Hide the Cards, The Wife’s Coming

I’m one of the now-almost archetypal middle-aged males who has “returned” to the pastime of baseball card accumulation after several decades away from it. Let me just say that quite a bit has changed since the early 1980s, the last time in which I spent a sum of money on baseball cards, and a time in which I was 13-14 years old. (I believe I aged out of card collecting around my 14th year, which would have been 1981-1982, about the time that Topps was joined by Fleer and Donruss, and things got pretty hectic out there).

I totally missed the gold-digging craze that followed. I even drifted away from ravenous baseball fandom itself for most of the 1990s, coming back in hot when my beloved San Francisco Giants made a run for their first World Series championship in 2002. You may recall that they did not in fact win one that year, and that it took another eight years for SF to take the first of their three crowns. Well before that time, I was again the same baseball obsessive I’d been in my youth. 

Having kept tabs a bit of the evolution of baseball cards during that time, I had a sense that once the speculation bubble had popped, there were new and interesting ways in which to engage with cardboard. Buying full boxed sets was out; collecting individual players or team sets or thematic variations of one’s choosing was in. This excited me. I got the sense that perhaps I could return to the unbridled collecting passion of my youth in any way, shape or form I deemed appropriate. I could spend mere pennies to create sets of my heroes; I could chase limited-edition special high-number varietals; I could buy cards that had slices of some dude’s uniform in them; I could sit back and do nothing at all. My choice. My rules. 

With that in mind, I dove back in during this past year. My favorite player as a kid was Jack Clark. That’s his 1978 Topps card you see here. The ‘78 Giants were an absolute delight: in first place nearly the entire year, which happened to be the first year I really launched my mania for the sport. There’s a new book that’s partially about their season here. It truly was as exciting as author Lincoln Mitchell makes it out to be. Clark, Willie McCovey, Vida Blue and others nearly pulled off an epic dethroning of the hated Dodgers and the less-hated Reds in a year that they really had no right to be that good. My allegiance to these men and gods was forever cemented accordingly. 

Thus, I started my collecting rebirth with a notion to collect some of my favorite players of all time:

Jack Clark 
Pablo Sandoval 
Greg Minton (yeah, seriously - we can talk about this in another post) 
Rennie Stennett (same) 
Ichiro Suzuki 
Vladimir Guerrero
Willie McCovey 

These are the sets I'm building up now, among others. As much as I love the baseball team from San Francisco, I’ve also collected some Giants and non-Giants teams. I’ve bought random cards and packs and lots and whatnot. I’ll be sharing many of them here. 

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