Of Cards and Card Collecting

1991 Topps Stadium Club Frank Thomas (PSA 10: $175; Ungraded: $2)

The 1991 Topps Stadium Club Frank Thomas card perfectly captures the arc of the Big Hurt’s powerful right-handed swing. He is photographed in profile, mid swing; the follow-through of the bat is not yet complete, leaving the tip of the bat extending up and away from the viewer, toward the top right hand corner of the card; because of the way his torso is twisted, you can only see the 5 on the back of his jersey, but you can catch a glimpse of the corresponding 3 peeking out from under his arm on the front of the shirt. The people in the crowd, sitting along the third base line, are blurs, half in sun and half in shadow; the infield dirt by Thomas’s feet looks almost as bright as beach sand. It is a beautiful picture, one that captures so much of what I love about baseball—the power, the artistry, the perfection of a sunny day at the ballpark.

I keep the card taped above my desk, where it is flanked by a 1990 Skybox Reggie Lewis card and a 1991 Pro Set “Rocket” Ismail card, which commemorates his winning the 1990 Walter Camp Player of the Year award at Notre Dame. It is, of course, no accident that all of these cards come from the early 90s. I turned 11 in July of 1991, and in those years I spent every cent I earned or was given on sports cards. (In this, I was like a million other kids my age; card collecting was a bubble market, soon to burst.) But although I did own all of these cards when I was a kid, none of the ones currently in my possession are actual holdovers from my childhood. I bought them all during the pandemic. In this, too, I am not an outlier; card collecting once again exploded in popularity during the lockdowns. Although I have no doubt this collecting phase is another bubble set to burst, I did not return to card collecting as an investment strategy. I have been thinking a lot about why I found myself perusing card shops on eBay so frequently during those awful months of lockdown, and why I have continued to periodically pick up new cards even after the world opened back up. I started buying cards again out of a sense of nostalgia and loneliness, but I have continued to buy them—and display them (I now have 25 cards tacked up on the wall above my desk)—because they represent, simultaneously, art and memory and fandom.

* 

1983 Topps Wade Boggs (PSA 10: $1,875.00; Ungraded:$3.50)

In retrospect, an astounding amount of my childhood social life was built around card collecting. My foundational mental map of my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania was constructed around the locations of the card shops in town. There was the one out by the mall, that we rarely went to because no one’s parents wanted to negotiate ‘mall traffic’; there was the small counter display in the menswear department at a neighborhood department store, where the guy who ran it hated kids coming in—he was after a more moneyed clientele; the same was true of the coins and collectibles store over by Blessed Sacrament Church; there was a decent shop by our school bus stop, but I didn’t like to go there because the owner had critiqued me for not taking care of my Wade Boggs rookie (it’s true that the card was totally beaten up, but in my defense the only reason I had the card at all was because my brother passed it on to me because of its terrible condition).

The gold standard of Erie card shops was Kinem’s Sports Cards. The store had beautiful, well lit display cases stacked with expensive cards none of us ever had hopes of buying, but that we loved to stare at (and an owner who was patient with kids who came to goggle); they always had the latest sets and packs; and they were willing to look at kids’ collections and occasionally offered to buy a card. It must be said that there was a period of time when the hot rumor in the halls of Cathedral Center grade school was that “Kinem’s waxes their packs!”—by which we meant that the owner secretly opened packs, removed any valuable cards and replaced them with commons, and then resealed the packs and sold them. I assume we were willing to believe it because more often than not the packs we bought didn’t have the big names—Ken Griffey, Jr., Frank Thomas, David Justice, Todd Van Poppel—we were hoping for. We were young enough to want to attribute such results to malice rather than the vagaries of chance.

In any event, even in the midst of the pack waxing allegations, we all loved going to Kinem’s, and most weekend get-togethers of any group of friends included at least one trek to the card shop, and the purchase of a pack or two. Usually, for me, this meant Fleer or Donruss, because they were cheaper than Upper Deck or Stadium Club; even us cash poor kids turned our noses up at Topps and Bowman. In those years, card collecting was largely a social activity. Sure, I spent a fair amount of time in my room organizing my cards in binders—sorting them in a variety of fashions (by team, or in sequential order by manufacturer, by value, or by how much I liked the players), and obsessively looking up their value in Beckett Monthly. But for the most part, having a card collection was fun because you could compare yours to your friends’, and then you could spend time designing complex trades (that almost inevitably fell through before completion). As we moved into middle school, though, we all got more competitive, and the nature of our hobbies shifted. Rather than being content to lug our collections around, we started to spend more of our social time gambling, and our cards became useful primarily as currency.

