I spent a good portion of last night going through, and getting rid of, almost 3/4 of my old baseball cards. It seems everytime I make a move, I choose to go through my baseball cards and discard excess cards to make room for space. I had done this once prior, but last night was the gutting that should have taken place a long time ago.

I hadn't purchased a pack of baseball cards with the intent of "collecting" the cards therein, since about 1992 or so, which made my trashing of certain cards pretty easy. This being 2005, I had the crystal clear knowledge of which players panned out, and which ones fizzled.

But in the process of doing so, I struggled to come to grips with my motives behind collecting cards.

Probably, on the primary level, I collected cards because I loved baseball. It's hard to be a son or daughter of Jim McKibben, and *not* love baseball/softball. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad coaching both of my sisters in their West U. softball leagues. I played under a dad coached team, and remember being an assistant coach for my dad as he coached my brother.

Beyond that, I have fond memories of countless evenings spent watching the Astros in the nearly always cavernous Astrodome. Walking through the Astrodome is like walking through an agoraphobic and a claustrophobic's worst nightmare. The hallways that you walk through as you enter the Astrodome are grey, and pretty tight width wise, guaranteeing that should there be a crowd at the dome, you'll walk nearly hand in hand with the person next to you.

Those hallways lead to other hallways that stretch around each level of the dome itself. Those level hallways are wider than the entrance hallways, but still require excessive amounts of maneuvering should you try and traverse them in search of hot dogs, or BBQ sandwiches. But as you're walking around the dome counter-clockwise, should you look to your right, every so often you'll see the entrance to the arena part of the Astrodome, which seems to stretch on forever.

Walking from the closeness of the Astrodome hallways and into the vastness of the arena area of the Astrodome produces an effect that is similar to the camera techniques Hitchcock used in "Vertigo." You get this weird zoom-in zoom-out motion going in your head, and it takes a few moments to regain your composure before you can try and find your seat, which is no easy task in itself, because no matter where you sit in the Astrodome, you always have the sensation that you're going to fall forward out of your seat, down the 20 aisles ahead of you, over the concrete banister, and onto the playing field itself.

But back to baseball cards...

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that my primary reason for collecting cards was the love of baseball, and everything that could have been written or said about baseball. I had posters on my wall of my favorite baseball stars performing miraculous plays, books on my shelf written by Yogi Berra and Hank Aaron, a wide assortment of gloves through which my friends and I would play sandlot baseball, and of course, baseball cards, which filled countless binders spread throughout my bedroom.

Baseball cards are the perfect mementos for baseball fans. Most of the baseball cards I collected had all of the player's information on the back, which was great ammo for a debater such as myself. Should I need to know how many homeruns Glenn Davis hit in 1988, or how many bases Rickey Henderson stole in 1985, all of the information was literally at my fingertips for instant recall.

But the genius thing about baseball cards is that they are ordered and designed by different years and seasons. The 1990 Topps series of baseball cards will look completely different than the season before, and the season that follows. For baseball fans, this seasonal differentiaion may be the key ingredient. If you are a true fan, a fan like I was in 1990, then the statistical information on the back of the card is redundant, because it's almost as if the stats of each player you follow is burnt into your self. You know that Craig Biggio hit XX amount of homeruns in 19YY, not because it says so on the back of the baseball card, but because you saw him hit more than half of those home runs personally.

Collecting baseball cards also fed my seemingly obsessive, at least formerly obsessive nature. For a long time, if I got into something, I *had* to have everything. For a long time, it was Nintendo games. I had to have as many Nintendo games as humanly possible, or as possible as my meager allowance would permit. Nintendo preceded sports. The Beatles followed sports. Jackie Chan followed the Beatles. Star Wars followed all. The Beatles and Star Wars have stuck with me, while the sports and Jackie Chan have kind of fallen off the track so to speak. But I'm not as obsessive about either Star Wars or The Beatles as I was in the mid- to late- 90's. If there was something that came out about either of those two pop cultural icons, I had to have it. Now, not so much. I haven't purchased a Star Wars book since the Ep. I book, and my Beatles cd collection is still devoid of their "1" cd. Maybe I'm just fooling myself...this coming from the guy who obsessed just a few months ago about Episode III. It's different though...somehow.

But I'd suspect that another part of my baseball collecting centered around the ability to make a quick and easy buck. I always saw baseball cards as a possible future investment for either a retirement aged trip, or tuition for the grandkids. If collecting ten-cent Ken Griffey jr and Cal Ripken cards could somehow pay out in the hundreds at some later time, then collect I would. And not just collect, but I'd collect as many as humanly possible.

Much to dad's chagrin, I'd raid his change jar on occasion and take my change filled pockets to the convenience store down the street to purchase a couple packs of cards. Before I'd even leave the parking lot, I'd already have sorted through the stack and discarded all the has been players. Young players that had potential to be stars one day would be put on the bottom of the stack, while full fledged stars like Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco would get a special place on top of the stack. And and all Houston Astros cards would of course be kept, no matter how big or small the contribution made by the player himself.

I probably spent more time arranging and re-arranging my books of cards, than I did anything else, including school work. I liked to have all of one player's card, by season that is, in one place. But I only had a finite number of pages, so one page would have 5 Eric Davis cards, 2 Barry Larkin cards, and 2 Roger Clemens cards. But when a new pack would reveal another Roger Clemens card, I'd have to go back through the pages and find another page that had enough room for 3 Clemens cards.

The tricky part of collecting baseball cards is knowing which rookies to keep, and which ones to throw away. It's always a bit of a crap shoot knowing which players are going to pan out, and which ones are going to go nowhere fast. The Ken Griffeys and Craig Biggios were pretty sure things. Yet as I went through my cards last night, I found myself staring at an almost endless stream of pages with players that I haven't heard from since I collected. There's this one pitching prospect, Ramon Martinez of the LA Dodgers...I must have had about 20 of his cards. I had a lot of Todd Zeile cards as well.

But even stranger to me, are the cards I had for veterans who were good, but nothing special. I think I had more Steve Sax and Don Mattingly cards than I knew what to do with. I had a bunch of Pete Incaviglia and Bobby Witt cards as well, for you Rangers fans out there. These players all had some good seasons, but nothing good enough that I should have collected their cards.

As I said, I must have gotten rid of about 3/4 of my cards. Now all that I have is a book filled with Astros/Rangers/Cowboys/Oilers cards, and another book filled to max capacity with known legends such as Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds (who doesn't even smile in his baseball cards, and was insanely skinny--pre-steroids--in 1990), and Jeff Bagwell...to name a few.

I figure if I can get my hands on a Becket's Collector Magazine, I'll someday go through my cards and see if any of the cards are worth anything. At this point, they're all fallen heroes to me anyway, I might as well return the favor and make a quick buck off the players that made a few of their million dollars off my fandom. I doubt most of my cards are worth anything anymore. I kind of came into the collecting business right as every other kid in the suburbs came into card collecting. When the market's flooded, things don't really sell for much. Oh well, now that I've gone through them, they can go back up on the shelf until the next time I make a move.

matt out