Building a Baseball Card Collection

Collecting baseball cards is an interesting hobby. There are so many ways a collection can be approached. For younger children, it is fun to simply acquire a few cards and learn from them. I particularly enjoyed sharing the joy of buying baseball cards with my son in 1974. We would buy a few packs of cards and open them together. The Texas Rangers were fairly new to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex area, so we would search for cards of those players. My son was only three years old, but he could understand the Rangers were our team. He learned to recognize the distinctive uniforms and soon he understood who would become his favorite players. This shared experience reminded me of the 1950's when I began collecting baseball cards. I recalled the joy of opening new packs from that time. In 1974, I still had some old Sport and also Sports Illustrated magazines from the 1950's and 1960's. My very young son liked to look at the pictures in the magazines. His favorite had Mickey Mantle's picture on the cover. Luckily, the first game we attended together as father and son included an "old timer's game in which Mickey Mantle would play. What a wonderful experience that was for us.

We developed our collection of 1974 Topps cards, with a special emphasis on Texas Ranger players. The next year we would collect the colorful 1975 Topps set. By this time, my son knew the more important players, even those who played on other teams. He learned about the different teams from various cities and even understood that the American and National Leagues were separate. His favorite players were Jeff Borroughs and Jim Sundberg. He also liked Reggie Jackson and Thurman Munson. As my son grew older he learned about baseball, but of course he also began to develop other interests. He noticed the outrageous rock group "KISS" and later loved movies like "Star Wars", "ET" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark". His interest in baseball declined but his card collection kept growing as the TOPPS company supplied trading cards for all these topics.