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!

Where It All Started...

There are plenty of things going on in my life right now that don't necessitate the creation of yet another blog, one that is no more unique or special than the hundreds of thousands of other blogs in the world. I've been hired help for blogs, served as a freelance writer, staff writer, and yes, even as an editor. My passion has been baseball as far back as I could remember. Whether it's minor league ball, the big leagues, or even a local little league game.

Things that go along with that obsession go far beyond writing, reading, etc. I've coached Little League, Babe Ruth, Junior Leagues, high school and legion ball. As I'm writing this, it's 2:56 a.m. on a Monday morning--exactly two weeks before I return to my normal job as a social studies and weight training teacher at a small reservation school in central Wyoming. The common thread since I first fell in love with the National Pastime more than thirty years ago? Baseball cards. What?! Yes, the little pieces of cardboard that have an image of our game's players on the front, and statistics on the back. What's different now than when I witnessed my first big league game in the Kingdome back in 1981? My seven-year old son, that's what.

As I write this initial entry--my tale to my little boy, I'm on the second movie of an in-house double feature that started with Moneyball  and is concluding with my all-time favorite: Bull Durham. My family is baseball obsessed to say the least. My son and I root for the New York Yankees, while my wife of 11 1/2 years along with my six-year old daughter, are one-hundred percent invested in Red Sox Nation. My oldest daughter? The one who will begin college this fall at Montclair State in New Jersey? She began as a Yankees fan, but quickly changed her allegiance to the New York Mets. That's a story for another day...

As a child growing up in north-central Oregon, the closest thing we had to big league baseball were the Mariners up in Seattle, and the Portland Beavers--the Triple-A affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies and later, the Minnesota Twins. My first pack of baseball cards? A wax pack from the 1986 Topps collection. I remember that first pack like it was yesterday. Fifteen cards, a stick of bubble gum, an entry form to attend the 1987 spring training for the team of my choice...all for a whopping forty cents. Thirty-one years later, the '86 set is looked upon as one of the ugliest, unpopular sets of the decade produced by Topps. It doesn't matter, as I put the entire set together by hand. Pack by painstaking pack. Well worth the reward, as it hooked me for life, and fueled my increasing love for the game from that point, through today.

I'm creating this blog as an online diary. An official entry as I take this newfound journey with my son. Now that baseball here in our little town is almost complete, I decided to quit using chewing tobacco after 27 years of constant use (another side affect of my baseball life). I need another hobby, something productive to occupy my time. After four years of being involved in Little League, my son has officially caught the bug of being obsessed with baseball. He's always dogging me to go hit (we live directly across the street from our local baseball complex), have a catch, to take him on in MLB The Show, watching or listening to games, whatever. If it's baseball, he wants to share in it with me.

When I began collecting, never in my wildest dreams did I ever consider purchasing an entire set of baseball cards. To me, that was cheating. I remember during the winters of my childhood, laying in front of the fireplace, looking through the Sears, JC Penney, and Jafco Christmas catalogs, at the full, complete sets for that specific year being offered. By 1987, I had expanded my desire to conquer the world of baseball cards, learning of Fleer, Donruss, and later, Sportflics sets. My Mom (God bless that woman) was all about feeding my addiction. Any time she would go to the local grocery stores (Albertson, Safeway, etc.), rest assured that by the time she was done putting the week's food away, a pack or two of cards was sitting on the counter for me. I also earned $2 per week in allowance for picking up dog poop, taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn, and doing some occasional housework like vacuuming or loading up the dishwasher for dear old Mom.

I would take my hard-earned money, and meet up with my buddies each morning before school. We'd walk up to DeHart's corner market, buy a Hostess fruit pie, a nickel box of Lemonheads, Boston Baked Beans, and a couple of packs of cards. When times were good, multiple brands of cards were available--the aforementioned Topps, Fleer, and Donruss. Fleer and Donruss cards would sell for only .35 per pack, so if funds were low, we'd snag an extra pack of those until allowance day came, and we could buy some packs of Topps again. We'd go to school, eat our pies, save our candy for lunch, and go through our new treasures, trading cards to help us each fill our sets.

As my buddies and I continued to grow up, cards were never far from our minds, but other things often took our card money (girls, beer, chew), but we'd still buy packs when we were thinking about it. Our little town even produced a card shop, where the owner, Larry Krutsinger, who was a local volunteer umpire, would show mercy on us, and give us a really good deal on cards of our favorite players (Mine was Don Mattingly, my friend Josh, Mark Grace, my other buddy Sean, Ozzie Smith). Sean and I would spend summer days playing ball with our other neighborhood friends, but our favorite stop was a junk store called Jolly's. The guy who ran that shop, was a crass, grumpy guy who looked like he hadn't bathed in a few weeks. The place was dark and dingy, but we knew he had boxes upon boxes of old baseball cards. Sean and I would collect all of the loose change we could find, and head up to Kelly Avenue to Jolly's. Mr Jolly as we called him, was so preoccupied with trying to sell his other junk, he'd allow Sean and I to go through those boxes for hours, looking for gems at discount rates. He kept an out of date copy of Beckett Baseball behind the counter, and we'd come to the side counter with all of the cards we could afford for that day, and he'd hand us the Beckett, a piece of paper, and a calculator.

Between the card shop and Larry, and the junk shop and Jolly's, Sean and I built our collection that most of our other buddies quickly became jealous of. Sean and I would spend hours upon hours, laying out our catch, talking baseball, trading cards, and preserving them for when we were all grown up. Sean moved away a year after we entered junior high school, but I found another friend who was into cards, my friend and Cubs fan, Josh. This is where my eyes were opened wide to parental involvement in the "hobby"of baseball card collecting.

You see, Josh lived on the opposite side of town. No quick walk or bike ride. I actually needed rides to Josh's house, but I got there and he to my house on the east side of town. I was floored the first time I entered Josh's house. It is a ranch style, with a living room through the garage entrance, a dining room and kitchen, then another living room and hallway to the bedrooms. Josh had a younger brother, Andrew, who was two years younger than we were in school. Josh and I would play Bases Loaded, RBI Baseball and the like on the Nintendo for hours. However, in that second living room, were boxes and boxes and more boxes of complete sets of baseball cards. You name the year and set in the 1980s and earlier, and odds were good it was stacked in that living room, or Josh and Andrew's bedrooms. His family would take trips to Portland, stop at multiple card shops, and come home with many more sets of baseball cards.

I remember asking Josh's dad why he bought complete sets rather than hand collecting. He responded by saying if taken care of properly, full sets could be worth big money in twenty or thirty years when we boys were grown up. I'd go home and ask my Dad if he'd buy me a complete set, and he'd just laugh and say "Buy you complete sets of toys?" "You're on your own son." I felt like I was behind the power curve and at a disadvantage to Josh because his Dad would get the complete sets, and I'd be stuck piecing my yearly collection together pack by pack. I still felt like it was cheating, and not really an enjoyable way to collect cards. My own father had a couple of treats for me later in my life...

I've been blessed enough to have suitable storage for my cards all of these years later. I've lived in many different states, all over the country, but I have always taken the time to ensure my childhood gems were taken care of.

I have many more stories to tell, and to explain where I am at in the hobby and my new journey with my son. My children are my absolute world. My family and baseball. It's a pretty simple life for a school teacher, and I hope you'll enjoy taking this journey with me each week as I document what I hope is something you might enjoy reading. Perhaps my entries will take you back to a special time and place in your life. Perhaps it was you and your friends, or you and your father that once enjoyed collecting. Maybe, just maybe, you'll get the bug once again and you can carry the tradition on with your own children...thanks for reading, and God Bless!