Trading cards and sports memorabilia have been a part of my life nearly as far back as I can remember. During spring or summer of 1988, I bought a pack of Topps baseball cards from Roth’s IGA or Payless Drug and with that 40-cent purchase I started a hobby journey that continues to the present.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted life and helped fuel a resurgence in the popularity of sports cards, I spent a great deal of my free time on the hunt for new additions to my collection. From supermarket hanger packs to piles of donated items at Goodwill and the ubiquitous early 90s Craigslist collection, I looked everywhere for sports cards.
I’ve used the past-tense here because everything changed fourteen months ago. Its far from the greatest tragedy suffered since the onset of the pandemic, but its simply not easy for me to regularly find affordable sports cards any more. Most retail options have disappeared – aggressive customers have harassed vendors to the extent that stores aren’t willing to risk the liability in offering trading cards. Card shops are still here, but the price of many hobby boxes has climbed above what I consider to be a responsible frequent expense for a hobby. The monthly show still happens, but its crowded, more expensive, and full people looking to live their best “flip life.” Maybe the biggest interruption to my style of collecting has been the utter disappearance of cards from local thrift shops, or at least from those I frequented before March 2020.
Aside from spending less money on purchases and winnowing my social circle to me and my spouse for much of the last year, I was not impacted physically or financially by Covid-19. All of my loved ones are still here and my personal safety and security was never compromised. For that, I am lucky and incredibly thankful. But I’m also really bummed about the state of one of the things that brought me great joy.
A lot of people talk about when they dropped out of the hobby, or how a fleeting purchase brought them back. I don’t have a story like that. I started when I was eight, and have continued for 33 years. There were times when lack of finances or time limited additions to my collection, but I’ve always been in the hobby. I’m not quitting, and I haven’t stopped buying – its just obvious that I can’t participate in the way I did before the current bubble started expanding.
So, I’ll try to get more satisfaction out of how I am currently willing to participate.
Which leads me to why I’m starting this blog. I have been a longtime reader of numerous great hobby blogs, and a relatively active participant in hobby Twitter. In what feels like a past life, another of my hobbies was writing. I operated a personal blog for more than a decade – when that ended, I more or less stopped writing. What had been a dependable outlet vanished, leaving behind notepads full of orphaned lines and topics set aside for stories that would ultimately never be written. Nothing came of any of it – I just moved on. Some of the time I formerly spent writing transferred to personal relationships and the endless tasks involved with home ownership – but a lot of it went to sports cards and other memorabilia.
Nearly ten years has passed since the end of my last blog and I recognize the past year brought with it an incredible lost opportunity. While many people learned new skills or worked to better themselves during a year of relative isolation, I was part of the many more who simply considered those possibilities. Now fully vaccinated, I’ve begun to emerge from the pandemic more or less the same as I entered it, but for the evaporation of what consumed most of my downtime. Simply put, there’s a void. I need more balance, and I think this may be a coupling of my some of my life’s great joys – sports, my collection, and writing.
I doubt much ground will be broken here, and I sincerely hope future posts will not be quite as long as this, although brevity was never my strong suit. My goal is to use this space to share my collection, as well as some past and future acquisitions, and numerous other hobby-adjacent observations. At the very least it’ll be a chance to add to the hobby blogosphere, get some writing reps in, and show off some used cardboard.
Thanks for visiting, and I hope to see you here again.