Blog Bat Around: Collection Centerpiece

I posted about my collection centerpiece back in August. It's reprinted here for the purpose of the blog bat around (time's been tight as of late and I think the original post says it all):

Breakfast of a Champion

Sorry, folks, but I didn't read any Kurt Vonnegut over the weekend (I'm working on some Jack London). Rather I'm feeling a little bit nostalgic about Joe Carter and a bowl of Honeycombs from 14 years ago. The details are a little foggy but knowing I was a high school student on summer vacation it was probably just another lazy morning of sleeping in and bumming around before the rest of the day's laziness.

This was a rare era where baseball, not hockey, was king in Canada. Our national hero, Wayne Gretzky had abandoned us for southern California and no Canadian-based team had won the Stanley Cup for a couple of years (nor have they won one since). The Toronto Blue Jays were two-time World Champions. They, not the Maple Leafs, not the Canadiens, not anyone else were Canada's team. Matters were also helped by the fact that the Montreal Expos were the best team in baseball up until the point of that fateful morning.

Memories of Joe Carter blasting a walk-off three-run homer still rang through in the collective Canadian consciousness. It was Game Six against the Phillies. Toronto entered the game with a 3-2 series lead but Philadelphia entered the bottom of the ninth inning winning 6-5. With Phillies closer Mitch Williams on the mound, it looked like a seventh game was in the works.

Williams lived up to his nickname "Wild Thing" right away, walking Rickey Henderson (yes, he was a Blue Jay for a couple of months) on four straight pitches. With one out Paul Molitor hit a single. This set the stage for the most dramatic Canadian sports moment since Paul Henderson scored against the USSR in the 1972 Summit Series. Joe Carter stepped up. I'd been glued to the entire game not walking away to get a drink, snack or even use the washroom. I couldn't wait any longer so I cranked the volume a little, ran across my dad's apartment and hoped nothing would happen. Wouldn't you know, mid-stream cheers ran out from the apartment upstairs. A gasp and a cheer came from the apartment downstairs. I made it back to the TV just in time -- for the replay.


With the count 2-2, Williams shook off a signal from catcher Darren Daulton. He let the pitch fly, Joe Carter swung and it was over. It was like a freeze-frame moment. The swing, the crack of the bat, the hop and fist pump around the bases, the team piling onto the field, a sea of Canadians jumping up and down in unison in the Skydome stands, the rest of the country feeling proud from the comfort of their living rooms. The Toronto Blue Jays were World Champs for the second straight year.

It was also the second year where Joe Carter made the final play of the World Series. The previous year he was playing first base when the Braves' Otis Nixon attempted a two-out bunt in the eleventh inning. Pitcher Mike Timlin picked up the ball and gave it a light toss to Carter who made the force out and history was made.

But it's the 1993 home run to win the second championship that stands out and not the routine play that won Toronto's (and Canada's) first World Series. Let's face it, home runs are more exciting. The moment had more intensity and tension to begin with. To this day it's still replayed over and over. Carter's raised arms have also been featured on plenty of cards as well in the 15 years since. It also made him an instant legend up here in the great and sometimes white North, even amongst though of us who weren't hardcore Jays fans but still felt proud knowing another World Series trophy was residing above the 49th.

So I'm sitting there pouring my box of Honeycomb cereal and I realized it was a new box. An airbrushed baseball card waited for me at the bottom of the box. Like other Post sets, the cards were licensed by the Players Association but not by MLB so you got the superstars but not their logos. As a result they weren't the prettiest cards, but they were still more exciting than the cereal they came with.

My first bite reminds me that I really need to remind my mom that Fruit Loops are far superior in the taste department next to Honeycombs, even without the cards. Just as I did when I was four, I pull out the bag of cereal to see if I'm going to have to dig through the cereal to get my prize or if it was sitting outside the bag on the bottom of the box. I get my answer quickly. Sitting on the bottom of the box is Joe Carter right after a swing, watching a flyball head out to left field. It might as well have been the homerun. Disappointment was the first thing that ran through my head. I was hoping for an Expo or Frank Thomas. As the first glance gave way to a quick inspection I realized that I'd struck cardboard gold. It was the Joe Carter autograph - essiently the grand prize of cereal box prizes that year.

