1st Post- It’s Spring Training For Me, Too

Let’s see if this thing goes anywhere.  Please allow me to introduce myself, or at least what is important about me for this blog:  I am a baseball nut.  And just as much, I am a baseball card nut.  I’d describe myself as a cardboard junkie, but that’s already been claimed.  I think I have an idea of what this little blog will be, but just like preseason predictions, you never know things will play out.   I’m going to talk on this blog as if I were talking to my wife, if I were to subject her to my obsession with baseball and baseball cards.   Mostly I’ll post about baseball cards (which have been a nice, relatively safe and cheap release for my hoarding tendencies), but I’ll likely veer off every now again into some of the other wonderful aspects of baseball and its culture.   

There surely is a fine line of how much information folks in the blogosphere want about why you do what you do, so I’ll relay in a nutshell when and how my passion for baseball cards began.  About 25 years about, I was hanging out with my family at my Pastor’s house and the subject of baseball came up.  Turns out, he was a baseball fanatic, and had been his whole life.  I only had a mild interest in the game.  I was in the 8^th grade and more interested video games and loitering than anything.    He talked about living in San Diego, going to Padres games and getting baseball cards autographed from the Padres as well as the visiting players.  To demonstrate the fruits of his labor, he pulled out an album of cards- a complete 1975 Topps Set.  At least 20% of the cards sported autographs he had personally obtained.  I was fascinated.  Page after page of colorful cards sitting in slick plastic pages…  (This is the part of the story where my wife rolls her eyes and turns on Jersey Shore.    You fellow card dorks know what I’m talking about though.)  Then he opened a wooden crate that had dozens of 800 count card boxes containing sets from the 60s to the present.  It was magnificent.  In fact, I must have really freaked out about his collection because the next day in my mailbox was a 1968 Topps Tom Seaver card, courtesy of my Pastor.  It was my first baseball card of any significance:  

The next week, I bought several packs of 1986 Topps (didn’t even know about Fleer and Donruss).   I don’t know if I would have latched on the first star I got from those packs anyway, but I came across a card that grabbed my attention:

Long story short, I hopped right on the Mets bandwagon.  It was great timing too, because the ’86 Mets were a blast to follow, and pretty much started the snowball of my mania for baseball.  I’ve stayed a baseball fanatic this whole time, but there was about an 8 year window that I kind of lost interest in cards for various reasons.  About a year ago, I jumped back in the hobby head first, and don’t see it slowing down anytime soon.  Then, about 6 months ago, I came across a bunch of fantastic blogs about the hobby and thought that looked like a fun thing to do, so here I am. 

I hope that was an acceptable first post.  I can’t wait to do it again.  In fact, I’ll probably post the next few topics all at the same time.  Let me leave the one or two of you actually reading this with my first blog question:

Do you remember your first card of significance, and what was it?