Old Time Family Baseball

1983 Fleer - Willie McGee

I was in a toy store. A six-year-old with carte blanche to have anything he wanted (up to $7) that would make the long car ride home easier. The odds were good that I’d get that Bib Fortuna figure I had my eye on for a while. But I chose a vending pack of 1983 Fleer — the ones with the three different see-through compartments. It was my first-ever pack of baseball cards. I picked the pack I did because you could see the Willie McGee card from the outside. I remembered him from the All-Star Game that year. I liked the name. McGee. It was a funny name.

Lesson learned: Children are pure and innocent. Willie McGee is a funny name? It’s a funny name? That’s all I could think?

Loooooooook at the picture on that card. Loooooooooooook at it. That wasn’t the card that made me run screaming in the exact opposite direction of where baseball cards could be found. That was the card that started the obsession. All I could think of when I saw that picture was, “Wow! Baseball cards!” Children are pure and innocent.

1983 Fleer - Rod Carew

The car ride was to my grandma’s. I took all 30 or 40 of those cards and spread them the hell out all over her house. I stacked them and shuffled them, flipped them and stared at them. When my grandma passed my doorway one afternoon, I stopped her to ask her which card was her favorite. She said “Look, kid. I have no ******* idea,” but translated it into sweetoldladyese. I asked again, pleading. She pointed to the Rod Carew card.

I remembered saying, “Really?”, as if she had made the wrong choice. That was probably really annoying.

Lesson learned: Grandmas know, man. They can spot the best of the bunch, the Hall of Famer, just after a cursory glance at a bunch of cardboard pictures.

Here’s another thing I learned, and I’m not sure if there’s a delicate way to put this. I learned it about five seconds ago, actually.

I learned that with just the right angle, lighting, facial expression, and accessories, that Rod Carew could look like someone in a dressing room who is getting ready to help Gene Hackman escape at the end of The Birdcage.

1983 Topps - Tom O’Malley

One night my sister and her friend were babysitting me. My sister’s friend had a crush on Giants third baseman Tom O’Malley. She was describing how dreamy he was. There wasn’t a way to pull up a picture of O’Malley on the ol’ Atari 1200XL, so it was incumbent upon me to provide the proof of said dreaminess.

By this point, I was hooked on baseball cards. And all things being equal, a pack of baseball cards was a cost-effective way for my parents to get me to shut up in a grocery store. My collection had expanded beyond the McGees and Carews. I had a box — about two feet long, two feet deep, and a foot long — that was filled with the things. It took me an hour to find the card, as the box was just an unorganized pile of nonsense. My sister’s response: Meh. I’m almost certain she popularized the term right then and there.

Lesson learned: I was an unorganized slob who was crying out for help at a young age. That’s one that I learned just now. The lesson I was going to relate was “Girls are weird,” but this new one is more revelatory to me.

1984 Topps - Don Mattingly

Now there were six or seven boxes. They were threatening to consume my entire family. I was still an unorganized slob, but there was at least some order now. When I’d go through a pack of cards, I’d separate the stars from the scrubs. The stars would go in a binder; the scrubs would go into the boxes of doom.

Problem with that was that I had no idea who the good prospects were. So after Don Mattingly went nuts in 1984, I realized at the end of the season that I probably had ten of his rookie cards floating around in the boxes of doom. I mentioned this offhand to some older neighborhood kids, and they offered to help me look through the boxes.

While we were sitting on my front porch, going through the cards, I remember them giggling and giggling, as if there was a joke that I wasn’t in on. I didn’t get it. After a couple hours of sifting, the search party ended. Somehow despite having 1,000,249 different 1984 Topps cards, I hadn’t managed to get a single Mattingly rookie.

When I was 19, something made me remember that story, and with the benefit of hindsight, I realized that they were all stealing the Mattingly cards, laughing after stuffing each one in a shirt pocket.

Lesson learned: Children are horrible, horrible abominations. Also, that I have a long memory, and that even if certain people aren’t going to understand an unsigned note that reads “I’ve hired a P.I. to find evidence of you cheating on your wife. I hope the Mattingly cards were worth it,” at least the universe will be right again.

1986 Donruss - Jose Canseco

We’re now in the baseball-card boom, where investors and speculators started hovering around the scene. I thought my cards were going to pay for my college. If I had known that there was a way to get loans for college that I could inconveniently pay back over several decades, well, I probably would have just sold them right then and there.

Sometime in 1988 or 1989, my mom decided that she was going to buy a card. Just one card that would stand the test of time and appreciate like a nice plot of land. She was going to put it in a safety deposit box. In twenty-five years, it was going to be worth something. She bought a Jose Canseco rated rookie.

Lesson learned: Jose Canseco owes my mom $75. But for $40, I’ll send him the card back, autographed by my mom, and we’ll call it even. I know where the card is. It’s in the safety deposit box. You suckers can’t get near it. Don’t even try.

Grant Brisbee can be found writing at Baseball Nation and McCovey Chronicles and can be tweeted at @mccoveychron.

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