I often wonder.....
 

Why we as children paid nickels for cardboard baseball players. Then roughly handled them, put rubber bands around them, put them in bicycle spokes, flipped them, traded them, and treated them harshly.
Now as mature adults, we readily pay hundreds, yea thousands of dollars to recollect the cards of our youth?
I admit my guilt, do you admit yours ?

Yep!

Because we cannot go back in time and spend 5 cents for a pack of cards and take care of them throughout our lives anymore.

I wonder why you did those things to them, but I didn't. If everyone abused their cards, there would only be low grade cards available.

I used to cut apart rookie cards so I could put each player with their appropriate team. I also drew beards and mustaches on random players.

Imponderable
 

As young kids, we had no understanding of ourselves as adults, and as adults, we have only dim memories of ourselves as kids...I guess.

We loved them. And what you're describing is exactly what kids should have done with them. I wouldn't say we handled them "harshly", but I know what you mean. I would say instead, we handled them in an unselfconscious and free way. And we treasured them. As someone who left the hobby for 40 years and came back to it recently, those times becomes more and more precious, and those cards are a link to those times...

When I was a child, the card backs were as interesting to me as the fronts. In many ways, they still are.

I read (and re-read...repeatedly) the stats, bios, cartoons, etc. I sorted my cards periodically; sometimes by year and number, sometimes by team, sometimes by player.

When the Phillies traded for someone, I went through my collection, looking for cards of the "new guy." When the Phillies were in the playoffs, I would "check out the competition" by looking at the other team's players' cards.

All that handling - in the days before toploaders, Beckett price guides, and professional grading - was done with little regard for condition. The inevitable result was a pile of cards with soft corners and paper wrinkles.

It wasn't until I was around 10 that I started taking some amount of care with my cards. I had those early side-load 9-pocket pages and put together a binder. I hadn't yet lost my fascination with constantly re-sorting, though. So, the cards likely still took damage - from being moved around, page to page.

Around two years later, something caused me to abruptly stop beating the hell out of cardboard. It was an old newsprint periodical that many of you probably remember - Current Card Prices. A "baseball card shop" had opened up near my dad's house. Naturally, I got him to take me there one day. When I first stepped inside, the seemingly endless array of merchandise left me speechless. To my eyes, the place had an absolute grandeur to it.

Among many, many other things, they sold CCP. They even had one on the counter for people to reference, presumably to spur impulse purchases. At one point during my visit that day, I picked up the store copy and checked it out. Hey, look! I've got some of these cards. WOW, check out these prices!! Holy smokes, I have this one, and it's worth more than my whole allowance!!! While flipping through the book, I suddenly felt informed...enlightened...wiser somehow. It was a religious experience.

Of course, the shop owner (a saint of man named Mike...I've still got his business card from all those years ago) made it a point to explain the importance of condition on values. He also introduced me to penny sleeves, top loaders, and a few other things one could use to store their cards.

Since that day, I have always treated my cards with the greatest of care. Obsessively. This approach helped me as a teenager who went to card shows; buying, selling, and trading. It helped me in my 20s when I set up as a dealer at these same shows. It helped me in my 30s and 40s as I pieced together a modest collection of cardboard keepsakes. As I near my 50th birthday, I trust it will continue to help me every step of the way along my collecting journey.


Postscript: I realize the shop was probably not much different than countless others that sprang up in the mid 1980s. It just happened to be the one at which I had an epiphany regarding baseball cards and their values.

Sorta like getting a toy truck for birthday and never playing with it in the sandbox. Or never using the Red Ryder BB gun you get for Christmas. Cards were fun, not pristine collectibles. Rubber bands held them together. (plus some of us bought packs only to get yummy gum strips....yuck). I did have enough excitement for a Bart Starr not to put it on my bicycle - of course he was on the wall of my bedroom using a thumb tack....who knew back then :-)

As the title goes, I often wonder what all of the cards I had from 65-68 BB and FB that are now molding, when we moved and everything got thrown out, in the Lakeville, Ma landfill. Most specifically if I had the Namath rookie. I don't remember having it but not sure. I know I did not have 66 or 67 high numbers but did have semi highs. Had plenty of 66 phil football.

