This will be an article of a more personal kind that I had hoped to write for quite some time now. I have been collecting baseball cards for roughly seventeen years now, about sixty percent of my life or so. It is an incredibly rewarding hobby with plenty of opportunities for learning and in which you meet plenty of interesting people. It can also of course be a successful business venture if you know what you’re doing. But this article is not about the art of money making as it pertains to sports cards but rather the more childlike motivations for which I continue to engage in this hobby. It is not a business venture to me although I have no problem with the business side of the hobby. I know I have an insurance policy in case I find myself strapped for cash or intend to make a large purchase of some kind but I see value in my cards beyond money and this is what I wanted to expound on in this piece.
I don’t remember exactly when I started collecting or even really why I asked my parents to buy me some sports cards in the first place. I just remember being ten or so years old and newly in love with this game called baseball. I also remember having a tattered Mike Scott card from 1986 even before I really knew what baseball was or who Mike Scott was. It was in some box with some toys I think and at the time the toys were frankly far more appealing. In any case, today I know Mike Scott had a phenomenal 1986 season and a nice career and I still have that badly tattered card somewhere in my binders and boxes today. I vaguely remember getting my folks to buy me a bunch of boxes at some antique show filled with assorted cards from the 90’s. These were not especially valuable but I would spend hours upon hours poring through them, the glossy pictures, the feel of them, and the stats at the back which might as well have been Swahili to me back then.
As time passed, the hobby was still the hobby. I still got cards for my birthday, Christmas, my high school and university graduation etc. Now that I am an adult and earn my own money, I still find myself budgeting some discretionary income for cards. Obviously, the bills come first but play money for me is better deployed in cards than bars or fancy restaurants. I have a rather formidable collection of binders full of cards. Some are heavy and provide a nice strength workout. Others are lighter. Some are baseball, others hockey, others soccer, others a mish-mash of whatever. I still enjoy the backs of cards the most. There is something incredibly gratifying about having access to an important part of somebody’s life story in the palm of your hand. What do I mean by this? Well, for any professional athlete, the stats tell the story of their careers in numbers. The stats on the back of their cards reflect the fruits of everything they spent their formative years working towards. I always loved reading biographies and reading stories and to me, the stats on the back of a card tell a story, give insights and allow you to share in some strange sense in someone else’s achievements.
I also derive a sense of achievement in my own right and not simply by owning thousands of plastic rectangles with pictures on them. I learned much of my baseball through card collecting. My first encounter with the stars across the many eras of the game’s history came through cards. The names and faces of Mays, Schmidt, Koufax, Piazza etc. came to my consciousness through cards. Whatever important lessons in negotiation, organization, budgeting and social skills probably came mostly through the hobby. You meet a number of very interesting people and become good friends with a number of like-minded people. You also pick up tidbits of info from conversations with grizzled veterans of the hobby. More importantly though, you learn to retain an attachment to the wondrous, starry-eyed ethos of boyhood. Many of these men regardless of whether they are dealers, collectors, or both retain a childlike carefreeness about them. The hobby connects them to those games they attended with their dads, the bars at which they cheered for their team in their college years, the games they took and take their kids to and who knows what else. It adds a completeness to life. I know it has added a completeness to mine.
Speaking of completeness, as a baseball card collector, I play the part of hoarder, researcher, archivist, antique connoisseur, and yes, merchant to some degree. (I have to negotiate after all to get the cards I want within my budget) I find wearing these hats particularly rewarding even though I don’t always feel like I’m all of these things. This is because I have to wear these hats in some way or other in other facets of my life. My day job requires me to have good negotiation skills, an ability to create and control a budget and organize documentation. Understanding the investment potential of my collection allows me to also understand basic ideas behind investing in general. No, I am not Buffett or anything, but collecting and now understanding the investment value of my collection was my gateway to understanding that time and patience are the investor’s best weapon. It also feels good being a subject matter expert on something, anything at all. In my case, that’s baseball history. I built this blog on the back of having that knowledge and that knowledge came from my years collecting cards and reading about the stories behind the players and teams involved. Continuing in the hobby also helps keep that spark of intellectual curiosity alive as far as the game and its history. That keeps content coming over here in this blog also.
Continuing to be a card collector to me is about being able to continue fostering a connection with the game I love and that has given me so much in terms of pleasures, joys and life lessons. It’s not so much about money or status or being able to say I have this card or that card although all that is definitely part of the fun too. I also will readily admit that I like having that safety net available should I be forced to sell part of my collection. That said, I am a collector and an amateur baseball historian before many other things. This is my passion. Cards allow me to touch history, feel it, experience it. Coin collectors will tell you the same thing. There is something exhilarating in that, especially with the very old cards. I can tell you what it feels like holding a century in your hands. It sounds melodramatic or even downright deranged but that really is the feeling when you hold one of those early 20th century cards. Only a passionate collector, a historian or an archeologist can describe such a feeling. Money cannot buy such a thing. There is a certain peace that comes also with sitting on a Sunday afternoon with a binder of cards on your lap, pulling one out and staring quizzically at it with the question “who was this guy again?” in your mind and drawn on your face. It really does allow you to forget about life for a while. It’s a quiet form of bringing oneself peace that requires neither other people nor fancy equipment nor any explanations. Thousands do this everyday, “innocent as children, longing for the past”. (baseball fans will know what movie this quote is from)
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