Category Archives: Baseball cards

A Card Collector’s Journey

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I’m pleased to present this guest post from Gerry Garte, a regular contributor here.

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Dwight Eisenhower was President when I first started collecting baseball cards. From year to year, I had the biggest stars of the day – Mantle, Mays, Berra, Banks, Aaron.  A small pack of Topps cards cost a nickel, gum included. My collection lived on a 25-cent weekly allowance, plus benefits.

Neighborhood guys and cousins had baseball cards. We’d trade players or flip for them. It was usually closest to a wall or curb wins. Leaners were great.

After Roger Maris hit an amazing 61 home runs in 1961, his card became prized. I had two. One of the neighbor boys offered to swap 12 marbles for my extra Maris. Transaction accepted. Funny thing, nearly 50 years later I still have the marbles.

The cards were a neat hobby, but like most kids, I never thought of their long-term value. Keeping a card in nice condition was not one of my concerns.

By age 16, baseball cards were like bicycles – left behind. So I yielded closet space. Long story short: None of the cards survived my high school years.

In the mid ‘80s, I went to a couple of sports card shows. It had been about 20 years since the early cards. I’d buy one or two cards at a time, spend maybe $10.

I met Enos Slaughter at a Raleigh, NC, show. He is a 1985 inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I got the gentleman’s autograph and was honored to be shaking the hand of a Hall of Famer.

My son, Benjamin, was born in 1991. When he was about 9, I introduced him to baseball card collecting. I was hoping he’d catch the bug as I had 40 years earlier. Turns out, the bug just winged him. But for the second time, it caught me flush.

After we had put together a great set of 1991 cards (year born), I took it from there.

Newly divorced, but with a steady job, I reverted to age 10. I decided – because I could– to buy all 587 cards in the 1961 Topps basic set — the great Maris year.

This time, I focused on the condition of the card. To ensure authenticity and condition, all cards were graded.  It helps avoid getting cheated.

The authentication services I trust most are PSA, SGC and BVG (Beckett). Their service determines if the card is fraudulent or has been tampered with — trimmed, re-colored, etc. Also, it renders a rating or grade for the physical condition and appearance of the card.

It took several years to complete the set. The journey was its own joy. I don’t know what it cost me, but two years later the set sold on eBay for enough to pay off the bills and buy the son a used Jeep. It was an investment in baseball history.

Three years later, I did it again. This time, I had a complete set of graded 1955 Bowmans (320 cards) auctioned off. The pay-off was smaller – due to condition, popularity and size — but the search was just as much fun.

In childhood, baseball had become imbedded. As an adult, seeing Major Leaguers from the ‘50s and ‘60s on baseball cards is a pleasant way of renewing memories and appreciating the game and life as it was.

As the country transitioned from Ike to JFK, I kept up with my world as best I could. I’d check the box scores daily. On Saturdays, after pick-up games at the schoolyard, I’d hurry home to catch Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese call the game of the week. I’d be engrossed, centered in front of the black-and-white TV set, with my baseball cards close by.

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Email Gerry Garte at garte@comcast.net

Buying a box of baseball cards

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When I was about seven and used to get a dollar a week for allowance, I remember once saving a few months to buy a box of baseball cards. I had started buying packs of Topps, Donruss, and Fleer maybe a year before, a pack or two at a time from the grocery store or card shop, and the idea of getting a few dozen packs at once enthralled me. I saved with resolve, my nylon wallet increasingly stuffed with ones even during times I wanted to break and buy a pack. It felt like Christmas when I got that box (1991 Fleer), and the last of the packs couldn’t have gone unopened more than a few hours.

That scene repeated itself a few times the rest of my childhood until I grew out of spending my allowance on trading cards. I’m 27 now and haven’t collected since middle school, but last Friday, I got a reminder of the past. I have been working as a delivery driver the past few months, and on my San Jose route last week, I spotted a sign for a baseball card store near one of my stops. Intrigue, plus desire for a quick break, got me in– one simply does not see many pure baseball card stores anymore, since the bottom for the market fell out around the time I hit adolescence. Even my old card shop in Sacramento had to start holding Magic card contests at the shop, the sports cards tucked almost apologetically into a corner of the display cases.

The San Jose shop was pretty barren, and I was somewhat amazed it was still in business and relatively free of Magic, which I never got into. There was a pretty good selection of vintage cards, with the likes of Mantle, Mays, and Koufax available if one was willing to hand over at least $100. I don’t make that kind of money, and I get leery of buying counterfeits. But behind the case of Hall of Famers were a few boxes of cards, including a 36-pack box of 1990 Score for $10, which I bought along with a July 4, 1983 copy of Sports Illustrated with Dale Murphy on the cover.

The nice thing about the card market having collapsed is that I can pay the same price now that I would have paid in second grade. In fact, with inflation, it’s probably cheaper. One might say the cards don’t have any value. That’s true in a literal sense, but I’m reminded of a series of Calvin & Hobbes strips where the family house is burglarized, and a distraught Calvin can’t find Hobbes (who he simply misplaced.) Calvin’s mom tells him Hobbes wouldn’t have any value to thieves, but a tearful Calvin remarks, “I think he has value.”

