Love Life Tips For Guys, In Sports Terms Of Course!

LOVE HER LIKE YOU LOVE YOUR FAVORITE TEAM

1) KNOW HER STATS…. You know that Grady Sizemore’s 2006 batting average was 290 and that Gaylord Perry had an ERA of 1.92 in 1972, but you can’t remember her birthday, her favorite movie or favorite color. If you have to, write all of her info down on the back of her picture in your wallet… just like they do on baseball cards!

2) LISTEN TO HER AS CLOSELY AS YOU’D LISTEN IF IT WAS FOURTH AND ONE IN A TIED GAME WITH ONLY :30 SECONDS LEFT …. You don’t let your mind wander off during a close game, don’t let it wander when she wants to be close to you. Women expect you to remember everything they tell you. Five minutes of full attention, can earn you ten minutes of total quiet during a game.

3) YOU WEAR YOUR TEAMS COLORS PROUDLY, DO THE SAME WITH CLOTHES SHE BUYS YOU…. So, the shirt is a little too metro sexual for your taste, just wear it. She took the time to buy something nice for you, don’t disrespect her thoughtfulness. Besides, any man who can walk around wearing a Dawg mask, with a bone in his mouth, shouldn’t be embarrassed by a mauve polo shirt.

4) DON’T BE A FAIRWEATHER FAN… She’s been a little crabby lately. She’s in the middle of a big project and ignoring you. Or since the baby came, she doesn’t wear makeup or shave her legs as often. Did you walk away from the Browns after the fumble or the drive? No, you did not. Your loyal support means everything to her. Marriage is a like being a Cleveland sports fan… you’re in it for better or worse.

5) DON’T PLAY IN A FANTASY LEAGUE. There is no free agency in marriage. If things aren’t as exciting as they were when you first got married, find ways to spice things up with fun ideas like ten cent beer night or wearing the Dawg Mask to bed every now and then. Remember, if you’re looking for happiness, you should look no further than your own bullpen.

Arkansas man buys Wagner baseball card for $1.62M

Baseball card days

Dave Jamieson used to collect baseball cards and recently uncovered his stash when he cleaned out the closet of his childhood home. In attempting to recoup some of the time and money spent in his youth on this cardboard, Jamieson found that baseball cards aren't as popular or as lucrative as they used to be:

Baseball cards peaked in popularity in the early 1990s. They've taken a long slide into irrelevance ever since, last year logging less than a quarter of the sales they did in 1991. Baseball card shops, once roughly 10,000 strong in the United States, have dwindled to about 1,700. A lot of dealers who didn't get out of the game took a beating. "They all put product in their basement and thought it was gonna turn into gold," Alan Rosen, the dealer with the self-bestowed moniker "Mr. Mint," told me. Rosen says one dealer he knows recently struggled to unload a cache of 7,000 Mike Mussina rookie cards. He asked for 25 cents apiece.

Close readers of kottke.org know that I collected sports cards too. I got involved in this prepubescent hobby later than most; I was 14 or 15 when a friend and his older brother -- who was around 24 and collecting for investment -- introduced me to it. And I loved it:

I still have them all somewhere, in boxes, collecting dust faster than value. The Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie, the 130 different Nolan Ryan cards, the complete 1989 Hoops set (with the David Robinson rookie), and several others I really can't remember right now.

I used to spend untold hours sifting through them, looking up the values in Beckett's Price Guide, visiting card shops, flipping through commons to complete sets, looking for patterns in Topps' rack packs (I scored many a Jim Abbott rookie with this technique), chewing that ancient bubble gum (I bought a pack of 1983 cards once and chewed the gum...it was horrible), and keeping track of the total value of my collection with a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet on my dad's 286. It was a lot of fun at the time (as the Web is fun for me now); I guess that's about all one can ask for from a hobby.

