Opening Day: One Anxious Man's Return to His Childhood Hobby by John Grochalski (Updated)

 Opening Day: One Anxious Man's Return to His  Childhood Hobby

 by John Grochalski

            So my wife said, “Find a hobby or find a therapist.”

My wife’s voice. Imagine her words coming out with a weary cadence; someone at the end of her emotional rope. Sad. Someone sitting back helplessly watching somebody that they love go through an emotional turmoil which they are unable to help them work through. Yes, imagine her sounding helpless.

In the summer of 2019 I was at a very low ebb, living with an undiagnosed depression that had me feeling, at age forty-five, that life and opportunity had passed me by. That I had made mistakes, career and otherwise. Adrift is a word that I’d use to describe how I was feeling that summer. Adrift and unable to cope with the desperation that I was feeling. I probably did need a therapist.

I work as the branch manager of a public library in a big city. The summers were a virtual battlefield. Mornings I had dozens of kids clamoring at the door for the library to open. Sweating, stinking eleven and twelve-year old boys, pulling and pounding on the glass doors, hell bent on wasting every single hour of their summer vacation playing shoot ‘em up games on the library computers. Pre-teen girls squealing K-Pop, littering the library’s floor with potato chip bags and candy wrappers. I had toddlers running around aimlessly, pulling books off of shelves, knocking over displays, as their mothers and fathers played on their cell phones. By the end of each summer day my branch looked as if it had been hit by a category five hurricane. A hurricane that would strike again the very next day.

Add to that the adult patrons. The guy who harassed women and followed pre-teen girls down the YA book aisles. The one who wasn’t doin’ nothin’ man, whenever he was caught. The tattooed jag-off who harassed people for money and shot up his junk in the bathroom. The one who graffitied the walls because he could. The old men who fought epic battles over newspapers. Homeless men who slept in chairs. One who had lice. Homeless men who bathed in the restrooms for almost an hour, as a line of men and children waited outside the door, doing their pee-pee dances and complaining to me.

That summer our branch fell victim to a random stranger who came by at least once a week and dumped a gallon of whole milk or a carton of heavy creamer right outside our front door. The symbolism was anyone’s guess. The milk and cream stained. They stank when in the heat. When it didn’t rain, we had dried, white, fetid lattices of dairy residue painted into our pavement.

And I had been doing all of this, summer after summer, going on ten years.

At forty-five I began to question being a supervisor and not being able to handle the responsibility anymore. My career had become a mistake. Having to play librarian, cop, babysitter and sometimes janitor all at the same time, I found myself crying in the shower. Crying on the way to work. All I had was noise, complaints, and 911 on speed dial. All I did was come home miserable and make my wife miserable. I needed help.

Find a hobby or find a therapist. I chose a hobby. I chose baseball cards.

Why baseball cards? First, let me talk about baseball itself. In July of that summer of 2019, my wife and I came home to Pittsburgh for a brief trip. My brother had one of those streaming packages that gave you access to all thirty Major League Baseball teams. I hadn’t regularly watched baseball in almost five years. I’d stopped watching the sport in the summer of 2014 when my wife was diagnosed, at 37, with stage-one, lobular breast cancer. If the summer of 2019 was bad, that summer of 2014 was unspeakable tragedy and horror all rolled into one. I just felt like nothing could ever simply be trivial again. Like baseball.

But while I was home, my brother sat there and flipped from game to game to game. There was the Dodgers. The Giants. Mike Trout smacking a home run for the Anaheim Angels. I was fascinated by this all-access streaming service. I suddenly found myself caught up in baseball again. It’s nuances. It’s slow pace. The sound of the crowd. I found comfort in the game.

My brother gave me the password to his streaming service. Back home I loaded it on to my TV. Away I went. The Dodgers! The Giants! Mike Trout smacking another home run! And while the sport didn’t quell the screaming kids, the degenerates, the destruction brought on by unsupervised toddlers, the complaints, my 911 calls, or even that unknown tormentor dumping milk and creamer in front of my library, going home in the evenings and catching a game, any game I wanted, helped temper the depression somewhat.

What else was out there like this?, I asked myself. I found my answer watching some random guy exuberantly opening up a box of baseball cards on YouTube, and shouting about his finds as if he was twelve years old again.

