Paul Graham
Baseball Card Days
Perhaps it's the onset of my thirties, but I've taken a sudden interest in the
paraphernalia of my childhood, including but not limited to balsa wood
hand-launched gliders, and, most recently, baseball cards. I remember when
you could only buy baseball cards in certain places, among them convenience
stores, toy stores, variety stores, and baseball memorabilia shops. Now I
see them in home-improvement centers like Lowe's. I find this disappointing,
perhaps because if you were a superstitious boy, as I was, once you found a
good spot—a place where the packs consistently turned up both your favorite
stars and third-string utility infielders desirable only for the completion
of a team or set—you returned to that place religiously, as to a reliable
fishing hole. And you never, ever, told your friends about it,
not even when the fishing went south for a month straight.
Between the ages of nine and twelve, my own favorite place was Hayek's Market in Newton, New Jersey, a low-lit delicatessen that smelled of salty meats and cheeses and sold, among its ready-made salads, fresh fruit, and coolers of juices, Topps baseball cards in their wonderful waxy packs. Just the mention of cold cuts would send me digging in my desk for change. Like an addict of those other products that come in square packages, I used to get cravings and withdrawal symptoms if too long passed without a fix.
A pack of Topps ran 35¢ then, which meant that with my weekly allowance of a few dollars I could do quite a bit of damage at Hayek's if I chose to, and I often did. What I really I coveted was an entire case to myself—I would not be so excited at the thought of a case of something again until I discovered beer—but I could never afford that many cards at one time. I seemed to know that buying in bulk wouldn't be much fun anyway. Gluttony kills all things, including baseball cards, which were best accumulated slowly across the summer season, in tens and twenties, until, come November, you were questing after that one last card like the Holy Grail: usually a bullpen catcher nobody had ever heard of, so that even if you cheated and walked up to a man at a baseball card show and asked for card #418, Hank Kroll, already fingering your two pennies (ah, what a bargain for the elation!), the man behind the table would raise an eyebrow at you and say, “Eh?”
If only you could see inside the packs. But that, of course, would defeat the point of buying them, the excitement and the suspense and the mystery, though now I see you can buy cards with the top one exposed through clear plastic, which in all honesty strikes me as a little trashy, a kind of striptease.
The color of the waxpaper shell on a pack of Topps changed each year, but
in my mind a pack of baseball cards, and the secret promise or letdown they
contain, will always be the green (I think it was green) of 1987: a deep green,
bright and slightly radioactive-looking in the shadowy shelves at the end of
Aisle 2, where one could also find squirt guns, rubber mice and snakes, and
bouncy balls so dense with elasticity that a good swing from a baseball bat
or, better yet, Dad's two-wood, could send them arcing a quarter-mile. My
brother, uninterested in baseball cards, used to glumly sift through the
balls while I tried with a ten year old's optimistic sorcery to divine the
good packs in the box. As a kind of booby prize, I used to offer him
that perpetual flavorless disappointment courtesy of Topps, a petrified
stick of bubble gum the color of a dog's tongue. You hoped it would
taste as good as Bazooka, but no, never, its gustatory qualities more
closely resembled that of the cardboard between which it sat.
There was something wonderfully working-class about Topps baseball cards back then. Made of rugged thick cardboard, the blue ink on the back sometimes blurred, and the photos on the front were sometimes grainy. The corners were prone to splitting like the covers of paperback books. As my financial resources improved I collected Fleer and Donruss baseball cards, too, and, later on, Upper Deck, all of which were higher-end cards, something along the lines of a difference between a Ford truck and a BMW. Secretly I coveted those nicer cards, with their crisp photos and white card-stock, but even then I felt that to turn my back on Topps was somehow to betray the long history of baseball cards, which were even thicker, blurrier, and less sophisticated a generation before I began collecting them.
When the time came to choose a pack—my mother had worked her way from the deli counter to the breads, and from thence toward the registers—there was a checklist of certain things I always did, and never did, before paying. I never bought only one pack, and I never took more than one pack off the top. I always inspected to make sure the wax seal hadn't been pried open and re-closed by a cherry-picker, and I always made sure the pack didn't look like it had been damaged. Not because I wanted cards in mint condition for the sake of value, but because I was obsessively neat then, as I still am.
I opened the packs one at a time in the car as my mother drove home, flipping
through the pile quickly, knowing immediately by the pictures which were new
and which, alas, were doubles. I made wordless noises displeasure when I
discovered I'd been screwed, which was more and more common as the summer
burned onward, bright and hot, to the start of school. The quickness
of my verdict always amazed my mother: I had so many cards, how did I
keep them all straight? (But she was mistaken, I didn't have so many,
not really; a thousand cards was not that many when you multiplied
the average roster by the number of teams by, say, the number of seasons
to pass since 1950, which for a ten year-old was a hair away from the
Mesozoic Era.) I just knew who I had, I told her, and who I needed.
Photographic memory, perhaps. Amazing, my father used to say: You know
without looking whether or not you already have Jack Clark but you
can't simplify fractions. Just amazing.
At home, I looked over my booty more closely, noting a new player's age
and hometown, the teams he had played for, the number of home runs and
batting average, or strikeouts and ERA. Card-collecting was not about
statistical nuance then; only the most basic data mattered. On the front
porch, my friend Ryan and I went wide-eyed over a 1.10 ERA, failing
to notice that the pitcher may have pitched one inning in one game.
