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...