Baseball cards were easily accessible and were sold at most gas stations and convenience stores in my neighborhood. There were also specialized "card" shops, many of which were tied in with book stores and comic book shops- and even coin-dealers. A few times a year, there were baseball card "shows" that were held at area shopping malls and flea markets. At card shows, private collectors and retail sellers of sporting cards set up shop and displayed their collections - most for sale, some for trade. At card shows, I was in baseball heaven.
Many of my friends also collected and traded baseball cards. Every year we anticipated the release of the freshly designed cards. There were a couple of different brands of baseball cards, including Fleer and Donruss, but the Topps brand was the king. Every year (starting in 1984), my Dad bought the complete set of Topps cards...792 cards in each set. These sets of cards, were not bought from a huge retail chain store, but were purchased from card shops whose owners or employees opened hundreds of packs of the newly released cards and organized the sets by hand. My brother and I were excited every time my Dad brought the new season's card set home. I would go through the whole set, checking card numbers, memorizing players statistics and personal information, and looking at the great pictures. I was usually in awe of the baseball players depicted on the cards - grizzled veterans like George Brett, Cal Ripken Jr., and Rickey Henderson and young phenoms like Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, and Darryl Strawberry. Also each year, new players showed up on their own, coveted "Rookie" cards. The out-of-market players made baseball more interesting to me, and added to the norm of my hometown Detroit Tigers in games and on local news.
Besides the sets, I also had my own collection of cards. Players I idolized and respected were the only ones allowed into my own, personal collection. Players like Wade Boggs, Tony Gwynn, Lenny Dykstra and Kirby Puckett (who became my favorite player of that era and will blog about later). I paid extra attention to the ball players I collected, seeking out their rookie cards, All-Star cards, highlight cards, insert cards, and off-brand cards- all which were kept in the plastic sleeved pages of my 3-ring binder. That binder became an extension of me, accompanying me to all the shops and shows I would visit. The player cards I acquired from buying packs of baseball cards that did not make it into my collection were kept in an old shoebox- named the "Hack Box"- available for trading, or just to hang on to if a player caught my eye down the road.
I collected baseball cards and went to card shows very seriously for about 6 or 7 years. Sometime around 1990-91, I stopped collecting and started selling my collection. My Dad also stopped bringing the Topps sets home, by then my brother and I were moving on. All the time it took to acquire the cards seemed like nothing to me. I sold-out my childhood heroes for money that could supplement my part-time job's paycheck. I needed the money to fund my high school lifestyle and to put gas in my tank. The "value" of a card (deemed so by a monthly price guide) and what a card shop dealer would actually pay me for a card was disheartening, but I didn't care. I sold any cards that dealers would buy, only hanging to the complete sets and my Kirby Puckett collection - which by that time was kept in it's own binder and was made up of over 400 different cards.
I actually do not regret selling most of my baseball cards, and have no idea what happened to my Kirby Puckett binder- lost, maybe, in a move from Michigan to Texas. I have always paid attention to MLB baseball, and after the Yankees' David Wells threw his perfect game against the Twins in 1998, I thought to myself "He would be a great player to collect baseball cards of"...so, I did. Living in Texas now, I thought about how to go about getting some baseball cards. Gone were the card shops and shows. The only baseball cards I could find were at the local Target. So I turned to eBay- I was blown away when I seen how much the hobby had changed! There were several different card companies now, and each produced numerous series of cards. I was able to find a "lot" of 100 different David Wells cards and bought them relatively cheap. When the cards arrived, I was intrigued by the card quality, and the photography- they were much nicer than the cardboard baseball cards of my youth that smelled like the cheap stick of bubble-gum included in the packs. However, something struck me wrong- the cards were just to easy to get! It used to be fun, going to baseball card shops and shows and searching for cards of my favorite baseball players.
Purchasing baseball cards online didn't get me back into card collecting right away. When buying cards online through eBay and several other baseball card web sites, all I would have to do was find the card I wanted (usually very easy), click "here" to buy and they would show up in my mailbox from all across the country. It all seemed very saturated and null of any excitement. Also, I never could key in on a player like I did with Kirby Puckett.
Then I had an idea- start another card collection just of my favorite team, the Detroit Tigers. Collect every Topps Tigers Team Set from my birth year (1974), until present. I turned mostly to eBay and a couple of other card websites. I started my collection with the most memorable Tigers team from my youth- 1984, the last time they won the World Series. From there, I just filled in the rest of the years past, up unto the present. Now each year, I have something to look forward to again- the release of the new Topps Tigers cards.
I find it enjoyable that I continue to do something that I loved so much as a kid. I still have the Hack Box up in my attic (couldn't find a baseball card dealer who was interested in buying those) and once again have a 3-ring binder full of some of my favorite "Paper Heroes".
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The newer 3-ring binder:
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