…but here I am.
I’m Scott. Some of you may know me from…well, all over. I could talk about those other places and other things that I’ve done or how we may know each other, but that’s not what we’re here for, and hell, you all know how to use search engines if you get curious, right? (For those of you who don’t know me from elsewhere and are finding me for the first time, be warned, those search results get kinda weird and kinda not-safe-for-work-or-kids.)
So, yeah, enough about me and what I did on some date with some stuff with some dudes.
I’m here today, and ideally for the forseeable future, to talk with you about trading cards.
I love trading cards.
I’m pretty sure I bought my first pack at some point during 1980. It was a pack of 1980 Topps baseball cards, bought at a old, run down grocery store owned by a man named George. I could be wrong about this, but I think my Rickey Henderson rookie card came from my first pack. I seem to remember Dwight Evans and Tom Burgmeier being in there too, though again, it was decades ago and very hazy.
Since that day, I’ve had an on-again, off-again, love/hate/love relationship with trading cards of all varieties. I mainly collect baseball cards, but I’ve collected a whole mess of other types of trading cards. Football, basketball, hockey, “Howard The Duck”…let me tell you, people, it gets ugly around here sometimes.
After 30 years of collecting cards, I’m still not exactly sure what draws me to them quite so strongly, causes me to spend a ton of hours sorting through them, makes me spend money I don’t really have on them, or has compelled me to create a place to talk about them with other folks. It could be that I’m a culture junkie. It could be the connection to my own youth that they have. It could be about a wider connection to history that comes from an unlikely source. It could even be an appreciation for what’s, in all truth, an incredible form of pop art. Yes, even in the case of the “Howard The Duck” cards. Oh, who am I kidding? ESPECIALLY in the case of the “Howard The Duck” cards.
Whatever the reason, I’ve been thinking about opening shop and talking with you all about cards for what seems like forever now, but tonight’s the night I finally chose to do it. Maybe it’s because I spent a fair chunk of my evening at a store, hands-deep in 1980 Topps cards. No Rickey this time, but I did replace my Tom Burgmeier card and while I don’t want to say I replaced my Dwight Evans, because a card that’s been with me quite as long as that, you don’t replace, but I did get another copy of it in better condition than the slept on, eaten on, thrown around, with me through several moves and most of my life one that may or may not have been in my first pack.
As for what I’ll specialize in here, among a pretty crowded and still-growing field: mostly, it’ll be sharing.
I’ve got some cool cards that I’d like to show folks, and if people want to talk about or show off theirs here, that’s cool as well. I’ve also got a bunch of doubles, so in an effort to get them out into the world, I’ll be trading them to interested parties, giving some away, and occasionally selling them, though like most of the card collectors I know of who aren’t dealers, what I have doesn’t have a ton of monetary value. In the meantime, if you have want lists, feel free to send them here. I’ll be posting mine as soon as I write something up that provides some context to it.
This won’t be a news site per se, but if I come across news that’s beneficial or interesting to us and not splattered everywhere, I’ll pass it on.
Instead of up-to-the-minute reports on sell sheets and the like (which are done very well elsewhere), I’ll be more likely to talk about what I’ve seen, thought and have experienced during my time as a card collector, or during my time as a person who happens to collect cards, and see what you folks think about it. Hopefully, it turns into a fun discussion.
If this opening piece has struck you as a bit sedate for the launch of a site, it’s by design. My first instinct when I write things like this is to jump around and yell and throw stuff and curse and break things, but I paused for a minute and went in a different direction when I resumed writing. (This isn’t to say that the wild rumpus won’t happen here occasionally, because it will.)
I did this because decided that the Crazy Eddie approach to talking about cards ran counter to how I feel when I spend time going through cards and looking at them.
When I look through trading cards, I feel calm. Again, for reasons I’m not entirely aware of, it quiets me. I’m really thankful for that. I forgot to mention that in my list of reasons for collecting cards, didn’t I?
Here’s hoping that you all get a great feeling of some sort when you look through cards, and that you’ll come by here to talk about them with my readers and I.
-S
2020 Notes: wow, this was interesting to read again, almost a decade later. I stuck largely to the mission statement before the mission outgrew the old site, necessitating a move to this one, and I’m still doing similar stuff today. Sorting through cards, even though the scale I’ve done it at in the years since has occasionally been a little bewildering, ultimately does still fill me with a sense of calm. I’m beginning to move the best stuff from the old site over to the “new” site, almost 4 years after it started, and I hope to go through the entire old site, gradually. I am finally sunsetting the old site after this process is done, and not everything from there will make it over (I want to make it worth your while to read whatever moves here, and some posts were definitely better than others), but I do want to make this archive of my work more complete than it’s been, and offer my insights on the “classic” posts as I go, either at the beginning or the end of each post, depending on what feels appropriate. Wish me luck!