Why am I writing about Baseball Card Day, not because I want to support this made up marketing day, but because it brought back childhood memories. When I was a kid, sounds like something my parents would say, I loved baseball cards. Of course that was before I found women and video games. I would get my baseball card pricing guides, grab my stacks of cards and highlight the current prices of the cards I owned. Once a week or so I would get all of my allowance gathered together and convince my dad to take me to my local card store. Once there I would look at card after card trying to find the one card I would take home with me that day. Of course most of the cards I couldn't afford, but I loved looking at all the cards in their protective cases. For Christmas I would ask for my parents to buy me box sets of cards and was convinced that someday my collection would be worth a fortune. It never became a fortune, it instead is probably packed up in some dusty box in a garage somewhere.
Today, every now and then, I will see packs of baseball cards on the shelves at a store and I will ask my kids if they want a pack. Their answer is always no. I don't think my kids have ever owned a pack of baseball cards and they may never want to in this age of electronics, but I keep hoping some day they will answer yes when I ask if they want that pack of cards.
On this Topps National Baseball Card Day I won't be celebrating baseball cards, but I will be celebrating my memories of the good old days when all I cared about was a new pack of cards.