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!