I had been a huge baseball card collector during my childhood and most of my teenage years. The first pack I ever remember opening came from a convenience store on Butler Street in Lawrenceville in the summer of 1980. In my first pack of 1980 Topps I got Ed Ott, platooning catcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and my second favorite player on the team after Wille “Pops” Stargell. I was hooked after that. From 1980 to 1992 any extra money that I came into, gift money, allowances, money that I found in couch cushions, money from part-time jobs, went to buying pack after pack of baseball cards. It was both a hobby and a grand obsession.

I collected during what eventually became known as the Junk Wax era of collecting, 1987 to around 1994. This was the era when we were all going to get rich off of our card collections, even though the major card manufacturers: Topps, then Fleer and Donruss in 1981, Score in 1988 and Upper Deck in 1989, were mass producing those bits of cardboard in the millions upon millions. What did we know? For me, I collected because I loved the cards. I loved seeing the players on those 2 ½ x 3 ½ inch pieces of cardboard. The action shots. The pitchers in motion. The different borders that each company would frame the photos in each year. The card backs. All those stats! To me baseball cards were more than collector’s items. They were little works of art. You can have Picasso. Give me a pack of 1983 Topps. I’d never felt better in my life than during those years of card collecting.

I wanted to feel that way again. Be the exuberant twelve-year-old. But my God the baseball card hobby had changed. For one, there’s now only one Major League Baseball licensed manufacturer of baseball cards (the Panini company makes cards but are unable to use team logos and have to airbrush uniforms), instead of the five when I stopped collecting and that's Topps.

And they produce so many sets. There’s their flagship set that they’ve been doing since 1951. There’s Topps Heritage, which are a set of cards using the design from forty-nine years previously but featuring modern players. There’s Topps Chrome. Bowman, Bowman Chrome. Topps Gypsy Queen. Topps Stadium Club. Topps Archives. Topps Big League (for the lower budget collector) and Topps Definitive (at $1,000 dollars a pack). Topps this. Topps that. I could go on and on with Topps brands.

It was a bit daunting getting back into collecting baseball cards. And a bit strange. Collecting baseball cards isn’t just about the cards anymore. And forget about there being gum in the packages. The cards are the gum now, unless it’s a hot rookie card. A lot of collectors now look for short-print cards; insert cards; autograph cards; cards with slivers of uniforms or player’s bats on them; cards with different colored borders that are only in limited numbers; insert cards with different borders; autograph cards with different colored signatures also in limited numbers. The value in cards now comes from the intentional scarcity that the card manufacturer creates. What’s the point in just having a card of Juan Soto, when I can pack hunt and spend tons of money to find that Juan Soto card signed with red ink on a blue border?

The hobby itself has changed. Long gone are the days of local baseball card shops. They still exist but are much harder to find. There are sites online to buy your individual cards. The big box stores run the retail game. That pack of slightly overweight forty- to sixty-year-old men that you see piled around certain aisles in the Target or Wal-Mart? They’re waiting for the sports cards to be stocked. The hobby is almost explicitly geared toward adults now. It's no longer the bastion of sweaty kids with pocket change waiting to get ripped off at card shows by heavy-set men with caterpillar mustaches, who smelt faintly of coffee and cigar smoke. Like I said before, there are grown men who have YouTube shows where they open card products. Just a voice and a set of hands ripping open packs and looking for that big hit. There are baseball and sport card podcasts too that run the gamut from nostalgia to hardcore hobby investing. The hobby also has its share of modern-day creeps and crooks…but I’ll leave that for another time.

With all this product and insanity, I worried that going back to collecting would just be another form of anxiety for me. Maybe I should have chosen that therapist instead, I thought, as I scanned the aisles of a Target store. But I dove in anyway. I bought myself a blaster box (a cardboard box containing a set number of packs) of 2019 Topps Heritage. The cards were in the design of the 1970 Topps baseball card set. I greedily opened them. And just like that I felt like a kid again.

I could in fact feel like the kid I used to be. Because of the mass production of the cards of my youth, there are still millions upon millions of baseball cards from the late eighties and early nineties that have yet to be opened. When I started back in 2019, most wax boxes of cards (a card box typically containing 36 packs of cards) were the same price or just a touch more expensive than they were back when I was using my paperboy money to buy my packs. If I didn’t want to participate in the current rage for autograph cards and short-print cards, I could go back to my own era and collect the players I watched and idolized back then.