Recently I stumbled across The Baseball Card Blog and was hit by a giant wave of nostalgia for my old obsession. One thing led to another -- you know how that goes -- and before I knew it, a package was speeding its way to me from a card shop in Pennsylvania containing several 1989 Fleer & Donruss wax packs, a 1989 Topps rack pack, and a couple of 1987 Topps wax packs.¹

I've been opening a pack every few days since they arrived. Smell is the sense most powerfully associated with memory, so getting a whiff of that cardboard is really sending me back. Like a wine connoisseur, I can even smell the difference between each brand of card; the smell of Topps cards holds the strongest memories for me...the 1989 Topps set was my favorite. I opened the '87 Topps packs with a fellow ex-collector, but when we tried to chew the gum, it tasted like the cards and turned to a muddy dust in our mouths. But that was mostly what happened even when the gum was new, so we were unsurprised.

Because of the aforementioned slump in the baseball card collecting economy, the card packs I ordered were the same price I paid for them as a kid (factoring for inflation), even though they're almost 20 years old and way more scarce. Back then, I used most of my $5/week allowance on cards, and it took weeks and months of patience to buy enough packs to complete a set, procure that Griffey rookie card, or amass enough Mark McGwires to trade to a friend for a desired Nolan Ryan.

As an adult, I have the cashflow to buy any card I want whenever I want (within reason). Or several boxes of cards, so as to compile complete sets instantly. Or I can just purchase the complete sets and skip the intermediate step. I could buy an entire box of 1989 Upper Deck packs -- at $1.25 per pack and nearly impossible to find in rural Wisconsin, an unimaginable extravagance for me as a kid -- right now on eBay. When I think about the financial advantages I now have over my 16-yo self in collecting the same exact cards, I feel like the NY Yankees (and their monster payroll) competing in a Single A league. It's unfair and even thinking about collecting cards in that manner takes a lot of the fun out of it for me. If I do start collecting cards again, I'm going to approach it like I did back then: by hand, a little at a time, and treating even the essentially worthless commons with care. Unless Nolan Ryan is involved...in that case, the sky's the limit, although I might have to sell my bicycle to get it. In the meantime, I'm waiting for the next household footwear purchase so I can put my newly purchased cards in the shoe box for safe keeping.

[1] A quick note on terminology. A "wax pack" is a basic pack of around 15 cards (plus gum, when cards still had gum packaged with them), so-called because the packages used to be sealed with wax. (Now they're all probably packaged in plastic and whatnot...I don't know, I haven't kept up.) The bottom card in such a pack is called a "wax back" because the card got a thin layer of wax on it from the sealing process. A "rack pack" is a hanging triple pack made of see-thru plastic. A "common" is an ordinary card not worth very much, as opposed to cards or rookies, hot prospects, all-stars, and the like. A "box" contains several wax packs, typically 20-40 packs/box. A "complete set" is a collection of every card sold by a company in a particular year. The '89 Topps set had 792 cards. Sets were sold in factory-sealed boxes or were compiled by hand from cards acquired in packs. ↩

If you're a sports fan, chances are pretty good you collected trading cards as a kid. You might recall spending your allowance on a pack of baseball cards with stale, pink gum at the corner store. You'd tear open the packs in search of your favorite star, then trade with your friends or carefully slide a few cards between the spokes of your bicycle wheel and listen to them click as you pedaled.

If you were a card collector, you probably had binders full of the carefully sorted cardboard gems lying around your room -- until you discovered girls. Once the fairer sex was on the scene, the cards went to the garage sale, attic or trash.

In the years since you got rid of your cards without a second thought, the industry has boomed. Though prices have skyrocketed, trading cards have never been more popular.

Here are 5 things you didn't know about sports cards. However, be warned: After hearing how far the hobby has come, you might want to stop on the way home and pick up a pack or two.