My mom wasn't around so I let out a [EARMUFFS, young 'uns!], "Holy shit!" of the most happiest kind. Instantly it was the coolest part of my collection (it's still up there today). A couple thousand were made and are probably floating around out there but I didn't care. It was the first time I'd "won" something with such long odds (1:3,000 boxes to be exact). It was an autograph of a legend. From a box of cereal. Even if he wasn't on "my team" or he wasn't "my player" it was the coolest thing. My hands shook as I took it out of the box. A smile caked my face and it wouldn't go away as I repeated the story over and over to my sister, step-dad and mom after each of them came home.

I guess my mom figured I was lucky. For the next two months cereal was a steady diet of Honey Combs and lunch was often a second helping. I explained to her that the cards came in other Post cereals as well but it didn't matter. She saw my smile that day. And when your teenager's smiling you want to do all you can to recreate that moment or at least hold it in time. On the bright side for me, I ate enough boxes to send away for the free complete set (plus $4.95 shipping and handling).

I still have the Joe Carter card. The last time I looked at the price, it was listed at $60 in a Canadian price guide (it's not even listed in my Standard Catalog). But that doesn't matter one lick as it's one of the few cards that I'll be able pull out and tell my grand-kids about while they sit on my knee and rub Grandpa's old man whiskers. They'll ask me why it's in a block of plastic like the frozen caveman on that movie. Then I'll tell them it was so that I'd still have it for that very moment when we could take it out together and I could pass it onto to them so they could tell their grand-kids about baseball, home runs and Honeycombs.

Conquering Collectacitis: Getting to the Heart of a Collection

The first cards I had were O-Pee-Chee E.T. cards. I still remember the box sitting on the counter of the grocery store, begging my mom for a single pack, her conceding but only if my sister got one too, the white powder the gum left on my fingers, sorting through the numbers and putting the story together. Then it was nothing more than a treat, something that got tossed aside a couple of days later and revisited every now and again when a new pack made it into the house. The cards don't survive today, likely the victim of a spring cleaning, move or particularly bad day by any one of my particularly bad dogs.

Next up came 1985-86 O-Pee-Chee Hockey. Again, it was a ritual of sorts. On the way home from Beavers (the junior Canadian version of Boy Scouts) on Wednesday nights I'd ask my stepdad to stop at the local Mac's and let me run in for a pack. His relationship with my mom was still in its infancy and I'd like to think he stopped to help the bonding process along. More likely, he'd didn't care, just as long as I was spending my money and not his.

This marked the first time I really got into organizing my cards. I wasn't worried about the set in as much as I focused on sorting them by team one day, by position the next and then back to team. I loved the checklists as I could scour for the names of the five hockey players I recognized - all of them Edmonton Oilers, of course. Just as the pile was entering the "impressive" stage, a fateful visit from my one-time best friend wiped out that collection in one swooped. To this day I still don't know how he got the cards out the door but I liked to think at the time that he shoved them down his pants and got paper cuts all over his thighs (although, in retrospect, O-Pee-Chee cards have some of the softest edges in the business so I doubt that wish came true).

Over the next few years, there were packs here and there but nothing major: The A-Team, Wacky Packages, Garbage Pail Kids, ALF and Fright Flicks were all favourites, but I never had more than a handful of each. But in 1989 I got my first case of the fever. It wasn't cards, but rather stickers. Late in the 1988-89 hockey season I became friends with someone who was working on the Panini sticker book. I thought it was cool and grabbed a few. I mapped out my quest to build the set but before I got very far the packs ran dry at the local corner store and I had to wait for next year.

Little did I know of the coming boom. Between 1990 and 1993 I tried to collect every baseball and hockey set that came north of the border. This meant mostly O-Pee-Chee and Topps for the first couple of years and then everything as the card stores started popping up. Somewhere around 1993 I noticed the sets were becoming too numerous and these inserts were getting increasingly difficult to find. So I cut back a little to the sets that caught my attention. While I like inserts and the perceived value they brought to my teenaged mind, I was still a base set collector at heart. The foundation was firmly in place for my primary collecting passion, but as the hobby evolved, so did my habits.

