Written By: Jon Finkel
The boy is a few months past his 3rd birthday and I figured it was high time I grabbed a pack of Topps and let him experience the joy of opening up new baseball cards. Yeah, he doesn’t know the players or really recognize the teams or understand a single word on the back, but so what? Baseball cards are universal; they easily transcend language, culture and age.
At least that was my thought when I picked up the pack on a whim while running an errand. I mean, how could my son NOT like baseball cards?
Since he’s three, my son’s baseball understanding is limited, but I’ve been taking him to games almost his whole life, meaning since he was two. He loves them. It’s our thing. We make a day of it. We went to about a half-dozen Rangers games last year. I’m aiming for more than that this year. He asks to go all the time.
He cheers in the car when he sees the park. He claps when we get to our seats. He knew all of Take Me Out to the Ball Game by our second game and I make sure to get him to the bathroom at the bottom of the 6th so we’re back in plenty of time for the 7th inning stretch (last year a 1-2-3 inning caused us to miss the song in a stall and the boy was none too pleased).
My thought with buying the cards was that since we’re only going to hit up a day game every other week or so (he pretty much falls asleep on the ride TO a night game), the cards would be a good bridge between trips to the stadium. He doesn’t quite have the patience to sit through much of a game on TV, but then again, neither do I.
When I handed him the pack of Topps he was confused – at first.
“Baseball cards are inside,” I said.
“Baseball? Cards?” he asked.
“Yeah. They’re cards with baseball players on them. They’re awesome.” I said.
“Like at the Go Rangers games?” he asked.
My son calls the games the Go Rangers games because he loves the Go Rangers chant and no matter how many times I tell him that the ‘go’ and ‘Rangers’ are separate, he won’t listen. He’s not even 3 1/2 so I let it slide.
“Yup,” I said.
And then something happened. It’s like he inherently understood that this was a rite of passage. That this was cool. That this was something only “big boys” got for presents.
He tore open the pack and I watched him flip through the stack.
“Who’s this?” he asked after the first card.
“Ryan Howard”
“Who’s this?” he asked after the second.
“CJ Wilson,” I said.
“And who’s this?”
“Alcides Escobar,” I said, realizing this was going to happen with the whole pack.
“And him?” he asked, holding up a card.
“That’s….”
And then I stopped. I couldn’t believe it. There, in his hands, was a throwback Ted Williams card. Time stopped, like someone pressed pause.
What are the odds? I thought to myself. If you’re reading this and don’t know me, I grew up in Boston and have been and forever will be a die hard Red Sox fan. My number one mission, year after year, from age 6 to 10 or 11, was to collect every single Red Sox players’ baseball card and as many Sox rookie cards as I could. I was also fascinated with Sox legends. I had a card from Yaz’s last year that was worth about $.45 that I held on to like it was the tesseract.
I also devoured sports biographies and as a kid growing up in Boston in the 80s and 90s, pre-Papi and Pedro and ‘Tek and Trot and Pap… There was basically Yaz and Ted Williams and that was it. I was fond of Gator Greenwell and Jim Rice and Clemens at the time, but if you asked me my favorite player I’d have said Ted Williams, even though I never saw him play.
Fast forward 30 years and here I was, with my son and his first pack of cards, and the fourth player in the pack was Teddy Ballgame. How could that be random? Of all the legends and all the packs of cards in the world? We get one with Teddy in it? C’mon…
“That’s Ted Williams,” I said, my voice a little off. “He’s a legend. THE legend.”
“Oh,” he said, recognizing the importance. “What’s a legend?”
And that’s when I realized the true power of baseball cards. They aren’t just cards. They’re gateways to stories. To careers. To icons.
“No Green Eggs and Ham tonight, buddy,” I said. “Instead I’m going to tell you about the incredible, true story of the Splendid Splinter who once hit .406…”
Ten minutes later I was still talking and, incredibly, he was still listening, holding the card like I’d just given him the key to the universe.
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Jon Finkel is the author of Forces of Character with 3x Super Bowl Champion and Fighter Pilot, Chad Hennings, Heart Over Height with 3x NBA Slam Dunk Champion Nate Robinson, as well as Jocks In Chief, the hit fatherhood book, The Dadvantage – Stay in Shape on No Sleep with No Time and No Equipment, and all twelve volumes in the Greatest Stars of the NBA book series for the National Basketball Association, which won several ALA Young Reader Awards.
As a feature writer, he has written for Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Muscle & Fitness, GQ, Details, The New York Times, AskMen.com, ComedyCentral.com, Yahoo! Sports’ ThePostGame.com and many more. His work received a notable mention in the 2015 Best American Sports Writing anthology.