Not the tiny, cardboard investments they once were

Over the winter I was looking for things to kill time until the job market opened up and decided if an activity couldn't be cheap, it should at least be fun. So, in what wasn't one of the more rational moves I could have made, I bought a box of baseball cards.

Actually, it ended up being two and for anyone who was 12, you know that buying 36 packs doesn't mean you'll get the full set. No, there were plenty of holes and doubles of shitty players and overall it was pretty entertaining.

However, the whole experience was kind of disorienting. I went up north to St. Cloud to a shop that had a pretty good buzz from a collector board and it lived up to the hype. The funny thing is that it's in the basement of a strip mall (Strip malls have basements? Yup, but I kept thinking of Jan Hooks' scene in Pee Wee's Big Adventure) and I was pretty sure someone was going to hit me in the head and take my wallet.

Nice folks, though and we talked about e-mail spam and baseball and I asked the lady behind the counter what she suggested in terms of a good set. The reason I needed to do this was multiple sets from the same manufacturers and all sorts of other garbage.

Apparently I'm not the only one who misses the good old days.

Back in the day there were only a few sets that mattered: Topps, Upper Deck, Donruss and Fleer. Others floating in and out, but those were the big ones. Upper Deck took over as top dog and Topps just seemed dated. Without going into too much of a song and dance about a simpler time in 1983, it was a good time to be into baseball cards.

They were cheap and available all over, but the cards with Cubs players were the only ones to matter in our neighborhood. Now, there are separate sets depending on where you buy them (Target has it's own set through Topps- learned that one the hard way).

When you add all the intra-company sets and alternates, overpriced junk that is sold as rare or with special inserts from old autographs and such and the whole thing is kind of a mess.

I was told as I was packing up my Topps set this year that there were special inserts from the Pope, Ronald Reagan and others and had to ask myself why. Aren't baseball players cool enough anymore. More shocking than anything are the prices (into the hundreds of thousands) for these cards.

The closest I came was a small piece of the jersey that Victor Martinez wore in the 2005 All-Star Game.

It looks like the bottom line is that cards are becoming too expensive for kids who are gravitating towards game cards like Pokemon and company. I say if this generation falls away from card collecting, that's just fine. It'll be cheaper when I buy them for my kids... then fight them as we tear through packs just to see who's inside them.

(Image from SportsHollywood.com)