Where Have You Gone, Rick Auerbach?

Whatever happened to baseball cards?

I used to collect baseball cards growing up... not for their value, but because - for a little boy - it was like being a general manager of a franchise. Friends and I would get packs at a time and make deals that would rival the Winter Meetings. I usually had no leverage. I grew up a Reggie Jackson fan and it seemed I never got his card in a pack. I always wound up with some journeyman named "Rick Auerbach". I swear they made 2000 cards of him every year. A friend of mine had a Bob Horner rookie card one year that I coveted. His asking price was a Thurman Munson and a Tom Seaver. Nope. Too rich for my blood. Even a nine-year-old has a walking-away price.

For years, the major manufacturer of baseball cards was the Topps company. They would package a random assortment of players in wax packs that would come out in early spring, about the time players hit The Grapefruit League. I anticipated the moment these would appear in the grocery candy aisle like a Baptist deacon awaiting a covered dish supper. I even liked the bubble gum that came in the packs. It was the consistency of a taco shell and tasted like plywood, but it was wonderful. You could find cards in other places as well. In the 1970s, Kellogg’s placed shiny 3D cards of baseball superstars in Frosted Flakes. That cereal tastes decent for about three seconds before it turns into a soggy bowl of mush in your bowl. The cards were at the bottom, so it required some keen angling of the box to get the card out without having to go through.

We didn’t just collect the big stars, though. In the 1950s and 60s, baseball cards were like small portraits. The colors were vivid and framed even the ordinary players as larger than life. Then, like most everything else, the 70s turned everything weird. Lowell Palmer of The Washington Senators had a 1970 baseball card showing him wearing dark sunglasses and resembling an artist’s sketch of D.B. Cooper. A poster of Joe Torre from Topps in 1971 showed the Cardinals catcher with sweat pouring down his face and eyes glazed, giving him the appearance of someone with a dangerously high fever. Felix Milan of the Mets held his bat more like a majorette’s grip on a baton than a major league ballplayer.

There were also cool facts about players on the back of the cards.  The career stats, personal factoids, and odd bits of trivia jammed in a small rectangle was like reading a short research paper.  As a kid, I had no idea about terms like exit velocity, pitch movement, or launch angle that TV announcers refer to these days.  I could, however, tell you from the back of cards that Andre Dawson enjoys deep sea fishing and Dave Winfield was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks.

But there was nothing like the thrill of opening a pack, thumbing through journeymen players, and then striking gold with a Carlton Fisk, Rod Carew, or George Brett. Baseball card collecting hadn't become a cottage industry, and there wasn't any thought given to keeping them in mint condition. We’d put them in binders or throw them in old shoeboxes and sit around with our friends playing high-stakes baseball card poker. We didn’t have cell phones or whatever the heck TikTok is. I know this sounds crazy, but we would use trading cards to have a conversation with each other. We would sit around for a couple of hours, munching on goldfish crackers and swigging ice-cold Coca-Cola until the summer heat sent us in search of someone’s swimming pool to play sharks & minnows. Card collecting was as much a part of summer as churning homemade ice cream and staying up late.

The Braves have tanked this year and I'm tired of hearing about owners and players unable to agree on whether they should make millions or billions.  The game itself is still pure, but greed has stolen a lot of the shine off the luster.  Still, I have some of my old cards.  Every once in awhile, I’ll dig them out and think of my friends and I as smelly, gross young boys who had vivid imaginations and had little care other than scoring a good trade for their favorite player.  Simpler times with simpler agendas.  Makes me wonder whatever happened to them.

And it makes me wonder whatever became of Rick Auerbach.