I started the Blast From the Packs series to talk about my experiences opening actual packs of cards and essentially reviewing the sets they come from, but over the past month or so, the majority of my “allowance money” has been going toward purchasing single cards — colloquially referred to as singles — on eBay… Read More The Singles Mixer: My favorite recent baseball purchases
Hockey was the last of the four major North American sports that I got into as a kid. I was probably about 12 or 13 when I started to follow the game, which means I was coming in about 1994, which just so happened to be the dawn of a bit of a golden era… Read More Oh Captain, My Captain: The 1984-85 Topps Steve Yzerman rookie
I won’t pretend to be an expert on using eBay, but I’ve been successful in the last month or so tracking down affordable boxes of old sports cards; grab bags of random packs of sports cards; and single cards of favorite players, including rookie cards (actually, they’ve mostly been rookie cards). I’ve learned a few… Read More Blast From the Packs: How I use eBay to buy sports cards
When I started this little experiment in purchasing sports cards from my past off eBay as a way to spur my writing muscles awake from a much-too-long slumber, I said to myself, “this isn’t going to be a big new hobby, it’s more of a writing exercise. Besides, I can’t even afford to buy cards… Read More I hate/love the trading card industry: A two-sided essay
Have you ever seen something like this in the trading card section or the toy section of a store and wondered what the hell it is? It’s usually between 5 and 20 bucks, and it purports to have a certain number of cards (usually between 30 and 80) and a pack or two, and sometimes… Read More What’s in the box? Checking out a Fairfield repack
When I was collecting sports cards as a kid, I collected each of the four major American sports at the time: Baseball, basketball, football (American style) and ice hockey. My interest in each sport would wax and wane with the seasons, but I would say most of the time, baseball and basketball jockeyed for that… Read More Blast From the Packs: Football then, football now-ish
Topps has been doing this really cool line of limited-run cards all year called Project 2020. The idea is they’ve contracted with a wide variety of pop artists, fashion designers, graffiti/street artists, tattoo artists, graphic designers, etc., to create imaginative re-vamps of classic cards from the Topps lineup across the decades. Each card is a… Read More It will be mine: Topps Project 2020 Frank Thomas (by Oldmanalan)
I think the most important part of sports fandom as a kid is having your favorites. A favorite team is one thing, and I imagine having a team is much more visceral for kids who grow up in a city with a professional sports team, but I grew up about 90 miles from Chicago, about… Read More Blast From the Packs: I was a Frank Thomas Kid
I always loved the feeling of ripping open a fresh pack of collectible sports cards. I’d hold the foil package in my hands, turning it over and feeling the tightly packed stack of cards within. The best part was always that moment just before opening, just before the mystery and anticipation of what-could-be turns to… Read More Blast From the Packs: A memoir by way of the sports cards of my youth
