Brockett Blog

There are moments when I can’t quite understand why there are pieces of cardboard in various states of protection scattered throughout my bedroom. I consider finding a way to cover them up, and let the other pop culture ephemera have the stage because they wouldn’t be so hard to explain to a visitor. Then I realize I sleep in a room with red shag carpet and wallpaper depicting NFL helmets as worn in the late 1970s (complete with the label under the silver and black helmet eschewing fluctuating municipalities and listing just “Raiders”), and my baseball cards fall down the list in potential bedroom embarrassments.

Two recent books, Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker and Mint Condition by Dave Jamieson, take wildly divergent approaches to understanding the appeal of these collectibles. I can gaze at my navel long enough to understand why I spend a few bucks here and there to assemble almost every card issued featuring pitcher Barry Zito in an Oakland A’s uniform: the chase, the gamble, the sense of discovery and completion, nostalgia tucked into 9-card plastic pages and three-ring binders, the economics of supply and demand in a microcosm, and, of course, the joys of dealing with eBay powersellers.

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On Friday, I accompanied my brother to the FansEdge Sports Spectacular in Rosemont, IL. As he stood in line for autographs from Dallas Cowboys HOFer Mel Renfro and Hang Time replacement coach Dick Butkus, I wandered the aisles looking for St. Louis Cardinals autographs and bargains. Amid this mostly fruitless search, I took in the sights.

First, a booth called Art of the Stars combined two features sure to kill at a sports collectible event: a statuesque brunette greeting gawkers and some interesting pieces of art. One particular piece caught my eye:

This celebration shot from the 2006 World Series captures a great moment, and only upon minute examination does a negative thought cross the mind. First, Best Buy must love that its scoreboard product placement has this kind of legs. And two – and this is the same feeling I get when looking at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch front page from the next day – there are a lot of roster dregs in that celebration. I’m just happy that the family of Gary Bennett has something to hang in their family room. But I love them all, even guys who weren’t on the postseason roster and contributed nothing other than to satisfy LaRussa’s veterans jones for a Latin Aaron Miles like Luis Vizcaino.

And then there was this guy:

He was just one of many guys who took any class gained by the art display and jort-ed* it all away. Now, any gathering consisting of fat guys in baseball jerseys isn’t going to set (or conform to) any fashion trends. But this particular combination particularly appalled, and was one of the worst offenders that didn’t involve frightening Raiders fans from the 1970s there to meet Ken Stabler.

* Check out that Wikipedia link for its picture of jorts. For a term with such a negative connotation, I don’t think that’s what people are thinking of when they make these kinds of jokes. “Those jorts … they’re cool.”

I spotted these relics at a card show in Rosemont in November, and used a handful of packs as Christmas presents (stocking stuffers, I swear!) during the holidays. I think they were received rather well, but joke gifts don’t exactly own a long shelf life. Still, the cards brought back a bunch of memories and spurred a number of questions.

Saved By the Bell: The College Years (mostly) reconstituted the original Saved By the Bell gang and placed them on the roomy California University campus … even though there were multiple original episodes detailing the various colleges the crew would attend. NBC moved the show from weekend mornings into prime time, and brought back the original cast (except for the characters of Lisa and Jessie, replaced by squint-and-you’ll-see-it facsimilies). Having not seen the episodes since a syndication run a few years back, Wikipedia reminded me that Kelly Kapowski (Tiffany Amber Thiessen) wasn’t in the pilot, and that there was an even more overt Lisa replacement in the form of Essence. Thiessen reconsidered, and Lisa 2.0 “transferred.”

