The Quest for the Lost Rautzhan

During the summer of 1978, my pursuit of a complete Dodger team set began as enthusiastic, soon became frantic, transitioned to obsessive, and ended in despair. I had no trouble obtaining most of the Boys in Blue like Steve Garvey, Ron Cey, Don Sutton, Dusty Baker, Manny Mota, etc. But after ripping open pack after pack, two cards continued to elude me: Reggie Smith and Lance Rautzhan.

Since Reggie Smith was one of the Dodgers' top performers, he was a known commodity to me. As for Lance Rautzhan, I had no clue who he was. But his card (#709) was on the Dodgers' checklist. So that alone lent it great relevance in my eyes.

Near the end of the summer, I finally pulled a Reggie Smith from a pack (as I described in a prior post, that was a day of elation for me), leaving Mr. Rautzhan's as the only unchecked box on my Dodger checklist. But as the lazy days of summer came to an end and the onset of fall was nigh, the supply of 1978 Topps baseball cards on the shelves of Seven-Elevens and other convenience stores and pharmacies began to dwindle until they had been completely replaced with that season's football cards.

This was many years before sports card shops were common fixtures in the community. So once the packs of a particular series disappeared from stores, the only hope for plugging holes in your collection was to trade with someone who had the card you wanted. Which worked great ... when you could find the card. The problem was, no one had Lance Rautzhan. Friends, cousins, new move-ins, basically anyone with even a rudimentary collection I would arrange trades with in my increasingly desperate search for #709. I would have happily traded a George Brett, a Robin Yount, or an Eddie Murray rookie for the now-mythical Lance Rautzhan card. But notwithstanding my persistence, this coveted piece of cardboard remained unobtainable.

For years, its absence from my collection stuck out like a sore thumb, and I'd begun to question whether it even existed. Then in 1983, a baseball card shop (aptly named The Baseball Card Shop) opened nearby, and suddenly, my mission to find the Rautzhan no longer seemed so futile. I got my older sister to drive me there soon after its grand opening. As I entered the store, I took a moment to soak up the surroundings. I had never seen anything like it. Cards were everything: on the wall, behind glass display cases, in dozens of albums, in stacks of boxes. This was heaven!

I walked up to the shopkeeper to ask where I could find the 1978 Topps baseball singles. He went over to the shelves, pulled down an 800-count white cardboard box, and handed it to me. I opened the lid, and with a sense of anticipation that had long been simmering, I zealously began flipping through the cards. As I neared the 700s, my excitement became palpable. The Quest for the Lost Rautzhan was nearly complete!

Finally, I got to #709. I had long wondered what this long sought-after card would look like. I can't remember what I was expecting (perhaps for beams of sunlight to warmly shine down on me or to hear heavenly choirs break out into song?), but I was a little taken aback when I saw that it was a 4-in-1 rookie card. But while it seemed somewhat anticlimactic that the object for which I had searched so diligently for so many years wasn't a stand-alone Lance Rautzhan card, I felt a tremendous sense of relief that I had finally achieved closure with respect to my '78 Dodgers set.

Looking back on my pursuit, I find it rather amusing that I invested so much time, effort, and energy into obtaining the card of a journeyman reliever whose modest career lasted less than three seasons. But such is the mindset of an avid card collector. Woody Gelman, the creative force behind Topps cards back during its heyday, once tried to explain what compels one to collect: "Part of collecting is the desire to complete something, to find everything in one category." He couldn't have explained any better what had driven me for so many years to find that elusive Lance Rautzhan.

As a postscript, it's a rather remarkable coincidence that Lance Rautzhan's career intersects with the name of this blog, for it was Rautzhan who recorded the final out in the bottom of 8th inning in Game 3 of the '77 NLCS, meaning that—following the heroics of of Vic Davalillo and Manny Mota and others in the 9th—Lance Rautzhan picked up the win in one of the most meaningful games in Dodger history. Funny how interconnected things are, isn't it?