*

1983 Topps Ryne Sandberg (PSA 10: $1,245; Ungraded: $10)

The summer I turned twelve, one of my older brother’s friends ate a Ryne Sandberg rookie card. I suppose since he didn’t swallow it, it is more correct to say he bit it into pieces, chewed on them for a moment, and then spit the mess onto our living room rug. He did it to make my friend Chris Sayers cry. And, to be fair to all involved, Sayers probably had it coming. He had been whining about the card for an hour, begging my brother’s friend to trade it back. It had been Sayers’s prized possession, but he lost it in a game of Acey-Deucey. But, again, to be totally fair, my brother’s friend, Jim Grabowski, was a mean kid, and he and my brother, as eighth graders, probably shouldn’t have been gambling with us sixth graders anyway. But it was the summer of 1992, and we all spent endless muggy hours playing Acey-Deucey, using the only currency we all had—baseball cards.

1992 was the height of the junk wax era—a time when baseball cards were being wildly overproduced, completely saturating the collecting market—and my friends and I were the peak audience for this bubble market. We spent all of our allowance money (if we were lucky enough to get an allowance), and birthday money, and paper-route money, and babysitting money, on baseball (and, to a lesser extent, basketball) cards. We had been doing this since second or third grade, so by that summer after sixth grade, we all had binders overstuffed with what we considered our good cards, shoeboxes full of commons, and smaller boxes with our best cards sleeved in hard cases; and we all were, for the most part, unwilling to trade them. Everyone overvalued their own cards, and feared being taken advantage of in a trade, and that combo meant we all just lugged our binders to each other's houses to compare them, occasionally swapping extras to complete a set, but for the most part our hobby was getting a bit stale. Which is where gambling came into play.

I’m not sure why Acey-Deucey was the default gambling game for the kids at St. Peter’s Cathedral Center grade school. At the time, I assumed (erroneously) it was what kids everywhere were up to. Perhaps, on some level, we knew that we all had too many baseball cards that we would never trade, and that by gambling with them, our cards would change hands easily and frequently. Perhaps we were just bored, and we embraced this particular game because it was simple, while also being, at times anyway, incredibly cruel.[1]

We usually did not play Acey-Deucey at my house, because my parents did not allow us to play. This was not something they ever said to us, but it was clear to both my brother Steve and me that if they knew we were gambling with our cards they would simply confiscate our collections. So, like much that went on at friends' houses, then and in the more exciting years to come, my parents were generally ignorant about what we were up to when not at home. But on this particular afternoon both my parents were at work, and a couple of friends came over to play cards; our older brother was nominally in charge, but he was in high school and could not be bothered. The game went like such games usually did—everyone anted up with cards they didn’t particularly care about, so for the most part no one felt too bad when they lost (or too happy when they won, because the cards in the pot were all rather uninspiring). But then we had a collective run of bad luck, where each person in the circle lost, repeatedly, which of course led to the value of the pot rising and rising as we each tossed in more cards to match our failed bets. This culminated with Chris Sayers betting pot middle on Ace Two, and losing when another Ace popped up. He owed, in truth, close to the value of an entire binder’s worth of his cards; he was close to tears.

“See, this is why we don’t play with younger kids,” said Grabowski.

My brother, ever the peacemaker, tried to soften the blow, and told Sayers, “Look, just put in your Sandberg and it’ll be square.” It was an objectively great deal for him, and he had to take it. But we all knew that it was his favorite card; he was a crazy Cubs fan, and Sandberg was far and away his favorite player. He put it in the pot, and Grabowski immediately won it, and Sayers looked like someone had just murdered his dog in front of him.

The round went on, but when the pot emptied out Steve declared the game over. We all knew how upset Sayers was, and Steve privately told Grabowski just to trade the card back or we’d all end up getting in trouble over it. But Grabowski was mean, and as Sayers threw out increasingly desperate trade offers, Grabowski slipped the card out of its hard case and said, “You want this back? Fine!” and then bit it in half, and then in half again, chomped it a bit, and then spit it on the ground at Sayers’ feet. It was the most purely spiteful thing I had ever seen someone do. Steve was right; we did all get in trouble, and Chris Sayers never came to my house again. That was also the end of the Acey-Deucey era for both Steve and I, as our parents forbid us to bring our cards to our friends' houses. In a way, that was the start of the end of my card collecting, period.

* 

2022-23 Topps UEFA Deco Artistry Mohamed Salah (Ungraded: $7)

I started collecting again during the pandemic for the same reasons that I collected as a kid: I was bored and I needed to fill the hours somehow. I was no longer walking to card shops, and I wasn’t trading cards with friends, but I could kill a fair amount of time scrolling through cards on eBay, identifying which ones interested me, and then tracking down the cheapest versions of the cards. And, like when I was a kid, cards were a connection to something that I cared about. These days, I spend a fair amount of my leisure time watching and reading about sports. I still follow the Red Sox, but I spend more time watching Liverpool and Celtics games. I also keep tabs on the Patriots, and love the US Women’s National Soccer Team and Notre Dame football (my early love of the “Rocket” was probably one factor that led to my going there for undergrad). One great thing about the contemporary card market is that they now make cards for everything, so I’ve been able to get cards that represent all these interests. 