But unlike Boy Meets World, the authority figure (in this case, Mr. Belding) couldn’t follow the kids to college. Who could fill such shoes? In the grand tradition of Reggie Theus on “Hang Time” …Bob Golic! And his shirt! The future NutriSystem spokesman and radio host offered up the comical stylings inherent in a former professional football player living in the largest dorm rooms in recorded history. Despite Golic bringing in the devoted Notre Dame viewership, the show finished in the lower rungs of 1993 television shows and was cancelled after one season. Pacific, sensing the untapped market for collectibles featuring shows cancelled after 18 episodes, put together a 110-card set featuring all kinds of things. Like wacky stills …

… and back-of-the-card information really best left unsaid:

This being the early 1990s, it’s no surprise that these cards exist. Non-sports cards took off along with comic books and sports cards during this boom period. I still have some “Death of Superman” and Marvel cards collected by the 14-year-old version of this geek. But you can’t just count on rehashing plots and using up the rest of the publicity shots. You need special inserts! And these packs had two of them:

So dreamy! And seizure-inducing! With syndication and DVDs, Saved By the Bell: The College Years hasn’t left the retro consciousness. And, given the amount of gloss, these cards won’t be disappearing anytime, either.

The following link comes with plenty of caveats:

• I interviewed the Web site’s writer for a feature in Take ONE
• As previously noted, I indulge in nostalgia by collecting small bits of cardboard featuring millionaire baseball players and prescribing value on said bits of cardboard
• My newspaper designing experience makes me extremely envious of anyone who can create art through the use of PhotoShop

Phew … with that out of the way, I can’t recommend highly enough the climactic final postings at The Baseball Card Blog. Ben Henry introduced the site a couple of years ago, when there weren’t many fans using the new tools of blogging to talk about their collections. Since then, many have filled in the void, highlighting their own collections, talking about current issues, busting packs and more. The balance of work and passion, evidently, finally tipped too far to one side for Ben, and he will stop updating his Web site in the near future. But in the meantime …

After a great first effort in transferring the words of former baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti onto the medium of the baseball card, Ben has gone for the Holy Grail of that convergence: “Casey At The Bat,” as told by some of the most iconic baseball cards of all time.

Each example is chock-full of wit and skill, mixing both the meaning of each line in the poem with an especially pertinent example familiar to just about any student of the hobby. And each card somehow manages to match the new message to the old fonts, so that upon first glance you might not even notice the new text on the Topps All-Rookie Team trophy as seen above. He’s about halfway through the epic, and you’ll need an RSS feed to keep from constantly visiting the site to see if he has updated the work. Like blogging, collecting is a labor of love, and it shines through in the creative work of this endeavor.

I lack many vices. The amount of money I have saved living a clean, boring existence has prevented the types of debts usually faced by writers on newspaper journalists’ salaries. But everyone owns a weak spot, a collecting jones that channels any latent obsessions and/or compulsions and focuses them on a particular “thing.” My thing is baseball cards, and though it may repel potential mates with Albert Belle-like force, it mixes nostalgia with current enjoyment into a passion in mint condition.

Last Friday, I attended a semi-annual card show sponsored by the Chicago Sun-Times (Oprah approved!) in Rosemont, Ill. My brother attended to spend big bucks to have Jerry Rice sign a San Francisco 49ers mini-helmet, and he reports one of the nicest encounters he has had in the Sharpie-signing game. I scouted for Christmas presents for said brother while looking for a couple of things:

• Certified autographs of players on the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals
• Barry Zito cards from his days with the Oakland A’s (2000-2006)
• Cards to complete my set of 2008 Topps Allen & Ginter

Walking amid a crowd of older collectors rocking Starter jackets and receding hairlines, I somehow felt both better and worse about myself for joining them in moving from table to table. After picking up a Scott Spezio autograph for $2 and realizing I may be the only one still looking for Barry Zito cards after his last few seasons, I happened upon a table showcasing boxes of packs from the 1990s. Just seeing the boxes brought back memories of the early 1990s and piecing together sets pack by pack after visits to area convenience stores and hobby shops. I moved on to comic books in about 1994, which is when cards continued a trajectory that still exists today – creating a premium over the standard set of cards that existed in the 1950s-1980s.

