Baseball cards: The agony and the ecstasy

By Ed Piper

When I was in the ninth grade, my first period class--and my first class in high school--was Public Speaking. Mr. (Earl) Sherman was a great teacher, but it was a painful class for me because of my intense self-consciousness during that period of my life, including my totally negative self-view because I had had braces and my front teeth had stuck out, which I had a hard time to overcome.

So, in my parents' careful planning with me--largely by my dad, Ed Sr., who loved me a lot, I know--we mapped out that I would take Public Speaking as a freshman, with Latin for two years to prepare me for a possible major in journalism, with two years of German to follow that. (I bailed out of German after three weeks my junior year, having already met the foreign language requirement.)

Already dreading going up in front of class, standing behind Mr. Sherman's wooden podium (visible because I was not short), I wore a blue jacket that I fiddled with in my nervousness during speeches. Mr. Sherman was really gentle and reassuring. He could see, with the rest of the class--which included upperclassmen who were way more developed and mature than I was at that early time--the extreme discomfort I was in, in front of class. He would comment quietly about my playing with the zipper of the jacket. Nothing to put me down, but feedback to point out it distracted from my presentation.

In this setting, I brought my baseball card collection in the wooden box my father had personally constructed for me. He used a router, I believe, to cut slots into the bottom and sides so that we could slip dividers into the box--which measured maybe 18 to 24 inches wide, by 12 or more deep. Being the collector that I was at age 13 (I didn't turn 14 until April the following Spring, I'm sure part of my maturity issue), I was careful with cards I put in the side channels, because in Dad's usual extremely careful measurement, somehow these two outside rows were a little too narrow for the cards. If I forced them to being lined up straight, it would have bent the edges of the cardboard cards, which would have completely decreased their value as collecting cards.

Classmates snickered. In 1967-68, the baseball card boom was decades away from happening (things peaked in the 80's), and I felt the added embarrassment of older, more sophisticated upperclassmen thinking my collecting was kind of childish. Not something a teenager ought to do to be cool.

Anyway, I did the oral presentation, which in that assignment required some kind of show-and-tell. I survived. Barely. I took my beloved baseball card collection, in box, home after school. I don't know where I kept it during the school day. These things weren't like cash the way they became in the 80's.

Long story short to say I've been chewing on talking about baseball cards for a couple of months now, ever since the new Series 1 cards from the 2017 Topps issue came out in February or later. One thing that is really evident these days, in the age of digital photography, is that the quality of photos on the individual cards is far beyond anything that was printed back when I was a kid collector in the 60's.