baseball cards

It's been a few weeks since I've written anything new, but now that we're into my favorite season of the year, I will be more diligent in my writing.
Reading a friend’s blog where he shared a baseball card story reminded me of my first trip to Cooperstown with a group of guys from my previous fantasy baseball league.
We did it right when we went to Cooperstown. We went to a game in Pittsburgh first, then Philadelphia before heading to upstate New York, where we spent two glorious days.
Getting upstairs at the Hall of Fame and seeing that room full of baseball cards... it felt like my old bedroom. As a kid in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, collecting cards was an awesome experience, and I had thousands of them.
I remember going up to Willard’s Grocery Store at the corner of Wyandotte and Madison in Lakewood. My friends and I would collect pop bottles in the neighborhood, then turn in the eight-pack of pop bottles we collected, and we’d each get a pack of cards in exchange. I can still smell the gum!
And, I can still see all those greats of the ‘60s: Frank and Brooks Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Pete Rose, Mickey Mantle, Denny McClain, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Indians aces Luis Tiant and Sam McDowell, as well as many lesser stars, like Larry Brown and Chuck Hinton of the Indians.
Most of the cards I had from 1966-69 were bent and ruined from using them as clickers in our bike spokes and from trading them with the kids up and down the street.
By the 1970s, cards went up from a nickle a pack to a dime, and then to a quarter, but it was the best money I ever spent. I think I recouped most of that money when I sold my cards to various collectors when I was in college.
My collection was mostly baseball cards, but there were some memorable NFL cards and NBA cards (the long, tall ones from the early ‘70s were really cool).
My dad moonlighted as a cab driver, and on every other Thursday night when he got his paycheck, he’d take my brother and I to Spartan Atlantic, the old dime store by the cab company on Brookpark Road in Cleveland, neither of which are there any more.
For 99 cents I’d get a package of about 100 cards and a small plastic football. I’ll never forget when I got a Jim Brown. He graced my bulletin board for years. Unfortunately, the pin hole that held the card in place ruined any cash value the card may have had.
That Brown card resided right next to the autographed Paul Warfield card I had, two of the greatest players to ever wear Cleveland Browns uniforms.
By 1975 at 14, I was too cool to collect cards anymore and found other things to waste my money on.
Today, you can get a pack of 10 cards for about $5. It’s almost as big a rip-off as buying tickets to a professional sporting event.
And few, if any of the players of today can carry the equipment of the players of the past.