Collectors and connoisseurs showed interest in cards on better stock, with glossy finishes and great photography. They paid good money for the chance at rookie cards and other cards of manufactured scarcity. And the card companies competed with each other to find new ways to appeal to this collector seeking value on the secondary market. And little 14-year-old Hank learned lessons in economics that wouldn’t be out of place on NPR’s Planet Money podcast.

In any event, a box of 1994 Pinnacle Series 1 appealed to me for a couple of reasons. One, the year featured the cancelling of the World Series and marked an interesting flashpoint for baseball. And two, the cost was $12 for a box of cards that I would have killed someone to own in my rolled-up jeans days (hey, trends lasted longer in rural areas). Here’s the breakdown:

• 226 of 270 cards
• 102 doubles
• Six “Museum Collection” parallels (such as the John Kruk pictured at the top of the post)
• Tribute Bo Jackson

Busting a box like this isn’t going to make anyone their money back on the eBay market these days. A parallel Cal Ripken or Ken Griffey Jr. might draw some interest, but the cost of this box was an investment in traveling down memory lane. I remember some of these cards, and can laugh at others with the benefit of hindsight. Great photography – seldom seen in many cards these days – captures odd moments, including current television analyst Orel Hersheiser having a great time stretching. And I can only wonder if kids in 1994 would have pulled a Brooks Kieshnick rookie card and started planning their future retirement funds.

The trip complete, I hear a whisper. The collecting jones demands completion. Not being privy to a 1994 grade school lunch table, I head online. There, I can finish the set … and have a touchstone for any time I wonder about my favorite sport just before its darkest days.

Editor’s note: This interview originally was published March 22, 2006. It was recently referenced on his site here.

Cardboard creations
{Ben Henry takes his collection of baseball cards to the Web

For as much as we’ve learned that everyone has a blog about everything these days, there hasn’t been a lot of bandwidth spent talking about Joe Boever’s 1989 Donruss baseball card. Maybe it’s because the nondescript Atlanta Braves pitcher went 4-11 that year. Maybe it’s because the card wouldn’t even show up in a price guide called “Beckett Joe Boever Card Monthly.” Or maybe no one sees the charm that Ben Henry sees.

Henry started a Web site, baseballcardblog.blogspot.com, earlier this year that has become an homage to the overproduced cards of his youth. Now mostly devoid of monetary value, he finds a way to describe the personal value of such collecting pursuits with proper — often hilarious — visual accompaniment. Henry recently stepped away from the wax packs to answer a few Take ONE questions by e-mail.

What led you to create the site?
Sometime last summer I started thinking about what would make the ‘Perfect Pack’ of baseball cards, and if something like this could ever actually exist. So, a Perfect Pack would consist of all the great or good cards from a set being seeded into one pack. An example of this would be in 1986 Topps getting Vince Coleman’s regular issue rookie card, the Pete Rose #1, the second-year Clemens and Puckett, the Brett All-Star (where he resembles Alfred E. Neuman), Nolan Ryan, Mike Schmidt, Wade Boggs, Tony Gwynn, the Pete Rose Record Breaker, Bret Saberhagen, the Expos Team Card featuring Andre Dawson, Len Dykstra, Dwight Gooden and Fernando Valenzuela. This is the kind of pack you dream about as a little kid, and I wanted to see if it actually existed. I thought the best way to compare packs against each other (using one 36-pack box as the entire population) would be to give each pack a rated value. I came up with a ranking system of how each individual card would rate (on a scale of -2 to +5), based on the player, whether it was their main base card or a subset card, and how the card would’ve been approached at the time of issue versus assessing the pack today.

So a Perfect Pack in 1986 Topps would be an 80 (a rating of 5 times 16 cards). I had started recording each pack in a notebook and after going through something like half a box I got really bored. Bored with the idea of dry, quantitative analysis. Right around that time, I found a card of Moose Haas and on the back it said that not only was he an amateur locksmith, but he was also a magician. Are you kidding me? And he chose baseball? It got me thinking that instead of writing about statistics (and really just made-up statistics), I should focus on what makes baseball cards so neat. So I searched around on the Internet for writing about baseball cards and either I didn’t know where to look or maybe I was looking in the wrong places, but I just didn’t find any beyond Beckett.com and the Topps and Upper Deck pages. So I got my friend to set up a blog template for me and I just sort of had at it.

