Most of my preteen/early teenage years was spent being obsessed with collecting baseball cards. I used all my paper route, Christmas and birthday money, and any loose change I could find to buy packs of cards. I would ride my bike to Front Row card store with my brother and friends to chase that next big rookie or "priceless" card I may come across in a pack. Except to me it wasn't priceless. All my cards that were worth anything I would trade in to get more cards and eventually I would be left with common cards (I would also do this years later with gambling winnings at casinos. Instead of getting back "commons" I'd get back a big fat nothing.) Looking back, it wasn't the cards that were "priceless" but the experience that was. It's how I memorized stats and got involved in learning about all sports. I still wished I had a few of my Randy Johnson, Tony Gwynn and David Robinson (NBA) rookie cards back though.
My 10 year old son has received packs of cards here and there for gifts but never really got into it. For his birthday he got a card binder for a present. We spent Saturday night separating all his cards by team names and putting them in the binder by alphabetical order. He was getting into it as one page after another got close to being filled. He is genuinely excited to continue his collection. Hopefully he won't trade in his Stephen Strasburg or Starlin Castro rookie cards for commons but I can't blame him if he does.
Had the David Robinson rookie card. Kirby Puckett Topps rookie was my prize. My youngest brother one day took my ENTIRE album (much like the one I'm sure your son is putting together) and traded it to some asshole around the corner.
ReplyDeleteHe managed to convince my brother that trading 20 cards for one was a good deal. Lost my Pucketts, my George Brett's... Some odd ones that I remember having as prized cards were Will Clark and Mike Greenwell. Don't even remember if they were ever worth anything but I had a ton of them...
All my baseball cards I traded. My favorite was a Frank Thomas one. It was worth $100 and I traded it for $80 in packs of cards. I still have a bunch of basketball cards somewhere. Birds, Magics, Jordans, Stocktons. I have to find it!!
ReplyDeleteThe Stoddard men love collecting cards back in the day! my bro still has most of the cards that my dad & him collected!long time ago! We have Jordans rooike, Mannings rookie, bonds rookie, tigers woods rookie, the finger cards & the cards that have "fuck face" written on the knob of the bats in cards. Hell even my dad named me after a Graig Nettles error card!
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