Ode to Baseball Cards

      In the past few weeks we lost two baseball greats: Lou Brock and Tom “Terrific” Seaver. One of the first things I thought about with their passing was my baseball card collection. When I was a kid in the late 70’s, I collected baseball cards and I remember seeing both the Lou Brock and Tom Seaver cards you see above. I’m sure all the names of baseball players of that era, however obscure, are somewhere in my brain. After all I was constantly flipping through all my cards and would see their names again and again. The first year I started collecting in a serious and passionate way was in 1976

     At this time it was mostly Topps cards that dominated the market, not just with baseball and the other major pro sports, but also with movies and TV. There was Mork and Mindy, Happy Days, Charlie's Angels and other collections from the biggest TV shows and movies of the day. You better believe there were a ton of Star Wars cards out there. My brother had some of those. But for me I think there was something more tangible and fun with collecting baseball cards. 1976 was also the year I went to my first major league baseball game at Shea Stadium to see the New York Mets, so it was thrilling to collect baseball cards and then see those players in person or watch them on TV. Each year the new baseball cards would come out right before baseball season started. It was exciting to see what the new design was and give it a thumbs up or down. I’m sure I disparaged the look of the 1978 baseball card, that year the team names were written in cursive. Yuck. But no matter how little I liked the look of the new baseball cards of any particular year, it would never discourage me from collecting them.
     

     The Topps baseball cards were sold in 3 kinds of quantities and packaging. There was the 14 count pack for 20¢ that was wrapped in wax paper with an illustration of a pitcher pitching or a batter swinging. A 21 count pack for 30¢ which was wrapped in cellophane, hence the name cello pack And finally a 39 count pack at 59¢, which they called a rack pack because they hung on racks in stores. These rack packs had 3 sections of 13 cards each, wrapped in clear plastic. (These prices and card counts I mention here are from 1978. The counts would change from year to year and obviously the price did as well.) They all came with a horrible stick of gum, which I always chewed. Not all stores sold all 3 kinds of packaging. One store might only sell the wax pack, while other, just the cello pack. The McCrory’s store sold the rack packs. I still remember going in there and seeing them hanging off the rods. What a beautiful site. Once I bought 10 of these packs, that’s over $6 with tax, a large purchase when you’re 10 in 1978. It was a thrill to tear into those packs and to see what cards were in there. Throughout the spring and summer months of buying these packs of cards there were always a few players that evaded your collection. No matter how many packs you bought, that player you needed was never there. Of course you’d end up with doubles, triples and even quadruples of other cards. This is where the cards sold in transparent packaging proved most useful because you could see the few cards that were on the tops and bottoms and see if that elusive card was one of them. But the day would come when you opened a fresh pack and there it was, finally, the card you’ve been looking for all season. You felt like you just got Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. You could also trade some of those doubles and triples you had for that missing card in your collection. I once traded 20 cards for one card I needed with some kid at school. I think I may have had to trade a Charleston Chew as well. In addition to collecting cards, there were a number of games you could play with them.

     One game I liked was called tossing cards or what we called “the wall”. It’s just like pitching pennies. The players each have 10 baseball cards or so, they take turns tossing them towards a wall from about 8 ft away and the one who's card ends up closest to the wall wins all the cards. With tossing cards you could ding the corners and maintaining sharp corners is paramount in card collecting. Another game we played was called “colors”. You and your opponent would flip cards until the color of the top card matched the one that preceded it, wherein the person who threw the top card would win all the cards. Usually the name of the player would be in some color or there would be a colored banner under their name or some color somewhere on the card you could use. I guess there would be less damage to the cards playing this game, however they still could get messed up by the dirty, sweaty, chocolate stained hands of the kids playing.
     I think the late 70’s early 80’s was the time when people seriously started to consider collecting baseball cards as an investment. Up till then kids collected baseball cards, then they didn’t. “My mom threw out all my cards” was a common refrain. I remember there were always those old cards that were talked about as being valuable, like 1909 Honus Wagner (it was sold at auction for $3.12 million in 2016) but I never really thought of my baseball card collection as an investment. I did try to keep my cards neat and organized. I had a shoebox for each year and had them neatly stacked in my closet. I took pride in my collection. Whenever I played those card games it was only with the current year’s baseball cards, so if they got messed up I could replace them easily enough. After a while I wanted to grow my collection with baseball cards from previous years. There was a goodwill type store I went to that had a bunch of cards but they were all mixed together willy nilly in a flat box and those cards only went a few years back. The only place you could get decent, older baseball cards back then was from a card and comic book shop. There was one such shop in Brooklyn not far from where I lived called Canarsie Books & Comics, which I always referred to as Jerry's comics after the owner, Jerry Kanowitz. It was a magnificent store. I loved the smell of the comic books that were in rows and rows of cardboard boxes. The more expensive comics might hang from a line with a close pin or in a glass display case. I’ll always remember seeing Silver Surfer #1 hanging on the wall for all to see. But I didn’t collect comics, I was there for the baseball cards. I would eagerly look through Jerry’s cards and get very excited, especially if I was finally able to buy one that I had my eye on for several weeks. My friends and I would go there often, sometimes walking the two miles to the store via the Belt Parkway. We’d usually end up at McDonalds or Burger King, being very happy with our purchases, while sucking on a shake 