That’s what I did. I set a goal to rebuild all those sets of my youth, and putting together a personal collection of cards of my favorite players. Nothing in my adult life hit me like sitting there on a Saturday morning, a little New Jack era soul on the stereo, and opening a thirty-six-pack box of 1987 Topps cards, featuring their classic wooden borders. Finding that Bonds rookie card again. The Bo Jackson rookie future stars card that was supposed to make me rich. The rookie card of my childhood favorite, Bobby Bonilla. The twelve-year-old boy in me glowed. And the smell of the cards!? In my humble opinion there is no more intoxicating aroma than the combined smell of cardboard, wax, and gum. Maybe pizza is a close second.

My old/new hobby of baseball card collecting has even wormed its way into my other hobby – Writing. I just finished a manuscript for a novel about a failed boy band from Pittsburgh in the late 1990s, P-Town. One of the characters in the book still collects baseball cards, and another uses them as a side hustle to make money. I’m now taking notes on a new novel that will take place, in part, in the dual worlds of wiffle ball and baseball card collecting. Also, one can get quite a few ideas for poems while attending a card show or duking it out with someone in Target for the last blaster box of Topps Chrome.

But has getting back into the hobby of baseball card collecting really helped me? The answer is yes…and I don’t know. I’d only been back into the hobby a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic brought all our lives to a halt. Instead of my usual malaise in dealing with the general public, the libraries are closed and I’m mostly at home. Finding the joy in opening packs of baseball cards was hard business as the ambulance sirens wailed up and down my block, and my city saw its death tolls reaching into the thousands. My brother and I had planned on going to the big National Sports Card show in Atlantic City this summer, but that has been canceled. Even baseball itself is playing a truncated season of sixty games, and who knows if they’ll even get them all in? At least no one has spilled creamer or milk outside my branch…at least not as of yet anyway.

Strangely the card collecting hobby is as robust as it’s been in years. With millions out of work and the government stimulus a mere trickle, one would’ve thought that the baseball card hobby would’ve bottomed out too. But that hasn’t been the case. Demand for product has outweighed actual product on the shelves. Prices have skyrocketed. Individual cards on the secondary market have shot up in value. Go to any Target or Wal-Mart and you’ll see empty shelves where the sports card product should be. Even my precious junk wax era cards have almost doubled in value, at least in terms of buying a box of them.

What is causing this? My guess is that maybe there are a lot of people out there now who are feeling the way that I did back in 2019: scared, anxious, a little bit helpless and worried about their futures. People who can take only so much sadness. And they need something. That little bit of something to make it through the hours. Perhaps some cardboard therapy. If only for a few minutes or an hour or two, to make this global tragedy seem a little bit further away.

Follow John's adventures in baseball card collecting at Junk Wax Jay

Watch John on an episode of About the Cards!

For more info on baseball card collecting I recommend the following.

Podcasts:

Wax Ecstatic: Matt Sammon hosts a fun and nostalgic, bi-monthly, look back at baseball cards and set from the 1950-1990s, complete with in depth biographies on randomly pulled players. Sammon proves that there is no such thing as a "common card."

About the Cards : This Podcast by collectors for collectors is hosted by Tim, Ben and Stephan and is done live every Wednesday at 8pm PST (10 Central), and is an honest look at the current sports card hobby and trends, both good and bad.

Sports Card Nation: A weekly podcast hosted by John Newman (the man who wanted the cards more than he gum) that places the focus on the sports card hobby and sports in general. Newman usually has weekly interviews with people in the sports card industry.

Sports Card Channels:

Jabs Family : A channel dedicated to opening sports cards both old and new. Jabs family breaks both hobby and retail products. He also does big breaks that people can pay into, as well as smaller breaks and challenges. Posts are at the host's discretion, but usually a few times a week. 

Up North Collectors : A father and son team of sports card collectors, focused mainly on current baseball and basketball cards. They break both hobby and retail items on their channel. Posts are at the host's discretion, but usually a few times a week.

John Grochalski is the author of the poetry collections, The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and The Philosopher’s Ship (Alien Buddha Press, 2018). He is also the author of the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016). Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, in the part that voted for Trump, so may God have mercy on his soul.