2002-2019 : Or My Various Affairs in the World of Sports Trading Cards

 

It was a small white lie.

            But in the essay, I wrote back in October, the one about coming back to collecting in 2019 after nearly twenty-seven years out of the hobby, maybe there were a few untruths in the writing. That’s not to say it was a totally mendacious piece of writing. I told the truth about my anxiety and my life. I told the truth about my collecting history, for the most part. It’s just that my leaving the hobby and then subsequently picking it back up all those years later, well, it wasn’t as seamless and vacuous a time as I made it sound. There were dalliances with card collecting in those in between years. Flirtations. Small relationships that didn’t even last a year. But nothing that I committed to. At the time I didn’t think those brief cardboard diversions were worth mentioning.

            When I got back into collecting, to stay (I hope), in 2019, I often looked back at those other attempts at collecting and wondered why they never stuck. Where was I at in my life that I suddenly wanted to get back into collecting cards, but ultimately decided against it? What made 2019 so different from say, 2002? Or 2007? 2008 and 2010?

I claimed to get back into card collecting in 2019 because I was an anxious man who needed an outlet. My wife’s ultimatum to me: get a therapist or get a hobby. But wasn’t I always an anxious man? From being an overweight latchkey kid placed in charge of my younger brother to getting my first gray hairs, I’ve always checked doors numerous times, worried about windows being locked or if I left the oven on. Juvenile feelings of inadequecy that never left me. I know my anxiety has gotten worse as I’ve aged, and if ever there was a candidate for therapy it would be me. But the seeds were there all of those years ago.

            I want to take a look at three distinct eras of me dabbling back into the hobby to see what went wrong. Okay, not wrong. But why things didn’t stick. What made me a collector now, as opposed to nineteen years ago when I decided, hey, maybe this hobby is right for me again.

 2002-2003:

The summer of 2002 was the first time that I really tried to get back into cards since my collecting heyday (1983/84-1992). I was twenty-eight and living with my girlfriend (soon-to-be-fiancé) of five years in an apartment in the Bloomfield section of Pittsburgh. I remember that summer as feeling lost. I had always had plans to move from Pittsburgh. To live in different cities. To travel. Since I was seventeen-years-old I wanted to be Jack Kerouac. Or, rather, my version of him, whatever that may be. Instead, I was on the cusp of turning thirty and living in another Pittsburgh apartment…again.

When I met my girlfriend, Ally, in 1997; she had those same rambling aspirations. We sold tons of CDs for money to go to Chicago. We bummed around the Windy City aimlessly for two days. We thought it was going to be the beginning of a great adventure. When Ally finished college, we were going to move to Denver. Then Denver became Boston. Both cities we picked under the guise of attending some MFA program. We saw friends leave Pittsburgh. For Philadelphia. For Brooklyn. Life had to be better in Denver or Boston.

We thought it was only matter of time before we’d be the next to leave. We got our own place to bide our time and save money. Then we got another place. Then another. Moving became a habit. Instead of leaving Pittsburgh, we just moved from one section of the city to another. Shadyside. Squirrel Hill. Bloomfield. We lived like nomads but in the same metro area. There were semi-serious talks about buying a house and moving to the suburbs. The fucking suburbs? By summer of 2002, I felt like the adventurous part of my life, or at least the desire that I had for one…was coming to an end.

I must’ve been looking for something to fill the time and the boredom. Back then, Ally worked occasional weekends and I didn’t. I’m not a needy or extroverted guy, but I didn’t like feeling both lost and alone, especially on a weekend when everyone else was decompressing from the work week and going out. I guess we search for what once made us feel good. And that for me was always baseball cards. I started going to card shows on the Saturdays that Ally worked. Small ones they still had at the Monroeville Mall. Bigger ones at the Monroeville ExpoMart. The occasional flea markets.

I can’t speak much on the hobby in the early 2000s, as I wasn’t a real part of it. I just know what I witnessed. And what I witnessed was sparse. The Mall card shows were a shell of themselves. Flea markets that were overrun with sports card dealers; they took up maybe a table or two. The big card shows at the ExpoMart were reduced to sharing the space with other small to midsize conventions. Cosmetics shows and baseball cards? Dogs and cats living together, man.

