The Return Of Baseball Stirs Memories Of Childhood Card Collecting

I’m not sure why, but my anticipation for the start of professional baseball is greater than usual this year. Maybe I’m just hoping it will usher in a return to normalcy after we’ve all experienced a year that was anything but normal.

We all want our lives back. But at the same time I don’t want us to waste the pain the past year has wrought to make us better people going forward. I seek a simpler life, unfettered with the noise of quarantines, social upheaval and hateful politics.  

Baseball has always been my safe haven, a place where I could be insulated from life’s urgent pleas. Baseball created a rhythm to my days, serving as a metronome to keep time during the summer months. I grew up listening to Ernie and Milo on the radio broadcasting Braves games, and now Chip and Joe provide the constant hum of a televised Braves game in the background.

I remember being there for Mark Budaska’s grand slam on opening night at Engel Stadium when the Lookouts were revived after an 11-year absence.  Even today there’s few settings as picturesque as witnessing a glorious Chattanooga sunset over the mountains while gathering with friends at a Lookouts game.

For many, baseball serves as mile markers in our life, taking us back to our childhood when my word was uncomplicated. It connects generations, stirring memories of playing catch with a long-departed father or the thrill of begging for an autograph while wearing your little league uniform to the ballpark.

One of the things I miss most, though, is collecting baseball cards. I’m one of the fortunate few whose mother didn’t mindlessly trash my collection once I went to college. In fact, I’ve still got moving boxes full of those cardboard gems from my collecting heyday of the ‘70s, unwilling to part with them like some sort of family heirloom.

This was back in the day when Topps was the dominant producer of trading cards, long before the onslaught of Fleer, Donruss and Upper Deck flooded the market with sets of their own which burst the bubble for collectors in the late ‘80s.

Growing up off Gunbarrel Road when it was a narrow two-lane road to nowhere, Bill Higgins Grocery store was an easy walk from my home. There was no greater joy than investing my piddling allowance into a brown paper bag full of packs wrapped in wax paper that sold for 15 cents apiece.  

The anticipation of finding a Tom Seaver or Henry Aaron card far outweighed the disappointment of another duplicate card of Marty Perez or Cesar Geronimo. It was like Christmas morning all over again, and I kept them neatly sorted in a plastic green Baseball Card locker that had a compartment for each team.  It was problematic, though, that the locker was stamped with the Seattle Pilots and the Washington Senators, teams that no longer existed after pulling up stakes and landing in Milwaukee and Texas.

My older brother, Wendell, had been a collector in his teens and still had some of his favorites he kept in his desk drawer.  Back in his day the cool thing was to attach your favorite cards to your bicycle spokes with a clothes pin to make a distinct clattering sound while riding. There’s no telling how many small fortunes met their demise as noise makers. 

It was always my goal to collect all cards for my favorite team, the New York Mets. I simply didn’t have the funds to put together a complete set. I can remember playing the role of general manager during many elementary school recess breaks trading cards with my friends, willing to part with a Willie Stargell in order to pick up an Ed Kranepool or Jerry Grote simply because they were Mets.

The father of one of my neighborhood pals purchased his son a complete set one year.  I remember looking at his 660-card collection with great envy, wondering what it would be like to have every card and being frustrated by his unwillingness to trade me for the missing cards I so direly needed. His obstinance created a temporary rift in our friendship. I subscribed to Baseball Digest, and they advertised full sets for $14.95 plus shipping and handling. I was tempted to splurge for the purchase, but recognized that would remove all the fun and mystery found inside of each individual pack of cards.

And who could ever forget the chalky, brittle slab of gum that came with each pack, trying to cram as many sticks as possible into my mouth while opening my latest purchases knowing it would lose its taste in a matter of minutes?

Those cards were small squares of knowledge long before their was Wikipedia.  I discovered that I shared a birthday with the Mets’ Rusty Staub, and that the Pirates’ Richie Hebner worked as a grave digger during the off-season.  It was easy to get lost in the bonanza of information squeezed onto the back of each card.

Once I entered high school this annual rite of spring subsided and I stored my cards away on the top shelf of my closet.  Bill Higgins store eventually closed as East Brainerd Road was widened and that chapter of my life closed with it.  I miss the thrill of walking down there daily to get an Icee and to find out if a new shipment of cards had arrived.

I had a brief foray back into the collecting world in my late twenties when the new sets joined Topps in the marketplace.  This time I was doing it more as an investor as the values of rookie cards for Ken Griffey Jr. and Todd Ziele escalated.  I went to Sam’s Club bought an entire case of wax packs as a speculator, hoping the prices would continue to rise. But when the glut of cards exceeded the demand, the market bottomed and those packs remain unopened to this day.

My plans were to pass my collection down to my sons some day, gifting them my treasures that would become generational relics. But times had changed. They had little interest in digging through the boxes to understand the significance of finding Roberto Clemente’s last card before his tragic plane crash.

So in my garage sits a large chunk of my childhood, the boxes securely taped from our last move years ago.  As this baseball season unfolds, hopeful of a full 162-game marathon instead of last year’s 60-game sprint, maybe it’s time to rip them open and take a peek inside. I’ll possibly unwrap some of those packs from 30 years ago just for the experience, to relive the expectation of discovering a rare find inside and seeing if three decades of storage has any bearing on the flavor of the gum.

More importantly it will take me back to a time when life seemed worry-free and all I cared about was my daily trek to Bill Higgins store. I could use some of that comfort in this post-pandemic world.  For those who share my sentiments, meet me at the monkey bars during recess and we’ll trade some cards.

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Paul Payne can be contacted by email at paulpayne6249@gmail.com or via Twitter @Paul_A_Payne