Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose, Sometimes It Rains...

I know it's been a couple of weeks since I last checked in on the journey of a hand-assembled baseball card set with my 7-year old son. The family has been pretty busy these last couple of weeks. I had Freshmen Leadership Academy and in-service at the high school I teach at. The kiddos have been making their rounds of the local summer vacation bible camp circuit, and last week, the 2017-18 school year began for me. I'm entering my third year teaching at St. Stephen's Indian School. And today, the big event...the total solar eclipse that brought thousands of extra visitors to our small oil town in central Wyoming.

So what have these past couple of weeks brought to my son and I as we attempt to complete the 2017 Donruss set? To be honest, not a whole lot. As I explained in previous posts, only two places in town: Walmart and Walgreens sell baseball cards, and only Walmart sold (yes, past tense) Donruss 2017 baseball cards. I purchased all five 30-card value packs they had in stock, and that's been it. I would visit Walmart, go directly to the aisle that I found our cards, and there the rack where they once hung, sat empty. Day after day, week after week. I would ask various clerks if and when the store was going to restock the packs. Unfortunately for my son and I, I was told "Once they're gone, they're gone. We're not restocking something such as these items." What?! Are you kidding me?

So what did I do? Instead of opening all of the packs I had purchased at once, I decided to spread it out to perhaps one pack every week or two. As I write this, I still have a couple of packs that remain unopened. I've been performing the obligatory on-line searches through popular retailers, and I'm beginning to think these five Donruss packs were throw away packs, and that nobody else on the planet ever carried them.

As of this writing, the boy and I have made it through three packs. The nice thing about the on-line checklist, is that I can see up to the second, percentage-wise, how far we've come as a father and son collecting team, and how far we still need to go. The second pack produced some gems...the Clayton Kershaw card, the Adam Duvall error card, and more of the '83 retros that take me back to my early days of collecting. How much of the set is complete? 28.7%! Of the base set, we have 56 of 195 possible cards. That's a pretty good clip for two 30-card packs. The third pack? We weren't so lucky. About 1/3 of the pack or a little more, were all doubles that were already in our collection. Including doubles, we're up to 68 cards in the base set, 18 of the '83 retros, 2 cards from the "Rookies" subset, 1 from the "Prospects" subset, and 1 from the "American Pride Red" subset.

The boy is still extremely excited, but doesn't quite understand why we're taking our time opening all of the packs. I want this experience for us to be enjoyable, and I want to enjoy each individual experience of opening a fresh pack, and seeing who we can add to our set. It's like several mini-Christmas mornings, rather than doing it all at once.

I'm not going to lie...the lack of available Donruss packs were driving the boy and I crazy. I had to find something to satisfy us...for now. I walked into Walgreens one afternoon to pick up a prescription, and it wasn't quite ready. So I was on the prowl to the small toy aisle in a neighborhood drug store. I found two strange looking boxes of baseball cards. They were generic boxes of cards. They contained 100 cards for $4.98each. I said to myself, "Hell, why not?" and I picked them both up. Braden and I went through each, and to my surprise, while there were no "gems", in either of those boxes, they contained cards from some of my all-time favorite sets from my childhood. Cards from the '87 Topps, the '86 Topps, the '82 Donruss, and the like. Most of the cards were from the Junk Wax era of cards--a time from 1984 forward, where cards were in mass production, and are still readily available. My son was ecstatic seeing and holding cards that Dad had collected some thirty or more years earlier. This may provide the foundation for us hand-collating sets of our own together, aside from the Donruss 2017.

Our boredom with the lack of available packs for our Donruss set didn't stop with the 200 cards purchased via the local drug store. I've been getting into online auction sites once again, browsing, reading, and browsing some more. My favorite era of cards is obviously from the 1980s, and late 1970s. These were the first cards in my collection, and this is where unlike my late father, I'm going to give my son the best of both worlds. Yes, I have and will purchase complete sets for us to enjoy together later in life, but I also like the chase and appreciate the value of building a set from scratch. Shortly after my 41st birthday at the beginning of August, I purchased the entire 1981 Topps set via auction. The boy was excited, I was excited. We looked through the set carefully, and he had a hard time understanding why any professional baseball player would be named Fernando Valenzuela.

Our latest venture in picking up random cards and sets doesn't end here. I downloaded an app on my phone a couple of months ago called Wish. It's a shopping app, and I hadn't spent much time looking through it, but one night, that's exactly what I did. I had shared stories of my enjoyment in building sets via wax packs with my son. He had never actually touched or seen a real wax pack in his short seven and a half years on this Earth. I found a retailer selling various wax packs for around $8. I placed an order, and two days after the '81 Topps set arrived, I had a small envelope in my mailbox. It contained 8 packs of cards, several of which were real wax packs.

I opened the envelope, and called my baby boy over to see his reaction to getting his first-ever wax packs. In the envelope was a pack of '87 Topps, a pack of '91 Fleer Ultra, a '90 pack of Donruss, a foil pack of '90 Upper Deck, and a couple of others. My son looked quietly at each pack, smiled, and handed them back to me. I asked him if he was ready to open the packs, and he replied with "Dad, let's save the foil, and the wax packs." "I can open the Fleer and the '88 Score." I asked him if he was sure, and he said "Yep." So he opened the Score (the best card was the #592 of HOF catcher Carlton Fisk, worth $1.25). My son thanked me for the cards, gave me a hug, and said, "Dad, let's put these away for now and concentrate on the Donruss '17s." Perhaps I overwhelmed him with all of the different types and brands of cards. I tend to get overly excited when it comes to sharing my love of baseball cards with my boy. I have over thirty years of great memories and great experiences to share with him.