There were maybe a third of the dealers at those shows then when I was a kid. More sports memorabilia than cards. The cards looked different. Shiny. Glossy. The card shows at ExpoMart didn’t even have concession stands for a Coke, a crappy hot dog, or a box of popcorn to eat while looking over your finds. Not that I found much to moon over. The autograph signings from the late 1980s and early 1990s heyday seemed a thing of the past.

I didn’t even know what I wanted in terms of getting back into the hobby in 2002. Or what was even out there. I remember buying a lot of Topps Total. There was something about the 990-card set that attracted me. The Ulysses of card sets. The Infinite Jest. Something vast that needed to be conquered. A sports card Mt. Everest. So, I bought a lot of Topps Total.

I also bought a lot of Pittsburgh Pirates cards. Team sets mostly. I filled in the gaps from the last set I bought in 1993 up to the present 2002 issues Pirates team set. But I wasn’t very enthusiastic about it. In the years since I quit collecting, twenty-card team sets were reduced to a handful of players. Especially for the Pirates. But who in God’s name wanted a team set of the 2002 Pittsburgh Pirates?

The team had finished 62-100 the previous season. The Bucs hadn’t had a winning record in a decade. Van Slyke. Bonds. Bonilla. All ghosts. The only good thing about a 2002 Pirates team set was that some of the images were taken in the brand-new PNC Park. God, I hated that era of the Pirates. The Jason Kendall/Brian Giles era. How could I be excited about buying cards for a sports product that was so terrible on the field? I kept thinking why was I even buying the cards?

These two....no fond remembrances here:

By the fall of 2002, I knew my heart wasn’t into collecting again. My Topps Total project had failed because a 990-card set is, well, a 990-card set. The 2002 Pirates had “bettered” their record to 72-89, and I knew I wasn’t going to be hungering for their 2003 sets. I felt like I was wasting money buying cards. Money Ally and I now needed.

She’d decided to go to grad school in New Orleans. The ol’ MFA guise. That wondering spirit was coming back into our lives! NOLA. The Big Easy! There’d be no move to the ‘burbs. No kids coming in a few years. This time we were really going to do it. We also got engaged. As 2002 turned into 2003, it felt like I was finally going to get out of Pittsburgh and experience something else, somewhere else. I felt like things were going to change for real this time. And they did. Just not like we expected.

I wrote about the passing of my father-in-law last week. What I didn’t detail was how long he had been dealing with the cancer that ultimately played a role in his death. Just after New Year’s 2003, Ally and I learned that Big Ron had cancer. Bladder cancer. Bad cancer. Stage four cancer. Ally was devasted. Suddenly Pittsburgh seemed too far away from her dad. And If Pittsburgh felt far, how far away would New Orleans feel?

Ally deferred her acceptance to that MFA program, but not to our leaving Pittsburgh. By April of 2003, we were living in Brooklyn (about an hour south from where her parents lived) and doing our best to be there for Big Ron as he was operated on and began to heal until there was initially no evidence of disease in him. My brief dalliance with cards? Card collecting quickly became a distant memory when I was hunting for a job in one of the biggest cities in the world, and had a $1200 rent breathing down my neck every month. Not to mention the culture shock that I never expected to hit me in the way it did. Let’s just say be careful what you wish for. But that’s for another type of blog.

 2007:

In the late winter/early spring of 2007, Ally and I had been living in Buffalo, New York for almost two years. 

We’d moved to Buffalo from Brooklyn in April 2005, after a couple of tumultuous, sometimes joyous years in NYC. We’d married in June 2004, and it was a good feeling to say that Big Ron was in full recovery, and we didn’t feel like we needed to be around all of the time. He was at our wedding and that mattered in ways we couldn’t even comprehend.

Ally and I also weren’t sure how we felt about New York City. New York, despite my affinity for The Beats, had never been on my radar in terms of places I wanted to live. Ally had her own reasons for distaining New York at the time. We’d moved there to be close to family when family was in need. When that settled down, I think it was hard to see what the city really had to offer us.

Also, the Brooklyn neighborhood we lived in didn’t make it easy. Carroll Gardens is posh as hell now, and I couldn’t afford to live there if I tried. But in 2003-2005, sections of the neighborhood were still raw. We had gang members on our street. We had the Guardian Angels in their little, red hats. Our upstairs neighbor lived for loud bass music. I saw a guy throw a brick through a car’s window after it sped away.

Want more?

