How to Collect Baseball Cards

Video Transcript

"One of the things that I have always found to be the most intriguing part of being a baseball fan is the stuff that you collect, and most importantly to me I have more than 40,000 baseball cards, and believe me one day they're probably going to put my son through college, but, you know, these cards they value with time they're the opposite of a car, you know your car devalues with time, but one of the most important things to remember is how well you have to take care of them. There are two schools of thought here. One is open up the packages, find out what's in them and go oh wow I have a Jose Conseco card, you know, it comes with steroids! But, you know, it's important, it's important, you know that's the excitement part you open it up and you're like I wonder who I got! You're usually getting between twelve and sixteen cards and most often, more often than not you've got ten guys you've probably never heard of. Now a nutball like me I've probably heard of them all, but for the average fan you probably haven't heard of them. There's those two that you get in the package that are like really cool, you know, like an Alfonso Soriano card or a, oh wow a collector's edition Eddie Matthews card. So it's that excitement, but also there's been a school of thought in talking to collectors and talking to others is that, don't open the packages. Make it exciting for somebody else twenty years from now, and you know what if you're looking to make a little return on your investment in buying these cards now it'll be worth maybe fifty to sixty times the amount you paid for them, and I will attest to that. You know, a lot of the cards that I've collected over the years I haven't, I have not opened, they are worth an awful lot of money. So if you're looking to get a return on your investment, baseball cards will actually give you that return especially with the stars. I will, you know, from personal experience, I have nine Mark McGuire rookies and considering all the stuff he's gone through it doesn't really matter to card collectors. They want those cards so all of a sudden each one of those is worth $400.00 and you know, that's an awful lot of money. At the time I was trading cards with my buddies, like here I'll give you a Don Baylor card for a Mark McGuire card and that's what you did. It's kind of part of the fun is that you're sitting down with people, you're looking at cards, you're reading the stats on the back, and you're like hey you know what this guy had a crappy year in 1987 so I don't want this card anymore, you know can I have, you know let's trade. That's part of it. You know it's kind of like what it is in, for baseball general managers, you know they're trading players left and right, well you're trading their cards left and right as well. So that's kind of how you can kind of have that same interaction with the players that are on the field. It's just really cool to kind of get the, there's so many different types, you know, Donruss, Topps, Score, the list goes on and on, and it's just, you know, Upper Deck, and there are magazines, you know, out there that allow you to go through and, you know, this card's worth ten cents, this one's worth a buck and, you know, it's just a lot of fun, it's engaging, it'll take up hours of your time so, you know, if you're like me I don't know how many months that was spent during the summer when I was in high school, you know, really kind of going through and writing down how much all my cards were worth, but I, you know, I found out a lot more information about these players by reading the backs of their cards and really engaging with these players, and you know some of them I've sent off to players to and ended up getting autographs on the cards, and you know really, those autographs mean nothing to anybody but me because they're not authorized, they're not, nobody else saw them do it so it could be you just doing your own signature on the card, but it meant something to me and I'll frame them for me, and those are the things that mean something to me and that's what baseball cards are to me is something that they are very personal and they can become very personal. So collecting baseball cards, it's a lot of fun, it's a great way to get to know the game and the history of the game, and basically cards and what they represent is basically somebody's history within the game and that's what is important about the stats on the back. It will break down somebody's career year by year, if you're a position player, it'll break down your home run totals, your RBI totals, you?re on base percentage totals, your slugging percentage totals, your average totals, your walk totals, your strike out totals. It'll break everything down and the same thing goes for pitchers and that's what a baseball card is, basically a chronology of somebody's career and it allows you to have it in the palm of your hand. Just like an IPod with music and just like, you know, a blackberry for a telephone, you know, basically baseball cards are just a way to keep that player with you at all times and those stats at all times. You know, if you're, if you're in an argument with somebody at work about, you know, somebody hitting a 300 in 1987 well, you know, you've got that card. You can go right to the back of it and it'll show you exactly what happened that year. It's basically history in the palm of your hand."