and eating some fries. I was careful not to get any ketchup on my new baseball cards. I didn’t have

a lot of bucks to spend so I figured out what kind of cards I wanted to get. I definitely wanted to collect all of the New York Mets cards since their 1962 inception. They were my team after all, no matter how awful they were and they were awful in the late 70’s. I remember being very excited to get one of my first Met’s cards, a 1963 Al Jackson (he just passed away last year). I remember it had this musty smell-most of the old cards I bought had that smell. I was always sniffing them whenever I looked through my collection. I also wanted to collect the MVPs of The National and Americans Leagues from each year. My first purchase in that category was the 1968 MVPs Bob Gibson of the Cardinals and Denny McLain of the Tigers (the only year a pitcher won the MVP in both the National and American Leagues) I also collected whatever good cards I could find and afford like a ‘66 Pete Rose, a ‘68 Rod Carew and a ‘73 Joe Torre. Torre was the manager of the Mets at the time in the late 70’s. When he won all those World Series with the Yankees’ in the 90’s I was like, where the hell was this Torre when he was with the Mets? Anyway, it was fun to build my collection. I bought these 9 card pocket pages you would put into a 3 ring binder and displayed some of my cards this way. I also bought individual plastic sleeves for cards and stored them in this really cool wooden shoe shine box.

   

      I don’t think I really appreciated it then but the graphic design of some of these Topps baseball cards, especially in the late ‘50’s and early 60’s, was outstanding. There were some really good designs in the late 60’s and early 70’s as well. The 1975 design was goofy to be sure but in retrospect it probably captured what the 70’s was about best. Every card had 2 completely random colors, one at the top half and one at the bottom half and then another color for the font of the team name. It was like a clown card. In 1981, I found out you could purchase the whole year’s card collection in one shot, directly from Topps. That seemed ridiculous to me. Where’s the fun in that?

            

      I’m sure that it would have been cheaper in the long run to do this but it would also be incredibly dull. I loved opening up the packs and sorting them by team in a shoebox: American League on one side, National League on the other. If you get the whole set at once, then what do you do? Isn’t the fun of collecting anything the thrill of the hunt? If you’re one of those people who likes to collect spoons from every state, are you going just by 50 spoons at once? Of course not. You’re going to travel to every state and get them that way. If you collected Fiestaware, would you want to get every discontinued piece they’ve ever made in one shot, even if you could afford it? I think you’d be happier searching for them, maybe on eBay, maybe at an estate sale. You might even get lucky and find a rare Fiestaware pitcher at some Goodwill in Omaha, Nebraska. It’s fun to collect things this way but for some reason, after 1981, I stopped collecting baseball cards altogether. 

     I’m trying to think of the reason I stopped. I guess I just lost interest. I was getting older and I was hanging out more. A few years after that I started to collect records, both albums and 45’s but I eventually stopped that too and then I didn’t have any hobbies or any real interests. I didn’t practice an instrument or play any sports. I didn’t write, take photographs, play Dungeons and Dragons or even read. It would have definitely been beneficial to focus on something in my crazy high school and early college years. I guess my only real hobbies were drinking and smoking lots of weed. In 1990 I sold the last of my cards. I’m sure the money I received for them was pissed away pretty quickly. I wish I had kept and continued to collect baseball cards. And not just because I would have had some valuable cards in my collection, like the ‘78 Eddie Murray and Nolan Ryan cards, both fetching around $900 in mint condition these days, though that couldn't hurt. I loved the discipline of collecting. I loved appreciating them in their shoeboxes and 3-ring binders. I would have done all sorts of research on the baseball cards, the players and the history of it all. Well c'est la vie. These days I do have many hobbies and interests, which is very important for anyone living in these crazy times. But whenever I hear about any baseball players of that era, I do look back fondly at that time of my childhood where unwrapping a pack of baseball cards brought a lot of joy.