On President’s Day weekend of 2003, I witnessed a dog murder another dog. Yeah. From my living room window, I watched a muscled, white Pitt Bull come out of the apartment next door, trot across the street, and casually clamp its jaws around the neck of a chained-up German Shepherd’s neck. The Pitt wouldn’t let go until the other dog was dead, despite the wailing and beating of the German Shepherd’s owner. When the carnage ended the Pitt Bull strolled away as casually as it came. The Shepherd’s body lay wrapped in a garbage bag for almost a week. Pittsburgh this was not.

We were working lousy jobs as well. Ally got stuck somewhere in HR, and I was working a “librarian” job in the medical library for a major pharmaceutical corporation. We both began dabbling in smoking cigarettes again, to calm our nerves, after working so hard to quit in 2001. We were in a different city but we were still at the same dead end. Our jobs were a few blocks away. On lunches Ally and I would meet, smoke, and discuss what in the hell were we going to do now?

Life was too raw for 2003 to 2005 baseball cards. Although I love the '03 design now:

The idea of grad school floated up again. But not in New York City. What we needed was a smaller, more manageable city. Maybe we were small city people after all. But not Pittsburgh. I was determined not to tuck my tail between my legs and head back there. No, it had to be somewhere else. Ally’s sister lived in Buffalo. She seemed to like it. We’d visited her there a few times, and the city seemed all right. We’d seen Ani DiFranco in a downtown coffee shop on one of our visits. That was cool, right? Why not Buffalo?

Plus...these:

Buffalo was an adjustment in a different way. We were going from subway culture to car culture again. I’d gotten used to hopping on a subway or walking everywhere, and there I was stuck in traffic. Things were spread out in Buffalo. They had strip malls. I thought my job at that medical conglomerate was lousy, but I couldn’t even find a job in Buffalo.

One of the places that actually hired me was a bath and sink warehouse. The guy interviewing me, overly chipper to a fault, was convinced I was going to write a novel and leave the job simply because I put down writing as a hobby on my resume. I also had baseball down; guess I didn’t look like major league material. He had a picture of himself and his staff kayaking. No reasonable man kayaks. I didn’t take the job. I couldn’t find a job, and I refused the one job that was offered to me. I felt like a failure and an absolute jackass.

A month, and many beers later, I ended up getting a job in a wine store the size of a car dealership. They put me in the warehouse and then thought, because I had a college degree, that I could sell wines. That’s too much of an experience to mention here. But you can buy the novel and read all about it. And, yeah, if forced, I can pair a decent red with a good steak.

What does any of this have to do with cards? I’m sure anyone who reads this blog on a weekly basis must ask that question at some point.

Well, by summer of 2006 I’d quit the wine store, and had hooked up with a temp agency that got me gigs from time to time. File work. Invoice processing. There could be weeks in between one job ending and another beginning. Because Buffalo was cheap, and Ally had a steady full-time job, money wasn’t as much of an issue. I had my classes to fill some of the time home alone. But the work involved in getting a masters of library science degree? Let’s just say, you aren’t really pressing yourself intellectually.

The goal by spring of 2007 was to finish the degree. Move to Monroe, New York, and live in my in-law’s basement until Ally and I found jobs as public librarians. Yes…in New York City again. Another long story as to why we’d go back. Let’s just say once you get the stink of NYC on you….

WAIT.....HANG ON....

Live in my in-laws basement? Move back to New York City? The city where you can never walk down the street alone? The city of dog murders? I felt the anxiety beginning to bubble up.

One spring morning in 2007, I found myself out of work with nothing to do, and in front of a sports card shop on Hertel Avenue. I remember looking in the window at a man behind a glass showcase with boxes upon boxes of cards behind him. Suddenly, I got that old itch. The itch I’d had as a kid. The racing down the mall hallway with Phineas, Miller and my brother itch. The itch I started to scratch back in 2002. The itch that would quell any lingering doubt. Here we go again, I thought.

I went inside that card shop and bought a few packs of 2007 Topps cards. I loved the bold, black design of the cards. The foiled lettering. The black and green grass backs. I was hooked. I found myself going back to the store and buying more packs. Then more. Finally, I bought myself a hobby box, as they were now being called. Within a few packs I pulled this card.

I thought I was back in to collecting for sure.

But then May came. Ally and I got our degrees and hightailed it out of Buffalo for Monroe, New York. We stayed with my in-laws for about two weeks before it was time to travel. We’d saved some money in Buffalo. We had some cash. Before settling in to look for jobs, Ally and I made a plan to travel the USA by car. My Kerouacian dream was coming true after all.

