Reminisce on Learning - the Run

People like to collect things. Through howdt time, the things that have been collected have more or less value, usually dependent on supply and demand. For a new issues of a collectable, the key factor is the size of the run. Here is a short autobiographical tale that describes the depth of the learning process.

At one point in my life i was an avid baseball card collector. i started when i was young and collected because i liked baseball. I read the cards, knew all the facts and watched the games that these players played. Cards cost a nickel a pack of ten and they came with gum - the gum was a worthwhile tradable. Card collecting developed for me a sense of marketplace - i knew what i valued, i knew what others valued and i set out to accomplishing a task - getting every card in the set. I began as a 5 year old in 1964 and by 1968 had completed my first set - the one with Tom Seaver and his rookie trophy. My friends Steve and Jeff and I did this every day. We breathed baseball.

Of course - i played with cards incessantly, putting them in my bicycle spokes, flipping them throught the air so that they spun over and over and trying to control whether they came up heads or tails. We would climb a staircase and flip cards out to a landing - the winner collecting all the cards when he could land a card touching another card in the designated area. On indoor days - we would pull out our cards and go back and forth matching positions, colors, even haircuts, winner take the stack. When we ran out of cards - the game ended for the day. I always seemed to leave with all the cards. So the next day, i would sort through - pull out the ones that were not doubles or look for better mint cards than the ones i had.

This was my interest, my hobby, my life - what i did when i was on my time. I crunched numbers, had a TV droning in the background with the Mets, Phillies, Yankess, Cubs and Braves available free. The sporting news and strat-o-matic baseball completed the set. Baseball players made a comfortable salary to play games - wow - and the numbers crunched demonstrated true performance comparatives - we could argue for weeks at length as to whether Greg Luzinski was more valuable than Lenny Dykstra (steroids?hmmm).

The depth of experience was supercedes by high school, chess, girls, drugs, beer and other things. I purchased complete sets, but put them aside whole to get back to - but never quite did. I would always look for odd sets - the Drake's Cakes set on the box bottom - clipped the panel whole. Each year the run of cards got bigger as more people began seeing value in these pieces of paper. And sports became bug business.

The tipping point for my interest was when Coca-Cola created a special Nolan Ryan commemorative set. I ordered five copies and when they came opened the first box. Jeff who is a diehard Ryan fan was so torn between looking at the cards and destroying the collector's value. But i wanted to see and read and feel the cards. The open pack is of course dispersed, but i still have a sealed Coke box in the closet. I wonder if Jeff has his?

I also have a Nolan Ryan Rookie Card encased in plastic in 'good' condition. Ryan was a late series rookie in the Seaver set - but edges and corners were not worth watching back then. That is why mint Ryan rookies are rare - a late in the run issue, when they printed less cards in the run for the latter series. Some years, the seventh series didn't come out til august and by that time - only the diehards collected baseball cards.

When I finished school and moved out west - moving my entire card collection was one of the keys factors to driving rather than flying. But grad school was too time consuming and other than buying sets - topps and Fleer and Donruss and Upper Deck and Beckett's became a life-saver. And then the move to Boston - the cards went into storage. Life in the working world - well, i moved back to Oregon and started the family.

And the opportunity came up, in the high point of the card craze where Roy - a California collector and I met at a card show, that was at a fair that my wife wished to attend. And when we got to talking the value, in 1993 and the need to raise money for the mortgage, Roy told me about the souther california card market where he dealt. Over the next year, I bled out all my sets from 1970 through 1985 and most of the specialty cards for enough to make the down payment on a small farm. The cards after 1986 were too recent and suffered badly from over-production. By 1995 - the value of cardboard was once again cardboard. Well a bit better - but i'll have to find a Beckett's and price a Ryan rookie. I recall an $1100 peak.

I still have my Ryan rookie card. The sixties cards that i collected as a rugrat were not of high enough quality for the collectors. I worked with Roy to fill in those sets and replace cards, but then life called and now - I look at the cards on the shelf and say wow - what's the next baseball card phenomena. It went to pet rocks and pokeymans and all sorts of things. So i sit back and look at the world and try to predict value. I look at sports of the 60s and ask - what has replaced it? Sports of the oughts (00s) is gladiator warfare - or at least was until it got replaced for real by the middle east endeavor. But science stands ripe to provide a collectable interest for youth - if we can share our stories and give people something to aspires to.

So who should be the scientists in the first issue of Science Zone cards and what should be the size of the run? Einstein, Pauling for sure, but who else? I'll accept nominations for a while - until we go into print. I'd also like suggestions for the back design of the card. If somebody else would like to invest money in my time - I'll help set them this up as a micro-business. I figure a run of about 15,000 - but i haven't looked at the market economics at all - there may be a significant cost savings at some threshhold printing run level.