By Richard Rosen
When the call came in, I knew right away from the sound of the ring it was my daughter. She was spending the week in Vermont, visiting with her two male cousins. Apparently the boys were cleaning out their closets and, never big on sports themselves, they wanted to know if I wanted some old baseball cards. Silly question; while I don’t actively collect them anymore, I still have my collections from when I was a kid a looooong time ago. My prize possession among all the hundreds of cards is my 1957 Topps Mickey Mantle, valued at $650, though that would be in mint condition and mine was far from that. Of course back in the day I was collecting these now prized pieces of cardboard we didn’t realize that someday some of them would be worth a small fortune, or actually what would have been a fortune in 1957, but today is a few tanks of gas and a ticket to the promenade level behind home plate at AT&T Park, along with a sausage smothered sauerkraut and an ice-cream. Sure I’ll take ‘em.
The kid gets home and hands me two very heavy, very well made boxes, both holding “high # series” Upper Deck cards from 1989. Here are a few surprises; as Zimmerman sang, “the times they are a-changin’”. Back in the old days the cards came 5 or 10 in a package wrapped in plastic coated paper with a flat rectangle of powdered bubble gum. When you bought these cards you had no idea which ones were inside. Early in the collecting season then, each time you
opened the package there was the thrill of several new cards to add to the collection. But as the number of cards in the collection increased, your chances of finding new cards decreased, and then you understood about the agony of defeat when you unwrapped your fourth Gus Zernial. Your only hope was to unload your doubles, triples, quadruples, working a trade with your albatrosses (much like the Giants would like to do with Barry Zito) that would net you a new player. If worse came to worse you could always clothespin one of the cards to the front fork of your bicycle where it would make a clack-clack-clack sound like a motorcycle as you pedaled along.
But nowadays (or at least in 1989 and I assume still today) you buy a sturdy box of about 100 cards and you know exactly which numbers are in the box. Think about it, THE CARDS ARE IN A BOX, a corrugated cardboard one at that, surely meant to protect them. In truth, you were no longer buying baseball cards in the sense that we did as kids, to look at endlessly, to play games with (flip the cards toward a wall, the one that lands the closest wins, a card that “stands up” against the wall, officially known as a “leaner,” is an automatic winner), and (God forbid) to write on when the player gets traded to keep things up-to-date. No, once we bought baseball cards, lots of them. That’s one reason why they’re so valuable today: every kid that wasn’t headed to the ROTC in junior high to avoid PE had baseball cards, and because they were so common, no one gave them much thought, and so they were destroyed in one way or another or lost or thrown away, leading to relative scarcity and the baseball card boom of the early 2000’s. Today you’re not buying cards, you’re making an investment, the cards come in sealed “strong boxes” better not opened, you might rumple one, and just tucked away somewhere where your mother can’t find them. It’s akin to buying a US savings bond and waiting a few years for it to mature.
To Be Concluded
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