Nostalgia
I Can’t Retire on My Baseball Cards
But I loved collecting them
Among the unrealistic beliefs, I held as a kid was the idea that somehow my shoeboxes of baseball cards would one day be worth lots more than what I paid for them (or, you know, what my parents paid).
If you collected baseball cards in the 1980s or so, you’ll understand. In fact, let’s also pause to remember the way the Topps wax packs crinkled open to reveal those brittle, pink sticks of gum already cracked into pieces and covering the cards with sugary dust. Do I have jaw problems today from chewing two or three pieces at a time, forcing them into a soft wad of gum through several minutes of determination instead of just tossing the gum into the garbage where it belonged?
I loved collecting baseball cards. I didn’t know a lot of other girls who collected, but I didn’t care. I also didn’t know any other girls who wore baseball caps from trucking companies or auto parts distributors, but that’s another (but probably related) story.
Mostly I collected and traded with my brother, or now and then a neighbor or a kid at school. My brother was more methodical in his collecting, keeping his cards in numerical order so that it was easier to see what he needed to complete the year’s set.
I liked keeping mine in order by team. I especially liked when a card manufacturer would do team checklists with a group photo, but I knew not to check the names off and reduce the cards’ value. I also liked special cards like “turn back the clock” cards featuring images of players from what seemed like very long ago but was probably less time than the span between now and the 30-plus years that have passed since I was collecting.
I chose my favorite players for sentimental reasons. Of course, I liked my local team, the Seattle Mariners. I also liked Bruce Sutter — relief pitcher for the Cubs, the Cardinals, and then the Braves — because his beard reminded me of my dad’s. And I liked Fernando Valenzuela, who had endorsed the Rawlings softball glove I had.
My brother and I learned from a magazine that we could send a letter, a baseball card, and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to a player in care of a team’s business address and sometimes get an autograph in return. We sent them to less popular players, knowing we’d have more chance of a reply. I used to keep my autographed cards on the first page of my card album, thinking how nice the signatures looked.
When I was growing up, I was well aware that my Uncle Mike had a set of cards from his 1950s childhood worth thousands of dollars, so why couldn’t my brother and I hold onto our cards and sell them one day when we needed to buy a car or make a down payment on a house or do whatever cool adults did with their baseball card riches?
But while Uncle Mike lived for much of his adult life with his mom and his baseball cards, his friends moved away from home and forgot about their cards and only fretted years later when they realized they’d let a Mickey Mantle rookie card get thrown out with their old spelling bee ribbons and soccer cleats.
There was no such scarcity for cards from the 1980s and beyond because my brother and I and a countless number of our anxious contemporaries kept our cards, too many of us to even imagine a Treasure of the Sierra Madre scenario where we could wait till everyone else slept on their cards and then gleefully put ours up for sale.
My mom and my girlfriend both read my posts here, and I know they both would be glad to gently help me part with my card collection, maybe choosing a few of my favorites to keep in the corner of a drawer somewhere, or making a fun, retro display to hang in a shadowbox on the wall.
Part of me thinks it could be freeing to let the cards go. Part of me thinks, well, I’ve kept them this long, and they don’t take up that much space. Now that I’ve reclaimed their value by writing this and remembering my joy in collecting them, I can decide what’s next for my cardboard friends, eternally posed with their bats against their shoulders, looking tough for the camera.
