It’s an analog hobby in a digital world, an expression of fandom in a sport whose attendance is in slow decline and whose cultural relevance is in free fall. Having acquired the limited-edition Henderson card-or, at least, having seen Byington unwrap it-I now felt a familiar rush, one I hadn’t known since the days I’d spent opening packs at Gilbert’s: the thrill of the hunt.ī aseball-card collecting really ought to be extinct. Up until that point, the experience of baseball-card collecting as a spectator sport could hardly have been more foreign. In the break’s live chat room, other participants gave the rookie in their midst a round of attaboys. “Boom! Nice, Eric.” Not only was Henderson a player I recognized this was a “relic” card, embedded with a shard of a bat Henderson had once used in a game. About an hour into the break, he turned over a card depicting Rickey Henderson, the brash Oakland leadoff man who had set stolen-base records during my childhood. This break threatened to last nearly as long as a regulation baseball game.Īs he started pulling individual cards from the packs, Byington offered the kind of pleasant, meandering chatter that might fill the air during a rain delay. Byington is more methodical in his approach, carefully unwrapping each pack and allowing the camera to glimpse every card. Some breakers, I would later learn, tear open the packs and riffle through them with the speed of a blackjack dealer, pausing only to display the rarest cards. But I’d read that this set had a few throwback cards dedicated to Oakland old-timers I do know a bit about-Dennis Eckersley, Reggie Jackson-and the A’s were priced more competitively than my hometown Red Sox were.Ī case of Topps Series 2 contains 12 boxes, each made up of 24 packs, which in turn each hold 14 cards. I don’t root for the A’s, and can name only a player or two from their current roster. For $18.75, I’d secured the rights to any cards depicting members of the Oakland Athletics. Like the other dozen or so participants in this “break,” I’d purchased a stake in the cards. Byington, an affable father of seven, was about to open a case of 2019 Topps Series 2 live on streaming video. I’d been under the impression that the card industry had all but died out around the time I went off to college, eclipsed in the adolescent imagination by Nintendo 64, Pokémon, AOL.Īnd yet, here I was, staring at the tightly framed hands of Billy Byington, the proprietor of Gargoyle Card Breaks. Though I was once a middle schooler with a pack-a-day habit, whose heart raced whenever I crossed the threshold of Gilbert’s Sports Nostalgia in suburban Boston, the last time I tended to my card collection, Bill Clinton was president and Barry Bonds was a speedster with some pop. If that sounds like the only activity more tedious than sitting through four hours of pitching changes and batters calling time, I shared some of your skepticism. I opened my laptop, navigated to, and prepared to watch a pair of rubber-gloved hands in East Wenatchee, Washington, open an entire case of baseball cards-more than 4,000 cards in all. O ne night not long ago, with my 3-year-old son finally asleep and my wife wisely heading to bed, I settled onto the couch, beer in hand, to catch some baseball.
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