You know, I never thought I’d long for a stale piece of bubble gum and a faded photo of men with bad perms and almost no muscular definition holding a baseball bat that looked like a twig with a stump at the end. And yet…

Hi. I’m Big D. And I’m a recovering addict.

No, not a gambling addict. I can quit gambling anytime I want (and I’ll give you 2-1 odds on that…) No, I’m a recovering card collector.

I grew up when sports cards were probably at their peak. People had realized that there was a lot of value in small pieces of cardboard with stats and logos. I started collecting sometime around the age of six (1987ish) and continued right through college (‘03 and beyond). And yes, it was an addiction.

My first “job” was sorting thousands of cards and organizing them by year, brand, series and finally card number. I was actually paid in unopened packs that I could rip apart, then bring the contents home to sort by year, brand, series and card number. Hey – I was eight years old. That job rocked.

Growing up there was nothing better to me than opening a fresh pack of cards or, better yet, a fresh box of packs. The chance to pull out some rare insert or rookie card was motivation enough to take every cent of birthday money right to the local dealer and buy whatever I could get my tiny little paws on. I can vividly remember getting extremely upset with my mother when she refused to buy me a box of cards I wanted – it cost $3,000. Hey, she had just refinanced the house to buy a car and I was ten; I didn’t understand the finer points of mortgages and interest. To be honest, I still don’t.

As I look back on it, I can see how I graduated into a life of gambling. Let’s face it – buying baseball cards is a gamble. You drop $3, $4, $5, $10 on a chance to get that rare, once in a box gem. Sure, the cards usually end up sitting in an old shoe box in an overstuffed closet for the next twenty years, but for those first few minutes, there’s no better feeling than staring at what your hands just produced.

So I got a little nostalgic the past couple weeks when I came across a couple boxes of cards in my old bedroom back in Boston while packing. Long ago I had separated my collection into “valuable” and “filler”, and the cards I happened upon were of the “valuable” type. Of course, I had to do no less than turn around and open the closet door to find about half a million of the “filler” type.

I pawned over the cards for about half an hour; in some cases I could remember exactly where I bought the pack that produced the card I was looking at. The 1992 Upper Deck Shaq redemption card that I got from a pack at Wink’s on Broadway.  The 1985 Topps Lawrence Taylor that I pulled from a box back in college.  Others had been given to me by family friends who were getting rid of collections. Some were acquired in trades with friends. But each one had a memory attached to it – some as recent as my junior year of college when I had a good enough job to spend gobs and gobs of money on old boxes of cards on eBay.

That’s why I got sad when I walked into a Wal-Mart store Sunday and saw the display for their “collectables”. There was a box of Upper Deck’s latest basketball release. There were a handful of boxes of Pokemon cards and other comic-based series. And then there was the display for the eTopps series.

Yes, you read that right. “eTopps”. No longer do kids have to open their cards and finger through each one until they find the one they’re looking for. Now, it’s a web-based collection – something you can check online to see which cards you have. Not only that, but with the ease of digital photo manipulation, you can now buy cards that shouldn’t even exist – as evidenced by the John David Booty Vikings rookie card available on eTopps now. You can pick the specific cards you want and pony up $6.99 a piece to add them to your “collection” – hell, at this point kids are just collecting digital photos.

Listen – I’m as big a tech geek as there is. I have more gadgets than you can imagine – probably four times as many as I actually need. I understand that it’s a digital world and that everything is moving to web-based applications. Hell, I wouldn’t have a job if not for technology (not that that would necessarily be a bad thing). But there are some things in the world that need to stay IRL – in real life. I wouldn’t have nearly as many great childhood memories if you took out the time I pulled that Shaq “Shadow-Man” Redemption. Or the Michael Jordan Beam Team from the ’96 Stadium Club Series. Or the Topps A/B Baseball Black Gold redemption from their 1992 series.

Some things need to be IRL.  Some experiences need to be left to chance.

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