Exactly...Amen!! "Cards were fun, not pristine collectibles". Perfect!!

There are guys here who were collecting back in the 50's. I myself started in earnest in 1968. I, nor anybody else I knew, never gave a thought to condition (at least not in a neurotic sense) or value when we were buying packs.

There's a YouTube channel that I enjoy by a younger collector, who in response to a comment told me that when he was collecting in the 80's they loved the cards too, but they also thought in terms of the potential value of the card. I'm glad that when I was collecting that wasn't an aspect of things.

For me, collecting cards in nice shape as an adult is just the continuation of the 'reliving your childhood' metaphor. As a kid, five minutes after they were removed from packs, all of our cards were on the road to Rough Shapeville with stops is Crumpled Junction, due to the aforementioned rubber bands, cardboard boxes, continual sorting and resorting, stuffing them in our pockets, flipping them, studying the backs to glean information on our favorite players, trading them and everything else that rounds the corners and creates more creases than what's found on an 80 year old fat lady. But our childhoods had rough situations as well. Perhaps troubled home lives, or bad days in school, broken bones, getting in trouble from your mom, pet loss...and on and on it goes. When we look back on our youthful days, we skip as much of the nasty stuff as possible and just think about the 'good ole days,' so I see cards the same way. When recapturing my childhood, I skip thinking about the traumatic time a car plowed into our house (true story), and instead think about how great it looked after reconstruction. With cards, I don't want to buy a 1972 Willie Mays that's in the shape mine was actually in - AWFUL - but instead I seek out a beautiful version of that fantastically memorable card. I guess it's just another way of glamorizing the past.

So you're one of the guys that made some of my favorite cards. Nice.

With me it is more than reliving my childhood. For me it is being able to attach myself to the history of baseball. I was not good enough to play in the major leagues so my only way to attach myself to the game and the history of it is to collect sets every year. It is my personal archive and museum that reflects the game I love.

I did it but only with doubles. We used to do all that and flip them also but never with our good cards. Those were carefully put away in shoe boxes. I took care of my collection from the tender age of 8 but like I said we abused the doubles. Still have all of my childhood cards in good shape.

It's funny to me how even after cards were a thing and "known" to be valuable in the 1980's - still - our perception of condition and keeping them nice is ever evolving. Back in the late 80's and early 90's, there were many vintage cards that we would have called "mint" which would probably be nice PSA 6's today. Even with current Topps cards right out of the pack then, the commons and players that were not superstars and rookies occasionally going directly into toploaders (we didn't use penny sleeves back then, or at least I didn't...) were still being shuffled and going into boxes. So it was not uncommon to have a dinged corner here and there, and of course centering was not really a concern at all. In going back and looking at my large stacks of commons or maybe even a favorite player in the 90's - say Don Mattingly - the cards are generally in good shape, but for some it's obvious that they've been handled. Whereas today maybe an "8" is a bad grade for a modern card, back then a lot of my modern cards that got handled probably were left in PSA 5 or 6 shape, not 9 or 10. And this is when we knew condition concerns affected card value.

I wonder what happens next, with everybody today grading ultra modern hot rookies. In the future will companies like Topps and Panini just issue cards that have already been graded? LOL.

It's already been done. I think 21 years ago?

I didn't think to save my cards
 

I collected football cards in the fall of 1971. When football season ended my friends and I took our cards to the school playground and threw them in the air and watched the smaller kids run after them. This was after several months of pitching them against the school wall and writing on them. None of us thought to save them.

Gum
 

I started buying 1 cent packs in the 1950's and it was for the gum. I saved the Orioles and the rest were eaten up by my bike spokes. I bought unopened boxes of 1959 Topps 1 cent packs from a friend in school for $1 a box. Opened each 1 cent pack, threw the card away and sold the gum for a nickel. Didn't start collecting cards until I was 28 in 1974.

Ever get a stale piece of gum that broke and crumbled in your mouth? - yuck.

I started to take care of certain cards in 60's and 70's when the 3D versions came out. Those were awesome, and too cool to put on my bicycle. :-)