1- The value of rookie cards is artificially inflated

There's little argument that Wayne Gretzky is the best hockey player to lace up skates, and his 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee rookie card sells between $600 and $900. Sidney Crosby may be billed as the best thing since The Great One, but he's got a lot to prove. Still, Sidney Crosby's 2005-06 Upper Deck The Cup rookie card sells at more than $10,000. We've got nothing against Crosby, but the fact that a largely unproven star's rookie card can sell at more than 10 times the value of Wayne Gretzky's is mind-boggling.

It all comes down to supply and demand. In the late 1990s, card companies introduced serial numbering, the antidote to mass-produced cards such as Gretzky's rookie. Cards were printed in limited quantities and stamped with a unique number. Only 99 copies exist of Crosby's The Cup card, meaning if you want The Next One's top rookie, be prepared to pay for it.

2- Babe Ruth is still signing cards

If you pulled an autographed card from a pack in the late 1980s or early 1990s, you'd tell everyone you knew. Now, autographed cards are so popular, often with one or more per box (and in some sets, one per pack) that they hardly seem exciting anymore. What may have you calling your friends, however, is finding an autographed card of a deceased athlete.

To create these "cut" autograph cards, card companies purchase authentic autographs of sports stars, often off of paperwork or void checks from the deceased athlete's estate, then cut out the player's signature and glue it into a new card. So even though Babe Ruth has been dead since 1948, it's possible to get his autograph in a 2008 product -- and that goes for more of the game's greats, such as Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, to name a few.

3- Barack Obama has a baseball card

No, the probable future U.S. President didn't have a short stint in the Big Leagues. Card companies have reacted to the popularity of politics in American society, and political figures have begun to appear on special insert cards. This year's Upper Deck baseball includes a Presidential Predictor insert set, featuring cards of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and others.

Taking the popularity of game-used memorabilia cards a step further, some relic cards in recent years have included swatches cut straight out of American history. It's possible to get a card that includes a small square of cloth from one of John F. Kennedy's suits or a card containing a piece of George W. Bush's necktie.

Other American legends (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, etc.) are represented with memorabilia cards in today's products. It may seem odd to get a Marilyn Monroe card in a pack of baseball cards, but these rare inserts are hot sellers among history buffs.

4- Celebrity body parts are now for sale

Topps created industry waves in 2007 when it produced three cards, each containing a strand of hair from former President George Washington. The card company got the hair from John Reznikoff, the owner of the largest collection of hair from historical figures. Despite the shock of many collectors and average citizens alike (and the disturbing wishes of some people to track down the cards so they could try to clone Washington through DNA strands), Topps' products created a stir and collectors responded by showing there is indeed a market for these bizarre, yet intriguing, collectibles.

Topps acknowledges that DNA cards are hard to make because of the difficulty of tracking down strands of hair from deceased public figures, but the idea has already caught on. The hot insert in this year's Upper Deck SP Legendary Cuts baseball cards is a Hair Cuts series -- cards that contain cut autographs and a strand of hair from figures such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Babe Ruth, Andrew Jackson, and Geronimo.

A Topps 2008 baseball product contains cards with hair from not only Abe Lincoln, but also JFK and Beethoven.

5- Your son's allowance won't get him far in the hobby

If you collected a couple decades ago, you'll remember when Upper Deck products hit store shelves in 1990 at the seemingly exorbitant price of $1 per pack. Almost overnight, gone were the days of 25 and 50 cent packs of cards that contained a piece of pink gum for good measure. The price of consumer goods has risen over the last couple decades with inflation, but card prices have risen because of the increased demand as the hobby boomed.

With very few exceptions, packs of cards are at least $4 and some high-end products cost more than $500 per pack -- not box but per pack. And those packs might contain as few as five cards. What, did you think you'd find that $10,000 Sidney Crosby card in a pack that cost $1?

Each sport only features a couple 99 cents per pack brands each season, which means youths with allowance money to spend don't have much of a chance of delving into the hobby. Adults with more disposable income, however, have a wide variety of choices.