All “sorts” of fun in ’61

Committee note: This piece was submitted by SABR member Jamie Selko.

Back when I first started collecting, I kept my collection rubberbanded in the proverbial shoebox. I even, oh wretched child that I was, fastened some few of them to my bike frame with clothespins so that when the spokes would hit ‘em the bike would “sound” like I was riding a motorcycle. Alas, now that I am an aged and wretched recluse, I realize that even eight flapping baseball cards, while indeed somewhat louder than a non-carded bike (though not anywhere near as loud as a bike armed with fresh playing cards, which kept were much stiffer and kept their integrity much longer) is far (to the eighth order of magnitude) from the real thing (and , if you are riding a Harley, at least two orders of magnitude farther).

    Anyways, like many readers, I was not content to let my cards linger in dark boxy solitude, oh no. I felt a strange compulsion to arrange them into more orderly sets than the seemingly haphazard way they appeared when I opened a nickel pack of these rectangular beauties, and arrange them I did. Or, rather, rearrange them. I mean, sure, you could be content with the staunchly traditional and conservative yet quotidian “numerical order”. Or, you could put them in a much more reasonable, cosmically systematic order based not on a mere, random number, but rather on more rational and compelling qualities, qualities with a more real-world justification.

    So, back when my entire collection amounted to a little more than two hundred cards, I set out to make sense of my new microverse. First, of course, I stacked the cards in teams, the most natural of all rearrangements. Next, also of course, I reorganized them by position, the second most natural of assignments. Then, if I remember correctly, I arranged them by age, then by height, position by height, position by weight, then circled back to position by age.  And I would do this each time I got a new pack of cards. (Of course, the constant reshuffling of my cards meant that they drifted farther and farther away from the now Holy Grail-like “mint”, but I didn’t (and wouldn’t have, even if I knew what was coming) give two hoots about that. Rearranging the cards (and the very cards themselves) filled me with a strange sense of joy and wonder. The joy remained until cards stopped being issued in series (although by then I was a certified baseball nut) but I kept on collecting them, basically because I thought it was somewhat more than a wonder that a 2.5 x 3.5 rectangle could not only tell us a person’s life story in a nutshell, but it also had a photo of the person in question and cartoons to boot.  How cool was that?

    My own life might have been becoming more and more filled with errata, miscues, faux pas, disappointments, false starts, dead ends, passionate but unrequited crushes, insults, injuries and worse, but the cards never let me down. The first crinkle when I opened a fresh pack, the quick punch of the somewhat vaguely sarcophagal yet redolent bouquet of that pink bubble- gumly slab, the piquant, almost stinging taste of the way-too-sweet yet pleasantly biting first  explosive release of the compound sugars on my tongue (unsullied as they were by the later evils of high fructose corn syrup and aspartame) followed by the almost as rapid disappearance of any flavor at all and then the minutes spent working a quickly congealing gob with a consistency somewhere between Silly Putty® and sinusitic mucilage until your jaws got tired . . .  Man, kids of today just don’t know what they’re missin’.