A Nostalgic Hobby - Returning to Baseball Cards

My birthday was this last week - Monday to be exact and usually on my birthday I have one heck of a time trying to figure out what to do with myself. I'm not a fan of heading out to the bars or throwing parties or anything. I just want to spend time with my friends and loved ones and not work. This year, we went bowling and spent a lot of money on scratch tickets, had some Mexican food and then a genius idea floundered to the surface. We were looking at the scratch tickets and thinking how funny it was to completely waste my birthday money when I remembered the equivalent activity from my youth.

You know what I'm talking about. Everything you do as an adult seems to have an equivalent activity from childhood. Those expensive new sports cars are surrogates for that shiny new Schwinn you always wanted. The extra piece of cake is a candy bar from the corner store and you still go through the motions of clique management and awkwardness around new people akin to High Cafeteria Drama of 5th grade. It's all the same, but older and more...well boring.

For whatever reason, when we get older we feel like the things we did as a child are behind us. We aren't allowed to ride a bicycle around for fun - only exercise or transportation. We can't eat that big piece of cake. We can't go outside and play in the rain for the sake of enjoying the coolness of it on a beautiful August evening. I think it's part of the teenage mindset, when you start pushing everything you could possibly enjoy away from you because "it's for children". Ironically, teenagers pick up their own adolescent mindsets and hobbies. But they try to appear as adults and that means they don't do things like collecting baseball cards.

Something akin to this popped into my head in the bowling alley that day with scratch tickets in hand. Those little $10 pieces of paper triggered a series of overwhelmingly warm memories from my childhood that I couldn't ignore, especially not on my birthday. For a child, baseball cards are the equivalent of gambling. And because a child needs that tangible item, that solid return for their time and money, baseball cards are perfect. They offer a set amount of things with the chance of acquiring something truly amazing in the process.

I wanted to buy baseball cards. It has been almost 10 years since the last time I avidly collected cards. I bought some in my final years of high school and a few only two years ago on a whim, wasting a few extra dollars for the hell of it, but I haven't had the kind of childlike dedication to them that I did once upon a time since I was 13. There's something magical about a birthday that allows you to dive headfirst into the great big lake of memories that you carry with you and pull out a few gems. This year, it was baseball card collecting.

For whatever reason, the dive into nostalgia stuck and I've taken to collecting again, only this time with the financial acumen of an adult - not to mention the financial backing. I can afford to buy cards in the way you need to buy them for the hobby to be not only enjoyable but financial viable. Which, unfortunately is an immediate by product of being an adult - having a goal in mind.

Nostalgia doesn't die easily I've found. It lingers in the furthest corners of your brain and waits for a chance to emerge and take you by storm. It usually takes a birthday or meeting up with an old friend. This week I found both - I aged a year and Ken Griffey Jr. returned to Seattle for the first time in 7 years. For whatever reason, the allure of age and my absolute love for the game has made me feel like I'm 13 years old again, diving back into the wonderful world of baseball card collecting.

How do you go about getting back into a hobby that you haven't been interested in for almost a decade? It's a little overwhelming to tell you the truth. Of all the things I've been through in the last 10 years (including 4 moves, high school, college, and a freelance writing career that tends to send a lot of possessions to eBay) my baseball cards are the only things I still own from childhood and that speaks volumes for their importance to me. Yet, they also represent a massive chasm between the here and now and the hazy summers of childhood.

There are hundreds of sets these days, expensive cards that I cannot afford, packs that I missed out on (more than 10 years worth) and rookie cards I want to own. There are auto cards, serial numbers, jersey patches, multiple jersey patches, throwback cards, and refractors. All of these additions are actually what made me stop collecting 10 years ago. I was just getting old enough that I started seeing it as an investment. Unfortunately it also seemed like a waste because everything I could afford turned out to be worthless. So I stopped.

But with age, once again, comes the ability to put more of my money into the hobby (among others) and get out of it the kind of enjoyment I did before, but with the financial implications and investment that I need for it to be worthwhile. Whereas small sums of money never yielded anything worthwhile in the past, larger sums of cash now will usually yield a card that I can use to recoop what I've spent already, plus I get everything else I bought to collect.