Much of the talk today in the hobby is about the kind of card, scarcity, etc.
Yeah, and it’s kind of too bad. I mean, a lot of the cards today are really nice, good-looking cards that I’d totally be into collecting if everyone wasn’t so hell-bent on finding autographs, SPs and game-used relic cards…maybe it’s just me, but I really don’t want a card featuring a crotch swatch of, you know, like Mark Prior’s uniform or something. I don’t care how many times they wash it. I really don’t think that Upper Deck and some of the other companies are too far away from bottling players’ sweat and dipping special chase cards in it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone from a card company paid Johnny Damon’s barber to collect his hair after The Cut, so they could insert furry insert cards in next year’s product. I mean, how sick is some of this stuff? I stopped collecting because packs got too expensive, the cards got too fancy and I still kept getting Astros bench players.

But this site talks more about the cards themselves, their photos, design and maybe even numbering.
For me collecting was about building a set, trading with friends for players I liked, and making fun of weird looking guys or players with unbelievable names. Today’s stuff is cool to certain people, but with so many sets, it’s hard to keep track. I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, because I really do like some of today’s sets, but it really was better back when I was pouring my allowance into completely worthless baseball cards. And it was this period (1986 – 1993), and cards from 1993 and before that I wanted to write about, because they’re just so much more interesting than stuff today.

Does that make you feel nostalgic/old?
I don’t know. Kind of, not really. I guess it should, but it doesn’t. I mean, I feel like these cards have always been part of my life as things I sorted, things I rated, things I valued. Not as things I read, things I really stared at and things that helped me contemplate the universe. Wow, that’s a little heavy. What I mean is, I find it really refreshing to re-approach cards in a new way, to appreciate and memorialize everything associated with them. I don’t think that what I’m doing with The Baseball Card Blog either dates me or my interests nor does it invoke any sort of nostalgia in me as a writer. The reader may feel nostalgia, but I think it’s up to individual interpretation.

Would someone be able to do something like this site 20 years from now looking back on the newest Bowman Chrome? Or does the 80s/90s era lend itself well to this writing?
I would definitely read what a current collector has to say about new cards and I think that in 20 years someone could do a fantastic job talking about 2006 Bowman Chrome. But I think the problem they’ll run into is that, because there are just so many sets today, they’ll have to try extra hard to get people to remember what it is they’re talking about.

I’ve been thinking about why I have such a hard time relating to cards today. With so many insert sets, I get this feeling that the hobby has lost its focus, or that maybe, in what is a much more sad interpretation, the focus of the hobby has moved away from the base set and towards finding 1 of 1’s of quad-signature game-used relics of Babe Ruth. I like Babe Ruth as much as the next guy, and whenever I think of him I invariably think of Harry Frazee, No No Nanette, and how I’d like to try to eat a couple of gigantic steaks for breakfast, but I don’t really want to think of the possibility of finding a card featuring his signature cut from an old check or something, if only because it would drive me to buy packs and packs of cards at $8 a pop. There are a few reasons that I don’t smoke: one, because I’d rather not die of lung cancer, two, because I always found Joe Camel creepy and three, because packs of cigarettes are so goddamn expensive. Now, explain to me (besides the dying of lung cancer part) how buying packs of new cards is not like buying cigarettes.

But, the cost of new packs aside, baseball is baseball, to paraphrase Terrence Mann in the film version of Field of Dreams, and I think what makes something like this universal regardless of time period is that people who follow baseball can relate and will want to read about it because they want to remember it and think about it and obsess and relive games and that time when they got to meet a player or something like that.

