Baseball card collecting is an American pastime. Like many other young people I was fascinated by superstar athletes, enjoyed going to see major leaguers, and spent a large part of my youth playing baseball. All my friends collected cards, traded them, and used them as badges of self-worth. Whoever had the most sought after cards was king. That 1989 UpperDeck Ken Griffey Jr. with the misprint was in serious demand, and getting it in your collection was a great achievement; kind of like walking on the moon. Operation Desert-Shield couldn't compare with the neighborhood battle for the best cards.
When I was 10-years-old my dad took things to a whole new level. He started bringing home cases of cards. Price Club (now Costco) sold boxes of packs from all the leading manufacturers, and dad added these cases to his routine shopping trips.
For the next two years I ripped open packs of Donruss, Score, Topps, Leaf and UpperDeck. I searched out the high value picks, like the limited-edition Ricky Henderson Elite card, the Topps Gold Series, and made sets out of all the rest. I filed cards in numerical order by brand and boxed them up in hopes of having a valuable commodity when I was older.
Little did I know that I would be hauling these boxes around for the next 17 years.
It was with card collecting that I first formed the habit of mass consumption. Collect. Buy. Sell. Trade. Own. I have kept some of the more valuable ones (not that I actually checked), but the large bulk of them are going away. So, it is to baseball cards that I say farewell. I am giving them to the local recycling center, where hopefully they will come back around as something a little more practical.
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