For the next couple of years, I was simply grabbing what I could a) find in Canada and b) caught my attention. I started dabbling in team collecting as I pursued the Cleveland Indian bats of Albert Belle, Carlos Baerga and a happy Manny Ramirez. Frank Thomas was also a monster worth getting from the quarter box, as was Mike Piazza because he was a catcher who could hit. This period was one in which I got into to many areas without focusing. I was throwing my McDonald's paycheques around and building a collection I could never describe to anyone.

Then the Internet arrived. I started the first incarnation of Trader Crack's back in 1996 on Geocities posting wantlists and tradelists. It was a pretty sweet time to be collecting. A new world was opened up to me as all of a sudden I wasn't limited by borders. By now I was focused almost exclusively on baseball. Since it wasn't hockey, it was slim pickings around my parts. But with trading I could have anything I wanted and get rid of my unwanted bits. I opened up a few new sets and began two player collections: Johnny Damon because I thought he'd be a star and John Jaha because he had a cool-sounding name and his cards were cheap.

You see, I'm a completist in a lot of ways. Once I'm in, I'm all in. I liked Frank Thomas but he had so many cards that I wouldn't possibly be able to get all of them. And this was before everyone went hog-wild on the parallels. John Jaha, now there was a guy I could go after. He wasn't a star so he didn't have a ton of cards and not a lot of people going after them. Today my John Jaha collection is about as complete as it likely will. Outside of one-of-ones, I am missing less than 10 of his cards. I've also got a couple of memorabilia pieces and oddball bits. His Topps contract would have been mine last week if the Topps Vault only wanted to make some extra funds and ship outside of Canada.

With the new-found collecting freedom, I got the fever bad. I bought anything and everything, traded for everything else and found a then little-used site called eBay to find everything John Jaha. The problem was I was still buying random packs in bunches and not focusing on anything in particular outside of a set or two and my player.

The fever led to an infection in my wallet that caused massive bleeding of pay cheques. Everything would be gone with my frequent sprees to the shops. Sure, I came away with some solid trade bait but when you're collecting John Jaha you don't need much as people are normally happy to pass their commons on in bulk.

One day I realized my collecting habits were too chaotic. It was time to focus. No more going after anything and everything. No more blowing entire pay cheques (note, I was young, not married, no kids, no responsibilities) and having nothing to show for it other than an Angel Pena autograph and way too many half-finished sets from series that sucked. It was about this time I stopped buying much wax. It was too expensive for getting little in return. A decade ago the Canadian dollar was worth about 50 percent less than the US dollar. This meant I was paying $100 for a box of low- to middle-end products like Stadium Club and Bowman. Instead I started getting singles I needed off eBay and continued trading.

Today, sets are still my main passion, although I limit myself to only a couple per year. I go after a set that catches my eye and, traditionally, Topps base sets. Of course, when something new comes along like Masterpieces I find myself adding to the wantlists, but with the Internet, I'm now at a point where I can build a set through trading without buying a single pack.

I work primarily in baseball and non-sport, with little straying today. I find now my collection is more focused and I'm much happier. I'm a firm believer in gimmicks. I like lots of things about card collecting and am pretty easy to please. So even though I build sets, collect John Jaha, have enough Montreal Expos to write the team's history through cards, set aside Canadian-born baseball players, get giddy over autographs of guys I've heard of and am mesmerized by holograms, most everything I get today has a spot in a specific box or binder. I purposefully keep massive wantlists so that I have a better chance of making trades.

Much of the joy I take from collecting today is in the chase. In the past I've lost sight of what it was I was chasing in the first place. That led to fever and burnout. The simple medicine was simply sitting back and seeing what it was I wanted from a collection. Now that I have that figured out, collecting is fun again.

This is my contribution to the Blog Bat Around. Thanks, Gellman for the wonderful idea.