Matthew Osborne
When I was a kid, baseball cards were everything.
Getting a new pack was like Christmas all summer long. I remember getting $5 in allowance as a child when packs of Topps cards were 50 cents each with that awful rock-hard gum inside.
So, I take out the trash and clean my room, then I get 10 packs of cards. Seemed like a good business model for myself and my parents.
I feel like once you have the love of baseball card collecting in your heart, you never let it go. Take my father, for instance.
It is because of his generation putting 1952 Mickey Mantle cards in the spokes of their bikes that created the scarcity resulting in folks paying $85,000 for a gem mint version of the card today. Kids loved the cards back then, but they had no sense of what they would one day be worth.
(Truth be told, though, if they took good care of them, would they be as valuable? It’s like the butterfly effect. You kill a butterfly in 1952 and Mantle cards are used as coasters in the 21st century, who knows what could have happened?)
It’s been 25 years since the home run chase of 1998, when Mark McGwire outdueled Sammy Sosa and Ken Griffey Jr. to hit 70 home runs. Did we care that it was steroid-fueled for McGwire and Sosa? Absolutely not. It was a blast, and checking box scores or ESPN for homers was my life at the time.
As such, the rookie cards of all three players were hot commodities. So Pops and I walked into a baseball card shop – which existed a lot more commonly back then – and we bought unopened packs in the years and brands that contained the coveted rookies of Sosa and Griffey. At the time, the asking price for the unopened packs of 1985 Topps potentially containing the Team USA Mark McGwire rookie card were going for something like $30 each, a little too rich for our blood at that moment – or so we thought.
We got in the car and I was driving, but like a schoolboy, my father wanted to open the packs while we were driving. He opened the 1990 Leaf and bang! There was Sosa, first pack.
Then he carefully unfurled the Upper Deck and boom! Griffey.
We had only traveled a mile or so and Pops said, “Turn around, we have a hot hand. We are going for Big Mac, too.”
Hey, it was his money and his call. We went back into the shop and laid down $60 for two packs of 1985 Topps. Sadly, that’s where our heat check turned cold, and there was no Big Mac to be found. But it was fun moment.
The annoying thing looking at it now is that the Griffey and Sosa rookies did not appreciate in value much over that time. Sure, a gem mint Griffey might fetch $500 if you are lucky, but it’s no 1952 Mickey Mantle. It also costs enough to get your card graded that it better be a nice one to get a return on your investment.
I went looking for cards over the weekend and apparently was looking in the wrong places. Collecting made a comeback a couple of years ago, so much that Walmart and Target stopped stocking cards because people were staking out the trucks like supervillains stealing classified technology.
As we drove back home, Cal started looking up cards online and seeing valuable ones that were only about a year away from similar cards that I have in my collection. What could have been …
The other frustrating thing is that collecting went from going for every card in the set to pulling that one lottery ticket card – usually a refractor or an autographed card – that is worth money. It did bring us things like the viral video of the young man pulling the 1-of-1 Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout autograph, but it still seems a little like slot machines for kids.
As I see it, I have three choices – enjoy the collection I have, sell all that stuff (my kids don’t care about it) or get back in the game and collect some more stuff. I could honestly see myself taking any of those three paths.
But no matter which I choose, I will always remember the joy of tearing open a new pack to find the wonders inside.
Matthew Osborne is the editor of The Northeast Georgian. Reach him at 706-778-4215 or editor@TheNortheastGeorgian.com.