Reese Kaplan -- Baseball Cards and Our Misspent Youth

Like many young children (probably a greater percentage boys than girls) I was an avid collector of baseball cards.  First it was saving them when they came in a waxed-paper package with a stick of bubble gum.  Together with my friends we'd look at the enclosed checklists and trade duplicates to our friends to try to fulfill complete sets.  We never had the money to consider the purchase of more than a single pack at a time and the concept of buying an entire year's box set at once didn't really exist.

Now many children abused their cards, sometimes shuffling them like a deck of playing cards, some would insert them into the spokes of their bicycles to get that cool motorcycling sound effect, some were held to bulletin boards (or sheetrock) with thumb tacks, and some were glued to the bookcovers we used to affix to the tomes provided to us by the schools to further our learning.  I was never an advocate of that latter move because once glued down you couldn't read the stories and stats printed on the backs of the cards.  

As kids matured a great many of them decided they were too mature to be participating in what was a kids' hobby and abandoned their collecting habits.  Others had the decision made for them when they went away to college and discovered an overzealous mother in a fit of decluttering tossed out the sets they'd spent many years building.  Once they got over the disappointment and resentment for losing out what was once valuable to them personally, life went on.

Then something wondrous happened as generations of card collectors continued to grow and mature.  Additional companies besides Topps got into the game, special sets were produced which were considered rare and desirable, and related baseball memorabilia like posters, baseballs, photographs and autographs began to join the kids' collections.  

Coming from a household where money for frivolities like baseball stuff was not readily available and issues like how to pay for the groceries were far more prevalent, I didn't have one of those enviably large collections like some of my friends. Instead of building my artifact group in large volumes, it came one pack at a time.  Later as I accompanied my mother to garage sales and flea markets I was sometimes able to buy a shoe box full of miscellaneous cards from various years that someone was essentially throwing away for less than a dollar and I was able to whine sufficiently loud enough and long enough to get my mother to buy them for me.  

Lo and behold, the collecting hobby soon became a real business and the first fledgling card shows began to evolve where people actually became quite organized about which cards were available, what they were worth and enabled collectors to either fulfill gaps in specific years or to parlay some of their unwanted cards into profits.  I never really paid too much attention to the formal organization of card collecting nor did I think about the prospective value of what I owned.  They were just a part of who I was, like my collection of books, watches and pocket knives.  

Fast forward many years and baseball cards have become a trading commodity, the cardboard version of crypto currency.  There are apps now to load on your phone that link to bidding sites and you can see the value of individual cards in your collection going up and down like trading pork bellies on the open market.  

A few months ago I reached the decision that it was time to retire early from my career and instead concentrate the rest of my life on having fun living in the tropics in the far east.  Part of the planning that goes into any move is understanding the logistics of getting it done.  Moving from New Jersey to Texas back in 2006 was fairly traditional, using a moving van to carry the contents of a home in the former to the new home in the latter.  It involved a great many boxes, packing, labeling and figuring out what didn't need to be moved.

This time around it's quite different as the costs of moving internationally in 2022 are far more prohibitive than filling a United Van Lines truck.  After thinking it through the decision was made essentially to move only in what would fit into suitcases.  That meant everything in the house -- furniture, appliances, artwork and garage contents -- would have to go.  That meant things would be sold, given away or donated to charity.  

Until you try to synthesize your life down to a half dozen or so suitcases, you don't realize how much you accumulate in a lifetime.  While I won't dwell on the need to liquidate obvious things like cars, motorcycles and furniture, it did finally make me face the reality that some collections of things would need to be organized if I held any hope in finding buyers for them.  That included my old baseball memorabilia collection.

With great trepidation I opened the closet in my home office to gaze at what I thought could be a few hundred cards that I would need to enter into a database with identifying information like manufacturer, player, year and condition, I realized it was more into the several thousand in volume that stared back at me.  Furthermore, there were autographed papers, baseballs, pennants and other things I'd accumulated over the years which meant a lot to me emotionally, but now needed a great many hours, days and weeks of manual effort to ascertain what they might mean as items to sell to new collectors.  

As someone who made my career in computing technology and project management, frankly it's humbling and embarrassing to realize that this remnant from my life that dates all the way back to the 1960s of my childhood (with a few examples older than that) was never organized into any structure.  Sometimes, I guess, we get more value in our hearts than we do in our heads and wallets.  

Anyway, as I educated myself on trading databases, online marketplaces, card value fluctuations and other aspects of formal collecting, I realized it was time for me to do the same with my grouping.  Wish me luck!