One draw to collecting is that it’s given me something to focus on while being online. Rather than simply scrolling endlessly and aimlessly through the internet, I go on eBay and look for cards. I identify one(s) that I want, and then do deep dives to find the right condition at the right price. I like to do online research (I am, after all, an academic), and I like to find a bargain. Some eBay sellers have hard prices, but others are willing to haggle. Making a deal on a card I want, even at just a dollar less than a list price, makes me absurdly pleased. 

At first I was mainly drawn to tracking down cards from my youth—cards of players I’d loved as a kid but couldn’t afford, or ones that I had owned at one point and lost track of. The Frank Thomas Stadium Club was the first one I bought, and when it arrived in the mail, it was like opening a portal to childhood. As a kid, I owned a ton of Thomas’s cards, and these are practically the only cards I held onto from my childhood collection—they’ve come with me through a dozen subsequent moves, even as I came to realize that they were never going to have even a fraction of the value of my dad’s own mythical lost card collection. But I had pulled that Stadium Club rookie from a pack back in 1991, and subsequently sold it—it was the only card the owner of Kinem’s ever wanted to buy from me, for cash. When I opened the pack I immediately noticed that the corner was dinged up, meaning it wasn’t in mint condition, but the card shop owner didn’t seem to notice. So I quickly sold it, a rash move I regretted before I even finished my walk home. 

So, quarantining at home, I started scrolling eBay. At first I was looking at first editions of authors that I loved, but even the somewhat obscure ones (hello, J.F. Powers!) were pretty expensive. But through the magic of algorithms, one area of collecting led to another, and soon I was seeing ads for 1960s baseball cards (I suppose it thought that as a fan of books from the 50s I was an older man), which eventually led me to the Stadium Club Thomas, my own white whale of a card. I bought it for about two bucks, a fraction of what I had sold it for back in ‘91. Such are the vagaries of cards from the junk wax era, and the beauty of eBay. There are, apparently, tons of people around my age who held onto their childhood collections, and seeing that they’re mostly worthless now, are willing to part with almost any card for a few bucks. (There are some professionally graded versions of these cards that fetch a decent price, but for me anyway none of this is about making a sound investment of resources). When the card arrived in the mail, I declared, jokingly, that it was the best two bucks I ever spent, but I’ve come to think that this is true. I’m looking at it now, taped over my desk, flanked by other beloved players of my youth, and I’m grinning again. What a small price to pay for a daily shot of joy.

Since then, the Thomas has been joined by a number of other cards that bring me a similar frisson of pleasure—Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, David Ortiz and Pedro Martinez, Abby Wambach and Becky Sauerbrunn, a Brady/Gronk card that is a pure delight. My current interest is Liverpool players. I’ve got my eye on an Art Deco designed Mo Salah, but I’m waiting for the right price.

 [1] Since this game is not universally known, and there are a number of regional variations, here is how we played it: first, everyone would ante up by putting in a card worth around a dollar (all disputed values were decided by Beckett). Then two playing cards were dealt face-up to the first player, who would need to bet whether the next card turned over would be lower than the lower of the two face-up cards, higher than the higher card, or between the two. It was up to the individual to decide how much he wanted to wager, by calling out the name of the player on one (or more) of the baseball cards in the pot. There was no passing; every player always had to make some sort of a bet on his turn. If the player won his bet, he got the card he named. If he lost, he had to put in a card (or cards) equal to the value of the one(s) he had named and failed to win. So, for example, if the two face up cards were a four and a Jack, the next card would be likely to fall between these two, so the player would be fairly likely to make a big bet—say four dollars’ worth—on ‘middle’; if any card in the five to ten range came up, he would win the cards he named; if not, he’d have to put in $4 worth of his own cards. There was one wrinkle, though: if the third playing card matched the value of one of the two already face up, then the player had to pay double the value of the card(s) he’d named (so, in our example, if the third card was a four, he’d have to put in $8 worth of his own cards). It is called Acey-Deucey because this Ace-Two split is the biggest in the game, and if one got that split it was almost required to bet ‘pot middle’—meaning one was wagering the entire value of all the baseball cards in the pot that the next card would come between Ace and two. It was almost always a winner, but there was still the chance that an Ace or two would come up, meaning not only that one lost, but that one had to then double the value of the entire pot. Which brings us back to Chris Sayers and his prized Ryne Sandberg.

Michael O’Connell is a writer, editor, and teacher who lives in Ann Arbor, MI. His academic scholarship focuses primarily on the intersections of religion and contemporary literature. O’Connell is the author of Startling Figures: Encounters with American Catholic Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2023), editor of Conversations with George Saunders (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), and the co-editor of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies.