Remember When?

I know many of us collected baseball cards growing up. Whether you were a serious collector or just bought a few packs, you have probably owned at least one baseball card in your life or felt what it was like to open a pack and see what players awaited you inside. I grew up in the 1980's and 1990's, an era known for having what amounts to worthless cards due to a flooded market by Topps, Upper Deck, Donruss, Score, Fleer, and a host of other short-lived companies or subsidiaries of the bigger companies. Even today, you can pick up a box of late 1980's and early 1990's cardboard for a few bucks. Even though many of the cards are not worth very much I still hold a soft spot in my heart for the days when I traded cards with my friends and used to fill boxes and binders with my cards. I had so many cards that I used to make forts for my army men when I was younger, turning a stack of cardboard into a firebase for my grunts in the carpeted jungles of a faraway land. Those days are gone but the memories remain. Memories I fear kids today will never get a chance to make.

Card collecting has gone from a kids and adults hobby to a mostly adult hobby. Gone are the packs for $0.50 and in are packs that cost $5.00. What kid can afford that? Gone are the days where you might have one or two cards in a set of a certain player and now there are seemingly 300 different variations of the same card with different color borders. Do I, a casual collector to this day, really need a Mark Teixeira card with a black, red, green, purple, orange, gold, silver, and magenta border? No. It might be more fun if there were a different picture on the card making it unique but I'm not interested in adding 300 different bordered cards to my collection. I used to collect Derek Jeter cards but that is not a possible goal because there are tens upon tens of thousands of Jeter cards out there. It's insane. Collectors today will never be able to accomplish what was so easy in the past, actually collecting the cards. With eBay, kids rarely trade cards anymore. I remember hanging out after school and spending the afternoon trading cards. We might have gone down to the local convenient store and spent $3 and came back with 6 packs of cards and then commenced trading Butch Wynegar for Don Baylor or Cal Ripken for Kirby Puckett. Today, kids need a full-time job to collect cards. Even at Wal Mart cards are $4.97 for a pack of Bowman. It's crazy. It's no longer about the hobby in many respects but about finding a card to sell it on eBay. Last year it was Stephen Strasburg. This year it isBryce Harper. Who knows who it will be next year?

When Topps won exclusive rights to produce trading cards for baseball I thought it would be a good thing. It would take away the massive amounts of different cards there were for each player and make it easier, and slightly more affordable, to collect once again. I am wrong. Topps, with its subsidiary of Bowman, has flooded the market with variations and parallels and shiny refractors and small subsets within sets that makes it almost impossible to collect an entire set. Where is the fun in that? The last set I actually collected and completed was the 2008 Upper Deck baseball set, one of the last years Upper Deck was allowed to print MLB logos. It was a nice set, easy to collect because it was void of thousands of parallels and variations. The design wasn't terrible, a foil name and the team name and position of the player that accompanied sharp pictures. The picture was the card. There was no border to offer variations for. I was able to collect Series 1 and Series 2 with few problems, save for a few hundred doubles. Now, with Topps being the only player, I don't think we will ever have such an easy go of collecting again. I'll still dabble in card collecting every now and then. I dabbled this year with Bowman buying a few packs until I got my Bryce Harper Bowman Chrome RC. Now I am satisfied. I'll stick to buying Yankee team sets because that's the only team I truly care about with the occasional Washington Nationals team set mixed in for the Ryan Zimmerman, Stephen Strasburg, and later the Bryce Harper cards. To me the fun and the passion are gone right now. I love my collection but it is impossible to collect anymore. I will still enjoy a chase every now and then as I did this year with Bryce Harper but, for the most part, its just too hard and too expensive to collect as I did as a kid and that's sad.