick.
Surhoff breezed through the Brewers' minor league system and made his major league debut in April of 1987. Just months before that, he made his baseball card debut with this 1987 Topps "Future Stars" card. I bought packs, boxes and a large lot of single cards. He was going to be a Hall of Famer and I was going to get rich off these cards.
Well, that didn't happen. He had a solid rookie campaign hitting nearly .300, but showed limited power. The 1987 Brewers won their first 13 games and found themselves 20-3. Two weeks later, they were 20-15. It didn't matter to me. I loved Brewers' baseball back in the 1980s.
I left for college towards the end of that season. The following summer, I met BJ Surhoff and got his autograph at a baseball card show. It hung in my dorm room for two years! Later that year, Kenner produced Starting Lineup sports figures and I bought my BJ Surhoff figure. It was so cool.
Nineteen years later, after stints with the Braves and the Orioles, Surhoff retired from baseball with more than 2300 hits and I wil always have great memories of his 1987 Topps rookie card!