Back in the car, I opened maybe 10 or 15 packs before going on with my delivery route. I’ve opened most of the remainder, moving at a curiously slower pace than I would have 20 years ago. I’ve been enjoying getting players who were once icons to me: Will Clark, Ken Griffey Jr, Nolan Ryan, so many others. I’m not sure what their value is today, but it was worth ten bucks for the blast from the past. Would if I could, I’d reach back in time, and give the box to the seven-year-old version of me.

Book Review: Cardboard Gods

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Baseball cards played a big role in my childhood. As I’ve written here before, I got my first cards when I was around three, started collecting a few years later and at one point had roughly 5,000 cards. I outgrew card collecting by the time I hit high school, though nostalgia leads me to buy a pack from time to time. Most recently, I purchased four packs of 1988 Topps on eBay for $4 with shipping and got young versions of Tony Gwynn, Cecil Fielder and Kevin Mitchell. It was $4 well spent.

I think every kid who built a baseball card collection has a hallowed first year of collecting. For me, it was 1990 when I was six turning seven, and my best friend Devin and I sorted, talked about and loved that year’s Topps cards. For Josh Wilker, the hallowed year was 1975.

Wilker, a fellow blogger, recently had his first book published, Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards. Sports Illustrated called it a “wry, rueful memoir” in a May 10 review and dubbed Wilker “one of 2010′s most promising literary players.” After seeing that article, I emailed Wilker for a review copy. Wilker forwarded my email to his publisher, Seven Footer Press, and I quickly received the book, which I finished this morning. It was a great read.

Wilker’s book has been well-praised, from SI to ESPN to other bloggers, as it should be. Every generation, I think there are perhaps a few baseball books like this: marvelously written, literary and unique. When Ball Four debuted in 1970, the New York Times wrote, “Ball Four is a people book, not just a baseball book.” Cardboard Gods works similarly. It joins The Boys of Summer as the second baseball book I’ve recommended to my mom.

Ostensibly, the book is about baseball cards, with each chapter an autobiographical essay devoted to a specific card spanning 1974 to 1981, the bulk of time Wilker collected before he too grew out of it. Wilker writes about his childhood and early adult life, using cards as metaphors, and towards the end especially, chapters fly by with limited mention of players. It works, though. I’m glad the book is billed being about cards, as I doubt I would have heard of Wilker otherwise. That being said, Wilker could have written about mud, and the writing would appeal. Wilker has an MFA from Vermont College and won a short fiction award, and in Cardboard Gods, it shows.

The story drew me in. Early on, I started to care about Wilker’s family members, wondering how their stories would come out, and appropriately, the book includes personalized cards for them. Though there is great baseball writing, like a reference to the Milwaukee Brewers as a “malodorous unshaven rabble,” my favorites passages concern Wilker’s mom’s boyfriend fashioning a metal chimney to his VW van in a failed attempt to work as a mobile blacksmith or Wilker, his brother and his dad going to a rock concert (featuring “a few prolonged explosions that I knew were songs only because they began and ended.”)

Were this a movie review, I would give Cardboard Gods three and a half stars out of four. My lone criticism here — which could be the baseball geek/former sportswriter in me talking — is that Wilker offers obvious stuff about players. When I got to the Mike Kekich chapter, I knew it would be about him swapping wives with his teammate, Fritz Peterson (that really happened.) I knew the Herb Washington chapter would talk about him being the only designated pinch runner in baseball history. I wanted more about the players, but perhaps that would have detracted from the memoir.

After finishing the book in the wee morning hours today, I emailed Wilker. He references a few non-sports books in his work, including Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, which was assigned reading from a favorite college writing professor. My professor also raved about Tobias Wolff and other writers, so I asked Wilker about his influences. Wilker replied a couple hours later, “I love Tobias Wolff and have read just about everything he’s written, I think. This Boy’s Life especially had an influence on my book.” That makes sense. I read both books (Wolff is one of my favorites, too) and Wolff and Wilker have similar life stories, both coming from broken homes, getting expelled from prep schools, and struggling to transition into adulthood. Of course, both men also beautifully related their stories years later.

One final thing. In Cardboard Gods, Wilker writes about youthfully penning a fan letter to his hero, Carl Yastrzemski and never hearing back. I wondered if the book changed this. I asked if there had been any word from Yaz. Wilker replied, “Only in my heart.” If I were Yaz, I’d drop Wilker a quick line. I can’t imagine a better postscript for the paperback edition of Cardboard Gods. John Updike once wrote of another Red Sox immortal, Ted Williams, “Gods do not answer letters.”

Imagine if one did.

