With my mom cleaning out thirty years of collected junk in her P*******n home in preparation to moving to a much smaller, 2BR condo in Portland, and the recent sale of my father’s stamp collection, I’ve been thinking about going through my baseball card collection one more time. I probably have 20,000+ cards. All of them are from the years 1982-1990, so almost all of the players on those cards have since retired.
The cards are stuffed in card-sized cardboard boxes, sucking up space in my closet. Half of those are complete sets and special packages. The others are just loose cards worth pennies, and not worth holding on to if I move again.
So, since I was in a glum mood anyway and didn’t feel like wandering about the City, I perused my collection with a pricing guide looking for valuable cards I missed in the 1990s. I ended up putting twelve boxes, probably 10K cards, in the recycling bin. I’m sure I threw away some slightly valuable cards, but none of them could have been worth more than $1. I found several more rookie cards, including a huge bunch of Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson cards (they were mediocre pitchers the years I collected).
What always amuses me about my collection, though, are these two rookie cards from 1986 and 1987. They’re just below, scanned in. Notice how skinny and whippet-like these young home-run kings were then? Now, you can get big in the gym, but… well, you can come to your own conclusions.