My Sports Obsession

     

You may remember a little while back where I wanted to    rename my blog due to I actually have people that read it now, or at least follow it anyways.  So I’ve been thinking for a bit and was trying to incorporate the Chicago White Sox, Michigan Wolverines and the Indianapolis Colts.  And that wasn’t working at all, just couldn’t come up with anything that I liked.  But I couldn’t see past trying to do that until early this morning, approximately 5am when I woke up out of a dead sleep and remembered I hadn’t turned my alarm on for work.   So I got up, turned the alarm on, and now I couldn’t sleep because I was jolted awake.  I just laid there and other ideas started flowing through my thick head.  And I got away from the team names and went another route.  And the final name represents exactly what it is.

My Sports Obsession

It works in a couple of ways, I love sports and my sports obsession would be the cards that come with it.  It also made sense because sports cards have almost always been in my life in one way or another.  I started collecting as a kid, I’d guess in 1981 because I had a crap load of the Topps cards with the hats and team names that we all know.

As a kid, the whole neighborhood collected, along with my brother and 2 cousins who are more or less brothers.  So there was all kinds of trading going on back then.  We used to ride our bikes down to Hooks Drugs in town (about 3 miles) and buy .35 packs of the infamous (now) 1987 Topps.  I had so many freaking wood bordered cards it was ridiculous.  I remember buying packs, coming home, opening them up carefully, taking out the good cards, replace them with more commons and seal the pack back up with an iron and sell them to the younger kids in the neighborhood.  Not proud of it now, but I did do it.  I remember having binders and binders of cards just of the players I collected.  I’d have a whole page of 1 card with some of them.

I’d hit 2 or 3 card shows a month in my later teens.  I’d hit all the card shops through the area every week, buying whatever I could of the players I collected or my all time favorite, opening packs.  Card shops were great back then because you can buy a pack of this, and a pack of that, and a pack of those.  This was before memorabilia cards were so huge and you didn’t have to worry about people taking out the hot packs because there really wasn’t such a thing.

This slowly died as I entered adulthood, I still bought packs and still had a lot of cards but I did little with them anymore.  In 1994, when the players went on strike, I was pissed.  I didn’t understand why it happened nor did I care, all I knew was there was no baseball.  I took all the cards out of my binders except for anything worth $1 or more (back then, those were the good cards), put everything in boxes and cases that I pulled out and then gave them to a lady’s kid that my mom worked with.  He was a youngster and was just getting into collecting cards.  I can’t imagine what his face looked like when he saw the thousands upon thousands of cards that I just gave him.

That was it.  I didn’t watch baseball, didn’t do anything with my cards for years.  4 years to be exact.  Until the HR chase of Sosa and McGwire in 1998.  I started watching with awe at this chase as they were approaching Roger Maris’ mark of 61 and kept watching as they went past it.  I remember watching the last series for both players, it was the Cubs vs. Cardinals, the final weekend of the season, the 2 prolific HR hitters were going against each other to finish the season.  I was rooting for McGwire, never been a fan of Sosa.  McGwire was always a power hitter where as Sosa was a 5 tool player.  That is until he started pounding out homeruns and lost the other 4 tools.  I didn’t like that, HR are impressive, but give me a 5 tool player any day.  He sacrificed his game to have all that power and I didn’t like that.  Of course, we know a lot more about both players than we did back then.

So after that race, I started to buy cards again (1999’s).  By this time I was married but didn’t have any kids, so I just bought here and there and started to amass quite a good collection.  I remember having 30+ binders of players I collected and boxes upon boxes of common cards.  I didn’t have anybody to trade with so what I bought, I kept.  I got back into baseball too, started watching all the time.  I hated being on 3rd shift at that time because I could only watch the beginning of games and then would have to go to work.

Then in 2002, we were getting ready to have a baby.  We had to move into a bigger place and of course, with a baby, becomes a lot more stuff you have to buy.  So I quit buying cards for awhile and it didn’t matter, we were getting broker and broker by the day.  So I checked out this website where everybody was selling stuff to see what it was all about.  Next thing I know, I’m in the process of listing all my cards on ebay.  I ended up selling every one of them within a few months or so.  The money came in handy, but I missed my cards.  Eventually I got over them and moved on.  I still watched baseball with a passion, but I still got the itch to open some packs.  As a kid, I would dig into my cards before a game and layout the lineups to the teams I was getting ready to watch on TV.  Every time I watched a game, even to this day, I think of doing that.  I haven’t, but the thought was always there.

Eventually it got to the point where I started buying cards on Ebay and then turn around and sell them.  I was still getting the rush of buying and having cards but as long as I broke out even when I sold them, I didn’t lose money.  Or that’s how I justified it to my ex-wife at the time.  I did this for many years, I would buy blasters and packs and such.  Sell the good cards and keep the base and inserts until I had 20 or so of a certain player or team, then sell those off as lots on Ebay.  The best pull I ever had was a Hideki Matsui auto in his rookie year.  If I saw the look of the card, I could tell you what year and manufacturer it was but I’ve looked for it and I don’t remember what it was.  It also marked the first time I sold on the international market of Ebay as well.  I ended up getting almost $300 for the card that I pulled from a $20 blaster, probably from Meijer at the time.

I did the buy/sell thing on a limited basis for awhile, really up until I started reading other people’s blogs and started my own as well.  And you should know the rest.  I started to collect my teams and players that I collect and started to trade off the cards I didn’t want.  And I’m having as much fun now as I did as a kid.  I wish I could put more money into my hobby but that just isn’t possible at this time, maybe in the future.  Because as you can tell, past and present, sports and sports cards were there, so they will probably be there in the future as well.