How much space do your collections take up, currently?
I had a lot of my cards in storage for a while. Then I entered a weird nesting phase a couple of years ago where I wanted all my cards around me. Right now, I have one big box of commons, three shoeboxes of my best cards, one three-ring binder of old cards and one other shoebox of new cards in my closet in my apartment. At my parents’ house my filing cabinet is full of sets and binders, under my bed I have a few 800-count boxes collecting dust, and in my closet I have the rest in boxes. All told, I have somewhere around 200,000 baseball cards and probably something like 15 to 20,000 basketball, football and other cards.

What is the most prized possession?
I used to be a huge Fred McGriff fan, so I was really excited the day I could afford his 1986 Donruss rookie (which is now relatively worthless in value but still under plastic in one of those screwdown cases). I also was a gigantor fan of Eddie Murray, and I have his 1978 rookie in plastic, even though I handled it so much in my teenage years that none of the corners are sharp and there’s a large crease across the front. Also, I still know where some of the cards are that I got in the very first pack I ever bought. That’s why I’m a Carney Lansford fan (not because he was briefly on the Red Sox, was one of the better overlooked hitters of the 1980s, or because his first name is Carney, although all of those reasons help).

Every collector has a few cards stashed away of the can’t-miss who missed. Who are yours?
Back when the card was going for $5 each, I met a guy who had an 800-count box full of the 1987 Topps Mike Greenwell rookie. Even then, I knew this guy was in too deep. Sure, Gator was good, but not $5 a card good. I prized my Wally Joyner 1987 Topps card, as well as the Kevin Seitzer card from the 1987 Fleer Update set. I really thought Steve Avery was going to kick ass for a long time (not just two or three years), so I still have mixed emotions towards his draft pick card from the 1989 Topps set. But, you know, I think this question can be interpreted a couple ways. Like, okay, Cecil Fielder was just another lousy Blue Jay when the 1986 sets came out, but then he became big in Japan (in more ways than one) came back to hit 51 home runs (when that number was an important, earth-shattering achievement) and his rookie cards went through the roof. Now they’re worthless again. So is he a can’t-miss who missed? Or is he a good player who came out of nowhere, everybody realized en masse that they had his card, his rookie flooded the market, then he realized he weighed too much, he couldn’t get his mojo back and everybody tanked? Or how about this example: John Kruk was a great player, but his rookie never went anywhere in terms of value (I think you can get one in mint condition for something like 75 cents). He’s certainly a can’t-miss who missed in terms of book value.

One of the recent posts talks about how you came back for 2003 Topps Heritage and then stopped new-card collecting again. What keeps you from coming back?
The money involved in collecting. I’m thinking of doing a 6-Pack Analysis of 2006 Topps and 2006 Topps Heritage, so last weekend I went down to the local card shop and bought six packs of each. It cost me nearly $40 bucks. That’s totally ridiculous, if you ask me. I really don’t see how little kids can afford to buy new packs. I’m on salary, and even I can’t afford that. I came back for 2003 Heritage because Topps rehashed the 1954 design (in my opinion the best design they ever did) with current players. I ended up buying close to 3 full boxes of those cards, and I’m still 11 cards shy of completing the set. I traded with other collectors, I bought singles; it was like I was really collecting again. But it really all came down to how much I was investing in these cards, and then the summer of 2003 ended and it got harder and harder to find the cards and then I just kind of lost interest. I bought a few packs of 2004 and 2005 Heritage, and 6 packs from this year’s set. I was excited to buy the ones from 2005 because the design was 1956 Topps, when the company went back to painted photos for the headshots. To my dismay the Heritage set used sharp photography for the headshots, so I said the hell with that and stopped collecting.

What is the future of the site? Do you think there are enough ugly mugs/weird stories to make this site work for a long time?
Maybe I’m delusional, but I think The Baseball Card Blog can endure for years. That’s my honest opinion. There are so many different fun things about cards and baseball in general that it can go on for a while. And really, the trick behind this site is that the subject matter transcends beyond the cards themselves. Baseball players are, in essence, a large group of lucky bastards who get to run around outside, make a killing and give the rest of us an outlet for all our weird, messed-up obsessive behavior. Really I’m just doing my part.