What happened to my baseball cards?

By Troy Foster

Baseball was my life as a child.

My fanaticism was driven by a chance encounter with an Oakland A’s scout when I was 7 years old, who promised me if I called him in 11 years he would give me a tryout. That encounter was the vehicle that turned my baseball engine. But it was trading cards that fueled it.

Millions of us collected baseball cards as kids. We were inspired by valuable Mickey Mantle and Jackie Robinson cards our fathers kept in shoe boxes, and dumbfounded by their condition. My father wrote the batting order of each player on his cards.

So we pledged not to make the same mistake, and during the mid- to late-1980s we bought millions upon millions of baseball cards.

I’ve always been a one-pack-a-day kind of guy. In college and the immediate years afterward, it was cigarettes, but as a child it was baseball cards. My mother would give me just enough money to buy one pack a day during the summers. They started out at just 35 cents.

Every day I’d walk with my neighbor Terrance to a store 2 miles down the road known as “Jacks,” although Jack hadn’t owned it in years and the new owner — who looked like Rollie Fingers — had renamed it “The Little Store.”

My whole summers were framed around this little ritual at the little store. Just one pack — no more, no less. About 15 new cards per day.

Our basecrawl is an adventure into my own pastime, and I can now recall the anxiety that came with opening each pack on these daily jaunts. I can remember the waxy paper and the smell of the stale gum that came with the Topps packs. I can remember the first things my eyes scanned with each new card: batting average, followed by home town. I can remember trading them with my friends, and getting swindled on a regular basis by that jerk Bryce from down the street.

My parents did a good job of not spoiling me as a kid, and collecting baseball cards was fun while it lasted. They never let me buy more than one pack unless it was for special occasions, and even when they bought me a WHOLE DAMN BOX one Christmas I could only open a couple packs at a time.

The reason I mention all this now is because of the experience we had a few days ago. We went online and found an event that was billed as a baseball card show at a mall in Tracy, California. We dropped in on it before the Angels game to see how the trading card industry had changed since the three of us were children.

The card show was about a tenth of the size of the ones I remember Dad taking me to as a child, and these card dealers weren’t so much selling cards as they were peddling autographs, posters, bobble heads and other memorabilia. This show also didn’t have the intimacy that I remember. It was smack in the middle of a shopping mall.

We heard a lot of the same things from the dealers: “They started making too many cards” … ”You can’t make a living anymore with just cards” … “eBay has changed the whole game.”

One former card dealer named Greg (who now sells movie memorabilia at these “card shows”) really summed it up the best: “I got out of selling baseball cards because it stopped being about the kids,” he said.

People got greedy. Instead of one pack a day, it was one box a day. And adults jumped in and started dominating the hobby.

I collected cards seriously for probably five years, but one thing I never accomplished – although I certainly tried — was completing a whole set. Every pack I bought at Jacks The Little Store got me past third base but never to home. I never achieved a whole set.

As we looked at all the cards these people were selling I was amazed at what I saw. Ten Jose Canseco cards were being sold at one table for $1. Another dollar for a bunch of Ken Griffey Jr.’s. Daren bought an old Tom Seaver card with a $10 price tag for $5.

Are all those baseball cards I collected as a kid worthless?

Then there was this grey-haired man at an end table. He didn’t give us permission to interview him on camera, but he did talk to us candidly about his dying industry. He had just closed down his baseball card shop and put everything in storage. He was there at the mall conducting a fire sale.

I hated doing it, but I pulled a crumpled $10 dollar bill out of my pocket, handed it to this gentlemen and did something I’d never done before: I completed an entire set of cards; in this case one from 1990 produced by Fleer.

Eighteen years later, I’d finally reached home plate. I’d completed an entire set!

I just never thought it would be so unfulfilling.

(There’s more on this and our other adventures at BaseCrawl.com.)