However, our pursuit of completing the Donruss 2017 set is not over just yet. A coaching friend of mine, whom I work with, is on his way back from Oregon. I had discussed my issues with not being able to acquire any more packs of Donruss '17s. I asked him as he was travelling, if and when he had time, if he'd look in various Walmarts and see if there were any packs, and if there were, if he'd pick them up for me. As luck would have it, he found several more packs, along with a 56-card hobby box in two different states.

Add in the fact that the family and I will be headed to Casper and Billings, MT over the next few weeks, the boy and I should be in the driver's seat for knocking out a ton more in our set. I'm excited, he's excited, and I hope you're enjoying reading our ongoing journey to complete our first set together as father and son...

The Boy Enters The Picture...

The very first pack ever opened by my son!

Another week, another opportunity to share in our journey. By now, it's early August. I've returned to school to begin in-service, with school starting on the 14th. My son and daughter, the 24th. Our little town is getting ready to host thousands of tourists for the solar eclipse on the 21st.

It's still baseball season in this household. My kids have taken sides in the Yankees/Red Sox battle for the AL East crown and perhaps more--an in-house rivalry that has occurred between my wife and I for the past 13 years or so. Our local little league will be reorganizing at the end of the month, and my big project: finding suitable property for an all-inclusive baseball complex for our three local programs is getting underway. However, my son and I continue to spend our free time discussing baseball, its history, and of course, baseball cards.

As I've stated in earlier posts to this blog, I began collecting with wax packs of 1986 Topps cards. From there, my obsession moved to add Donruss and Fleer, some Sportflics, and eventually a few hundred packs of Score, Upper Deck and the like. One thing I cannot get over is the expense of wanting to simply collect cards. The other thing that bothers me living in a small town of 10,000 or so people, is the lack of quality places to purchase cards and supplies. My family has lived in Riverton for almost six years now, and our primary shopping outlets were K-Mart (closed in December of 2016), and Walmart. There was briefly a hobby shop in town, but the owner only sold gaming cards and collectibles, and literally laughed at me when I asked if or when he was going to be selling baseball cards. Our local Walgreens sells the occasional 100 card multi-pack, with various cards over the past couple of years, but nothing consistent.

So my son and I are stuck with Walmart until we travel to Casper or Billings to find a better selection. My son is a tad younger than I was when I began collecting, but I still believe now is the time. I've spent quite a bit of time at Walmart, trying to decide which set and make of cards would be "Our first set" to put together as father and son. I'm not a wealthy man by any means, and I didn't want to overwhelm him by selecting a set that would break my bank, or one that had so many cards, he might get discouraged with our progress right out of the gate.

Our Walmart also doesn't carry a vast array of cards as other larger Walmarts or Targets might normally carry. They have one little section, with packs from this year, last year, and a couple of boxes (Allen and Ginter, Topps Archives) and the like. When I decided a few weeks ago that this year was the year for our journey, I found these packs of 30 cards, with a logo that was like a long lost friend: the 2017 Donruss. I had remembered reading some time back, that Donruss was back in the baseball card game, but couldn't use team names or logos because of contractual exclusiveness with Topps, but it didn't matter to me. I did some research, finding out that the '17 Donruss set contained less than 200 cards in the base set, along with several dozen others in sub-sets, and thought "Perfect!"

I remember when I was growing up, the Internet and Google were still many years away, and to keep track of cards and checklists, one would have to write the numbers and cards down on notebook paper, based upon the checklist cards that were included in sets. It was work, but man was it fun to cross off or check mark the names in the notebook as my collecting would get closer to being completed. I've brought technology into my son's world of collecting, and we use a site called The Trading Card Database  which allows my son and I to keep track of the cards we acquire for our '17 Donruss set. We even set up an account on the site, called TheBrostBoys, and we can see who else collects this set, what they need, what they might have for sale or trade, in the hopes that we can complete our collection by the end of 2017.

The day finally arrived when I was ready to either turn my son's life upside down, and give him one more thing to obsess about (He's a tad OCD, he gets that from his mother), or to find out that he had little to no interest in carrying on the Brost family addiction of baseball card collecting. I called him over by where I was sitting in the living room, handed him his very first pack of 2017 Donruss, and said "Son, if you find yourself loving this hobby as much as I do, and I hope you will, you will remember this day the rest of your life." He smiled that toothy grin, and said "Can I open them?" I replied "Absolutely!" I pulled out the cell phone to capture this moment, and he began our official journey into the wonderful world of baseball card collecting!

My son carefully opened the seam on the back of the pack, splitting the entire pack to where he could remove all of the cards at once. He then did the cutest thing I've ever seen...He put his nose up to the pack and the cards, took a deep breath and said "I love the smell of baseball!" I was the proudest papa on the face of the Earth at that moment. I knew he was hooked, The first card he pulled? The #1 card in the entire set, a Diamond King of Paul Goldschmidt. We continued to look through each card, the "Bringer of Rain" variation of Josh Donaldson, the '83 replica cards, some of the stars of yesterday such as Pedro Martinez, some of today's legends like Albert Pujols. The final card in that first pack? Charlie Hustle himself, Pete Rose. Say what you will about the gambling, the latest issues he's facing (which I in ZERO way condone), but it's pretty cool to pull a card with the all-time hit king swinging away in your very first pack of cards you've ever opened.

Thanks for checking in, and here's to many more fun years of collecting with my boy! We'll be back soon with the results from our second pack that was opened!