Nothing was more boring than a steady .290 hitter, even though he
may have been bound for the Hall. We preferred Pete Incaviligia
and Steve Balboni with their astronomical home run and strikeout
totals. Those were digits that tickled the brain. The backs of baseball
cards were stories, those we began with a glance and ended in our
imaginations.
And baseball over the radio. That was the deepest allure of the cards, the necessity of them: to be able to put faces with the names read over the radio, to see the stance of the hitter at the plate, the leg-kick of the pitcher on the mound. I laid them out according to batting order, and so had my own lineup card, score card, sense of the depth in the bench and the bullpen.
In this way, I developed favorites the baseball card market undervalued. I knew, having held his card and studied him for a good long time, that Kevin McReynolds often came through in the clutch with that long, looping swing of his, usually in the 8th inning, long after bedtime, when I'd turned the volume of the broadcast from Shea on my clock-radio down to a whisper. I knew that Gary Carter was better than his .250 average (good for a catcher, at any rate) suggested. I knew Bo Jackson was probably a punk. I had strange favorites, attachments that baffled my friends.
It was through baseball cards, in fact, that I had my first experience with high-pressure sales, in my friend Mark Sloan's bedroom. Mark, a year older, had introduced me to baseball cards (and Atari, and Garfield comic books, The Police, and Hall and Oates) and he also had a temper. When, one afternoon, I refused to make a trade that entailed receiving two no-name bozos for the crown jewel of my Mets collection—it could have been Dwight Gooden, or Darryl Strawberry— he intoned, “The voice of reason is calling you, Paul, listen to the voice of reason.” I held fast, and then he upturned his box of cards and stormed out of the room. Treasuring friendship, or perhaps peace, more than the baseball cards, I think I reconsidered the deal.
A boy's relationship with his cards, I believe now, may be a predictor of the type of man he'll be. Will he flip cards with a friend? (Risk Taker: Maybe motorcycles in the future). Does he ditch everything but the stars? (Expensive taste). Does connive and arm-twist his buddies into trading for players they do not want or need? (Future salesman.) Or does he let others walk all over him? (Equally unpromising.) Does he hock his cards for a new bicycle? (Utilitarian, not a sentimental bone in him, possibly a ladykiller). Does he stare at them for hours, reliving memories of games on the TV, the radio, the Little League field? (Dreamer.) I was one of those.
The oldest card I ever had was a 1934 Charlie Gehringer, given to my by my grandfather. He found it in his basement one day, along with G-Men cards (“Heros of the U.S. Government”—probably worth something now, but utterly uninteresting to me at the time). Then he horrified me with stories of the cards he'd had and what had become of them: Micky Mantle and Joe DiMaggio and Bob Gibson not simply lost, but jammed into the spokes of bicycle tires, blown-up and burned. I wasn't interested in the value, not until much later, when I longed for a car and would have sold my kidneys, let alone my baseball card collection. It was history I wanted to hold in my hand, both baseball's and his. Charlie G came to me in pretty rough shape; I put him in a sleeve of protective plastic, hoping to save him, perhaps, to someday give him to my boys.
Not having any children of my own, or knowing any, I wonder what has become of baseball cards now. The thought nags at me for days, weeks. I assume, and with good reason, that perhaps they have gone the way of many features of childhood a generation ago, which is not to say extinct, but less popular. Baseball cards are perhaps not as necessary with real-time access to statistics on the Internet, fantasy leagues, video games where you can not only see the stats but manage the team, the farm system, the league. If your second baseman is a bum you can get rid of him. It's all very compelling, in a different kind of way.
Eventually, my curiosity gets the better of me. I drive to a local market. The market doesn't carry baseball cards. Neither does the convenience store at the gas station, the local grocery store, or a store in the mall called Pandemonium. I give in, go to Wal-Mart. A pack of Topps goes for almost $2.00 now—steep for a kid, unless allowances have been adjusted in accordance with the Consumer Price Index, which perhaps they have.
No more wax: they come wrapped up like Tylenol bottles.
Wax is bad for the collectors, bad for the guys who trade baseball
cards like people on the NYSE trade commodities. In the pack I choose
from the top of the pile, Derek Jeter is frozen alluringly mid-swing
on the front: the striptease. You get a dozen of them,
but not, you can bet, a dozen of him.
“Didn't you used to get seventeen?” I ask my wife. She shrugs, as if she should know. Cabbage Patch kids were her bag—another story entirely. In the car, I crack the seal. Topps looks like Fleer now, which means that Fleer probably looks like Upper Deck. Everyone wants to be sexy, nobody wants to look like the 1980s. As she drives, I flip through the package—it's not
a pack anymore, but a package, as in the verb.
“Hey! Where's the gum?”
“They probably took it out. It was probably marking the cards or causing brain cancer or something.”
Or both, I think. Either could be true. I squint at the photos, turn the cards over. “I don't recognize anyone in here.”
“You don't watch baseball like you used to.”
“Who are these guys?” I put the cards in the door pocket. I think that I must be getting old.
©2009 by Paul Graham