And boy did we! From New York to New Orleans to Dallas to Arizona and then California. To Wyoming. Through Kansas. Kansas City and St. Louis Barbeque. Chicago deep dish. Chicago to Pittsburgh. And then Pittsburgh back to New York, where the car that had taken us some six-thousand miles, had its check-engine light go on the minute we pulled into my in-law’s driveway.

By August of 2007, Ally and I both had librarian jobs in the city. And we both had more student loans to pay. We moved out of the basement in Monroe, and found ourselves an apartment in a part of Brooklyn where dog on dog murder was not a common theme. I was joining committees at my job. Ally and I were going over to Manhattan on weekends, and really taking the city in, in a way we were unable to back in 2003. We felt we belonged in New York City this time. We joined the MoMA and I fell for art in a way that I never had before in my life. 

From time to time, I’d look at all those 2007 Topps cards that I bought in Buffalo. They seemed like purchases made by a stranger. As with 2002, I asked myself why had a bought these things? There was an answer at the time, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Anxiety or something? The cards felt like clutter. I’d still look through them from time to time. Then I put the box in my closet. I stopped going through the cards altogether.

 2008-2019:

            But there was less of a lull between my collecting liaison in 2007, and getting back on the bike in spring of 2008. Why was that? I’d discovered something called Topps Heritage. Putting modern players on older Topps designs seemed a genius move. And in 2008, Topps was using their 1959 design for their Heritage brand. When I was a kid, I LOVED 1959 Topps cards, and always wanted some. I had to have them. My awesome wife managed to find a hobby store (in our old Carroll Gardens neighborhood), and she surprised me with a hobby box for my birthday.

    This led to me buying packs again. Topps, Heritage and Upper Deck. I found a comic book shop in my newish Brooklyn neighborhood, and was happy to find that they sold cards. I bought a lot of 2008 Topps. The design was such a sharp contrast to the 2007 Topps cards. Stark white, where 2007 had been black. More a traditional design. Scaling back from all of the foil. I liked them but I didn’t love them.

My buying seeped into 2009.  I could never get used to this card.

    But as with everything else, there’s change in life. Having an actual career now meant having actual money in our savings account. Having been a relative pauper from the age of twenty-two to thirty-four, it was nice to not live paycheck to paycheck. Traveling the USA by car had made the traveling bug grow. Not only did I want to revisit the honky-tonks of Nashville, the Jazz joints on Frenchman Street, and kill an afternoon over a pint of Anchor Steam in Vesuvio’s San Francisco; I wanted to go international. London. Paris. Madrid. Vienna. 

Dublin to walk in the footsteps of James Joyce.

    A travel budget in 2008 couldn’t really support collecting cards. Or at least that’s what I thought. So I stopped again. But I wasn’t really out. My brother got back big into collecting and selling cards. When I visited him, he always had the latest Topps brands around. He’d give me Pirates cards. Pirates cards were worth having again. 

    Andrew McCutchen. 

    Pedro Alvarez. 

Pittsburgh had a winning team, and I could admire them from afar. Really afar. I began watching the 2010 baseball season in a Canadian sports bar…in Paris.

 So why didn’t collecting stick those other times? The answer was obvious but it took nearly 3,380 words to get there…and I’m still writing.

The real answer is: I’m old. I’m settled down. My life isn’t in flux the way it was at those times, and I consider that a good thing. I’ve been in the same job for fourteen years now, wherein I used to work a place for two years and then move on…just like with apartments. I’ve also lived in the same place for fourteen years. Same city. Same apartment.

And I've traveled.

There is anxiety. Too much on most days. But I feel like I have more time, energy and money to invest in a hobby than at any time since my youth. The twenty-eight-year-old me was lost and searching. The thirty-four-year-old me was on the cusp of new horizons: career and travel. The soon-to-be forty-seven-year-old me? He’s seen some things in this world. Good and bad. Most days now it’s nice to sit back with a stack of cards or some packs, put on a little bit of music, and just have some fun.

Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.

NEXT FRIDAY:  I'm taking a break and we have guest blogger Russell Streur here to talk about the Brewers. Russell's post has a come-from-behind win in the bottom of the ninth, a no-hitter, a 39-game hitting streak with a little bit of Greek sculpture mixed in. Oh, and free hamburgers! Hope you enjoy!