A purchase at the dollar store

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About a year ago, my mom gave me a nice, scented candle inside of a glass jar, and it seemed a shame to waste the excess wax after the wick burned out the first time.  As a result, every month or two, I buy a cheap candle at the dollar store and put it inside the jar.  Then, I melt down the leftover wax from before on my stove and pour it inside the jar to seal in the new candle.  Yeah, I know, I’m probably the only sportswriter who recycles wax from scented candles.

Anyhow, with some time to kill today, I made a trip over to the dollar store that’s walking distance from my apartment.  Initially, I just planned to buy the candle, but when I was at the checkout stand, I saw amidst the display of sports trading cards, a brand that read “Historic Vintage Collection” with the subhead, “40 Years of Baseball Trading Cards.”  The front of each pack had a star, with text over it that read, “Historic Star Card in Every Pack.” This caught my interest.

As a child, I used to collect baseball cards voraciously, and I started collecting older ones after my aunt bought me cards for Bob Gibson and Tony Oliva when I was about eight.  In time, I had cards as far back as the 1940s and even had a dog-eared Willie Mays from 1969 that I got for $10.  I also had cards for Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks and Juan Marichal, among others.  At one point, I had as many as 5,000 sports cards.  Most have long since been gotten rid of, though I still have the old cards, in a binder at my parent’s house in Sacramento.

For whatever reason,  I’ve always had a passion for history and love any type of primary source material.  I also used to collect old Sports Illustrated issues as a kid.  In more recent years, I’ve branched into finding old books.  I have a decent library for both baseball and sports writing, and a lot of the stuff I like is no longer in print.  Thus, I find cool books every now and again, like a 1944 sports writing collection I located in a used bookstore in Sacramento a few years ago.  My copy includes a handwritten note, dated December 10, 1944:

To Eddie:

The Page 55 Contributor would have you (and all others who might glance here) that without your aid, early and late, I would never have come this far– might even have been left at the post, or have been thrown out at  first.

Anyhow, you’re one brother in a whole country.

Warren

I checked after reading this and determined the message was written by Warren Brown, a longtime Chicago sportswriter whose contribution in the book is a story about boxer Jack Dempsey from 1923.

Anyhow, while at the dollar store today, I wondered if the packs of old cards just contained reprints, which is lame, but for a dollar, I figured it couldn’t hurt to see what was inside.  I made the purchase, walked home and opened the pack.  Among the 15 cards were a 1984 Willie McGee and 1994 cards of Sammy Sosa and Juan Gonzalez.  They all appear to be originals, from the Eighties and Nineties.  I probably had the majority of them as a kid and for all I know, may have been holding the same cards from 15 to 20 years before.  Still, it was nice to get a little nostalgia.

Baseball cards

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I’m not certain of the first time I ever got a pack of baseball cards, but it may have been Christmas of 1986. I would have been three. I received an assortment of cards, which I know were dated that year, as a holiday gift from a family member (I want to say my dad, who played third base in high school.) I got players like Jose Canseco, George Brett and Von Hayes, and the cards quickly became dog-eared, ridiculously bent up. If they had any value, it depleted almost instantaneously. Goes without saying, I was hard on toys as a kid.

The summer before kindergarten, I became friends with Devin, a kid my age who lived around the corner. Devin was raised by a single mom, Nancy who loved the San Francisco Giants and passed this love down to her son. As a result, Devin had cards, lots of them. I visited often in those early elementary school years and looking at cards was pretty much what we did. We got in trouble once, and Nancy took away the large cardboard box full of cards, so we hid a few under his bedroom carpet. Nancy found those too.

I was forever pushing Devin to let me sort his cards. As Devin remembered it years later, I would come over, dump out his cards all over his floor and then promptly fall asleep. I don’t have much recollection of doing this, but I remember being enthralled that Devin had players like Jesse Orosco and way more 1990 Topps than I did, maybe three times as many. I became someone who collected cards, almost obsessively, and in time I had something like 5,000.

At first, my friends and I had no concept of value. It was all about obtaining specific players: Will Clark, Kevin Mitchell, and Canseco, among others. Guys like Omar Vizquel were righteously shunned, even before the episode of The Simpsons, where Bart tells Milhouse, distracted with a schoolyard crush, “I’ll trade your Carl Yastrzemski for my Omar Vizquel.” It seems funny now that Vizquel is probably bound for the Hall of Fame, unlike Clark, Mitchell or Canseco. That being said, I’d still take Clark’s card before Vizquel’s, if offered. My values haven’t changed all that much.

In time, Devin moved away, I learned of a magazine where I could look up the value of cards, and I stopped having as much fun with them. The minute I started calculating value, a part of my childhood ended. I also began to collect football and basketball cards, and my grandfather used to tell me I could make good money in the stock market if I studied it as hard as I studied cards. I would tell my friends that my large collection was how I intended to pay for college, though that never happened.

I quit collecting around the time I started high school, after realizing one day that I’d grown out of the hobby. Cards simply no longer held their spell over me. I’ve bought a couple packs in the past few years for the sake of nostalgia, though it feels a little strange since I’m in my twenties.

All of my heroes are mortal now.